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Facebook IPO: is a smartphone next?

With Facebook now sitting on $16bn after its flotation, will we see the massive social network do a Google and develop its own phone?

With its flotation, many think that Facebook is now a juggernaut, sitting pretty on $16bn (Β£10bn) of cash and a valuation that started the day at more than $100bn.

Friday's launch was fun (cue Zuckerberg's droll status update: "Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on Nasdaq") but there's a tendency to see stock market flotations as the culmination of a company's existence. That's a common mistake, like first parents being excited about the baby's birth, and forgetting it's the next bit that really matters.

It has taken eight years to get here, yet it's easy to forget that this is actually just the beginning.

What to expect now? Don't be surprised if the next big thing is a Facebook phone – running its own software and developed from top to bottom to involve you in the site all the time.

Zuckerberg's team has been advised to do this directly, because it needs to reach the "next billion" internet users, and they are mainly going to be using mobile phones, not desktop or laptop computers. Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples' lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.

When Google floated in 2004, everyone knew it was good at search, but they didn't think it would last. Microsoft was going to come after it, and anyway the founders' lack of respect for the investment banks (something Zuckerberg hasn't mimicked, hoodies aside) meant the float was not so anticipated.

Yet, in the eight years since, Google has bought YouTube and made it the internet's biggest video destination. It has launched Android, the mobile operating system which now powers more than half the smartphones being sold worldwide.

It has won millions of corporate customers for its Google Apps suite. The IPO, at $85 per share, was just the start: on Friday, Google's shares were $630.

Similarly for Facebook, everything so far, and the money and public presence it now has, are just a beginning. It has more users now (901 million) than were using the internet at the end of 2004 (817 million); but the total number of internet users has meanwhile tripled, so rather than having 816 million potential new users, it has 1.38 billion. The potential market has nearly doubled.

But can it carry on growing, or will it sputter out, like Myspace and Bebo?

Ed Barton, director of digital media at the research firm Strategy Analytics, thinks that getting that next billion will be a significant challenge.

"Facebook depends on advertising, and I would highlight that the fastest-growing internet media markets are China and the Far East, India and Brazil," he told the Guardian.

"Facebook's potential is nowhere near as strong in those as it has been in the US. And in those markets there are often a number of locally oriented social networks already in place."

China in particular, where Facebook has so far been banned, has many thriving social sites, as does Russia with VKontake claiming about 290 million users (compared to Facebook's 901 million).

Barton doesn't think there's any risk of Facebook fading out where it's strongest, in the west: "In the places where it's already strong, it has a defensible position," he said, arguing that we "invest" in the networks we use, and don't want upheaval.

So rather as Google cornered the market for internet search early this century, not by being the first but by being far and away the best, Facebook wasn't the first social network, but its management has been far better – and unlike Bebo (bought by AOL) or Myspace (bought by News Corporation) or Friends Reunited (bought by ITV), Facebook had no parent that could feel threatened by its rapid growth.

So for some, it looks like a one-way bet. Andrew Schneider, a hedge fund adviser and CEO of San Francisco-based Schneider Family Office, was busy on Friday selling shares of Apple and LinkedIn on Thursday to free up at least $20m of cash for Facebook shares. "You've got 900 million users, and you've got real solid revenue, and the company is earning money," Schneider said.

But the present limits to growth could be dictated by its heritage. Facebook was founded on a desktop computer in a university dorm room, and while it long since broke free of the latter, it's the former that prevents it reaching those 1.38 billion, and the next billion to come.

That's because a growing number of internet users aren't going online through the PC, but through the smartphone. By next year, there will be more internet-capable mobile phones (1.83bn) than PCs (1.78bn), according to research company Gartner. Which is why analysts have been itchy about Facebook's stark admission that it doesn't make any money from mobile advertising: it's missing half the market.

What's the solution? The Facebook mobile app isn't enough; people only spend a little time there, and showing ads on a mobile screen doesn't pay well. Horace Dediu, who runs the independent consultancy Asymco, spent a day at Facebook's headquarters a few months ago and told them to talk to Chinese smartphone manufacturers, create their own version of Google's Android (as Amazon and China's Baidu search engine already have) and start selling a "Facebook phone".

"My recommendation was that they should do a handset," he told the Guardian. "Because it means they can control the user experience, and capture all the information that they might need to monetise the experience. For Facebook, they could offer it as making your life richer as a social participant."

While there's no indication of whether Zuckerberg's teams will act on Dediu's advice, the rumours that Facebook is working on a phone have surfaced from time to time – most recently in April, when the Taiwanese news site Digitimes suggested it is working with Taiwan's HTC to build a device integrating all the Facebook functions, for release this autumn.

Digitimes has a mixed record for rumours like these, but it would be a smart strategy.

If that seems strange, consider that Google realised it needed to control mobile search or it would lose its dominance; hence Android. But Facebook can create a version of Android that doesn't rely on Google. (It could use Microsoft's Bing search engine – which some executives there offered to sell to Zuckerberg early in 2011; he demurred).

Everything is in place for this mewling infant of the internet to turn into a real force, if it chooses. And Zuckerberg certainly will choose to.

(Fri, 18 May 2012 16:38:30 GMT)

Twitter to use Do Not Track

Social network to honour requests from users who do not want online behaviour recorded – unlike Google and Facebook

Twitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data.

Twitter announced that it will officially support "Do Not Track," a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.

But some commentators have pointed out that the support also indicates that in the US the company presently does track where users go on the web through data collected from sites that have integrated Twitter "follow" buttons or widgets.

Dustin Curtis, a web developer, pointed out that a posting on theTwitter blog on Thursday says that "We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies – including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube – do when they're integrated into websites. By recognising which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last 10 days."

Curtis commented: "Twitter is recording your behaviour. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use. Right now, that data will make better suggestions for accounts you might want to follow. But what other things can it be used for?"

Twitter clarified that it does not intend to use the "suggested user" or tracking feature in Europe at present.

However the adoption of the Do Not Track system could alleviate those fears. Some browsers, including Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari, include a Do Not Track option that sends a line of code to websites indicating the user does not want to be tracked. But under current regulations, it is up to the website to honour the requests. Google has said it will implement a Do Not Track feature in its Chrome browser later this year.

The Do Not Track announcement also coincides with Twitter's recent push to provide a more personalised service. Twitter says that when it recommends "tailored suggestions" based on a user's surfing history, it does not use the data for any other purpose.

"As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience," Twitter's director of growth and international, Othman Laraki, said in the blogpost. "For those who don't want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection."

Twitter's support for the initiative was first announced on Thursday by Ed Felten, the FTC's chief technology officer, during a panel in New York. The microblogging site later confirmed Felten's statement, adding in a tweet: "We applaud the FTC's leadership on DNT."

Mozilla praised Twitter's move in a blogpost and noted that adoption rates for Do Not Track have risen steadily, to 8.6% of desktop users and 19% of mobile users.

"We're excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the web," Mozilla said.

Twitter's decision to get onboard with Do Not Track represents something of a balancing act for the six-year-old company, which has been closely scrutinised on how it can generate enough revenue to justify its multibillion-dollar valuation.

Online tracking through bits of code embedded in websites known as "cookies" underpins the business models for many internet companies.

Facebook, due to go public on Friday in the largest-ever US IPO, has been valued at $104bn, partially by investors who believe it can offer advertisers a platform for highly targeted ads based on perceived user interests. Google similarly generates billions annually by targeting ads based on what a user is searching for.

Major online destinations that have endorsed Do Not Track include Yahoo, which said in March it would allow consumers "to express their ad targeting preferences to Yahoo" beginning this summer.

Updated: added in clarification that "suggested user" system is not used outside the US.

(Fri, 18 May 2012 07:09:54 GMT)

Max Payne and narrative dissonance

Rockstar has turned its ex-cop anti-hero into a credible character. So does it matter that he's also a frenzied killer?

Max Payne is a troubled man. The latest instalment in his dark tale of loss and revenge sees the ex-New York cop taking on a job as a personal security contractor in Sau Paulo, Brazil. There, he becomes mired in a complex plot involving the wealthy clients he is protecting, a gang of paramilitary vigilantes and a shady special forces arm of the local police force. There is a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

But here's a problem. Throughout the game's beautifully constructed narrative sequences, we see Payne going through agonies of recrimination and remorse; he's still haunted by the murder of his wife and baby by junkies; he questions his own motives as a DEA agent and then as a glorified bodyguard; he is disgusted by himself and his life. When the game begins he's effectively drinking himself to death in his filthy New Jersey apartment. He desperately seeks some form of salvation.

Yet he is also an accomplished killer, capable of gunning down a room full of "enemies" in a matter of seconds. Through the course of the game he takes out hundreds of people with a variety of weapons, stopping only to pop painkillers and reload. But at the end of every action sequence, we return to the anguished Payne of the narrative, slamming back bourbon and regretting everything that has led him here. Somehow this shadow of a man is able to fly across a room with two machine pistols wiping out lowlife gangsters as though swatting flies.

This isn't a failure of the game, as such – it's an astonishingly entertaining thrill ride that I've heartily recommended. But the slight disconnect between the shambling Max of the cinematic sequences and the athletic psychopath we control in the interactive sections is the latest example of a pervasive video game dilemma: the difficulty of marrying the narrative with the ludic.

Back in 2007, the veteran game designer Clint Hocking wrote a blog post in which he created the term Ludonarrative Dissonance; he used this to describe a central failure of the otherwise brilliant game Bioshock. Hocking felt that while the narrative of the game wants the protagonist to be selfless in aiding Atlas, the actual mechanics of the game rely on self-interest and the pursuit of power.

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game's narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player's ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

The interesting thing about Bioshock is that, with the Little Sisters (and your ability to either spare or harvest them), the player is invited into the moral debate that the game proposes. However, Hocking points out that this element is so hopelessly skewed in one direction, it only serves to accentuate the dissonance between story and action.

There are a few similar moral considerations in Max Payne 3; in a couple of scenes the story allows us to stop and make a decision on what our hero does next, but these do not directly impact the ongoing plot; they are isolated moral decisions – to shoot or not to shoot a wounded enemy. In a way, this is as much of a disssonance as the Bioshock problem: Max is filled with doubt and self-loathing and yet his in-game actions – at least as far as the flow of the story is concerned – are resolute and deadly.

And Payne is in no way alone here. In most narrative action titles that require spectacular violence from the protagonist, the player is encouraged to both see the character as a rounded human in the story sections, but then treat them as a killing machine in the interactive sequences. Look at bespectacled geek Gordon Freeman in Half-Life. One minute he is chatting with his colleagues about complex science, the next he is beheading alien invaders with a crowbar.

Indeed, Half-Life reveals a central irony of ludonarrative dissonance: to ensure the physical realism of the environment, Valve has allowed the player to attack other scientists – which is ludicrous to the story. However, games where players are unable to slaughter important non-player characters (ie, almost all RPGs) prompt a similar sense of disconnect and are equally ludicrous.

This is a good problem in a lot of ways. It means developers are telling complex stories about characters who are ambiguous and troubled. The downside is, the conventional mechanics of action games haven't quite caught up. No one wants to play a game in which we have to guide Max though years of treament for alcoholism and grief. But is there a compromise?

Naughty Dog, the creator of the Uncharted series, has recognised and grappled with this whole conundrum. Nathan Drake is depicted in the story sequences as a charming loveable rogue, but in the interactive sections of the games, he guns down hundreds of people. So which is the "real" Drake: the Drake of the narrartive or the Drake in the hands of the player? Is that Drake a psychopath?

"Amy [Hennig, Uncharted creator] has a name for this," explained lead designer Richard Lemarchand at the GameCity festival last year. "She calls it 'the uncanny valley of narrative'. Her theory is, because the acting performances have become so good, it makes this issue of the game parts stand out even more.

"In fact, if you play through to the end of Uncharted 2, Amy references this issue. At the climax, the main bad guy Lazarevic says to Drake, 'You're no different to me. How many lives have you taken today?' We do think about it and we're always looking for creative ways to address that issue."

So far, what the developer has tried to do is place Nathan in obvious and immediate peril at the beginning of every shoot-out. He never fires first, and even when he sneaks up on an enemy and snaps their neck, he's always in a situation of mortal danger. We must decide for ourselves if this "absolution by context" argument is adequate.

There are, however, plenty of titles that stay on the right side of the ludonarrative problem, by exactly matching the story and game mechanics. Rocksteady's Batman titles are the perfect example – here, we know that the Batman we see in the cinematics is the same as we experience battling foes in the missions. There is no disconnect between the driven, single-minded character and his capacity for violence.

Max Payne 3 is a very strong narrative experience. It hasn't taken the easy route of post-modern irony, smirking at the disconnect lying in the centre of the action (Bulletstorm did this beautifully, by the way) – it takes Max seriously. But when will we begin to see action games that present us with complex characters and difficult scenarios and then provide us with the gameplay elements to really explore these without dissonance? And given how enjoyable the Max Payne 3 experience is, do we even want that?

Games are about control; it's fine to have a neurotic AI sidekick, but if we can't trust the avatar, does that just become annoying? The big reveal in Heavy Rain was built around our inability to guess the motivations of a complex and damaged player character, and many gamers hated that. Should we just accept that the people we play in games, and the people who appear in the stories, are sometimes different, and sometimes utterly incompatible?

(Fri, 18 May 2012 14:03:00 GMT)

Pinterest valued at more than $1bn

Popular social network valued at between $1bn and $1.5bn following a $100m round of funding

Move over, Facebook. Pinterest, the social site that lets people "pin" pictures and content to create collections of interest, has become the latest company to be valued at more than $1bn (Β£630m), following a $100m round of funding.

While estimates of the effective valuation implied by the investment vary between $1bn and $1.5bn, they highlight the fact that Pinterest has already discovered a business model in which it collects an "affiliate" payment on purchases people make via the site.

The new valuation is at least a fivefold leap in value since October 2011, when a previous financing round put it at $200m.

The company has shot to stardom in the past few months to become the 16th most-visited site in the US, according to measurement company Alexa. In April it had more than 20 million users, up from 1 million in July 2011, according to ComScore, another ranking company.

Its traffic soared after August 2011 when it was named one of the 50 best websites of 2011 by Time magazine, and by December it was getting 11m visitors worldwide a week, according to Hitwise.

Now it has received a fresh round of funding led by the Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten, and with particiapants including its existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, and a number of angel investors.

In October 2011 it received a $27m funding round that valued it at $200m. The site only opened for business in March 2010.

Although the company has not disclosed its revenues, they are probably less than $10m according to modelling carried out in March by Rags Srinivasan, a strategic marketing expert. But with user numbers still growing fast, that could be advancing rapidly.

A growing number of brands are using Pinterest to advertise their wares effectively for free, with the aim of driving sales via the displays. That could offer a future means for Pinterest to charge, either for position or visibility.

However, legal experts have queried the site's liability for copyright lawsuits because it effectively allows the copying of images that are often copyrighted. While some brands may not mind if it drives sales, photographers and commercial organisations could be less pleased.

Rakuten has invested in a number of online retailing companies around the world, including the British retailer Play.com.

"While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining," said Rakuten chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.

"We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and Rakuten's model for e-commerce."

In an interview with the FT, Mikitani revealed that he had also become an e-commerce advisor to the site, and said: "Having a good grasp of images is becoming more important for e-commerce. It's more straightforward and appealing to the instinct of human beings than text. That is the strength of Pinterest, I think."

He added that Rakuten had wanted to fund the entire round, but Pinterest's board already had agreements with existing investors.

He was enthusiastic about the prospects because, he said, traffic going to shopping sites from Pinterest would have high conversion rates [to sales] because people would have high interest in products.

Of the copyright risks, he said: "I think, on the whole, they will overcome those issues. Their intention is not to damage any brand."

Mikitani added that Rakuten-owned sites would in future use the Pinterest "Pin it" badge to add content.

"Pinterest is the future – we know we are going to have a more tight integration for all the e-commerce sites we have."

(Thu, 17 May 2012 11:37:08 GMT)

John Sculley: future of health is in the cloud

The Newton was two decades ahead of its time, says the former Apple chief executive – and the future of healthcare will be driven by cloud computing

John Sculley – the man who as Apple chief executive gave the world the Newton, which was the first glimpse of the "personal digital assistant" in the 1980s – can see a number of possibilities opening up before us.

A world without work for millions who want it? A world where we can diagnose strokes or heart attacks well before they happen? A world of machines talking to machines? All are possible, even likely, because of cloud computing, which he sees as the next driver of huge social change.

And he also has a clear idea of what the Newton really needed to succeed – and which of Apple's visions from the time really matches what we're seeing now.

"I'm an optimist," declares Sculley, now 73 but still deeply involved in technology. "You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature."

Cloud computing, has says, means that we're shifting from the growth of Moore's Law – a doubling every 18 months – to something even more exponential. "The curve is accelerating upwards, at a level that means that technologies are coming out that can do things that you couldn't even envision even two or three years ago."

Robust data storage costs are falling too, from around $5 (Β£3.14) per gigabyte a year ago to 25c now. "The speed at which a lot of this technology is commoditising is unprecedented," Sculley says.

Even so, he sees some areas for concern. First, imagine a world where computers have driven humans out of all but the highest-skilled jobs – so that driverless cars, automated factories and similar processes mean that the middle class that has for years been happily thriving on jobs that couldn't be done otherwise suddenly find themselves disenfranchised.

Sculley admits he's not as optimistic about that. "The more we bring in these sophisticated technologies, the higher the skills of the people that are needed to be able to use it, and the fewer people we need in the workforce, so the issue is not about work moving to lower-cost workers, it's about automation replacing many of the jobs that we had counted on, particularly for our middle class in the past."

The political gridlock in the US – caused by the warring demands of the Tea Party, which thinks government and taxation is destroying jobs, and those of the Democratic Party, which has been trying to drive growth by boosting the money supply – is one example. Another is the Eurozone, where the tensions between Spanish, Greek, German and French voters and their leaders is coming into starker focus as unemployment rises.

"Those are the things that technology may not be able to solve, but it certainly is a consequence of technology, that the sophistication of automation is changing how work is done, and is changing the skill requirements of workers," says Sculley. "In many cases jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society."

Even so, he does think that – as has happened previously – technology will throw up a solution. (In the early 1900s, the problems of horse manure in London streets threatened to overwhelm them; the car solved that – but, of course, eventually brought its own set of challenges.)

On a more optimistic note, Sculley – who now works as a venture capitalist, and has investments in companies looking at healthcare – things that cloud computing is going to make a colossal difference to the quality of our lives.

Healthcare in the US is a $2.6tn market, driven by insurers which pay doctors who often carry out procedures and expensive tests in order to avoid lawsuits. The problem is that healthcare costs are rising more quickly than inflation, incomes or tax receipts.

"Politicians are arguing among themselves as to who's going to pay for it," says Sculley. "It's completely unaffordable at its current growth rates, and the more I get a chance to understand health care, the more convinced I am that the problem is very solvable, but it's solvable through innovation, not through just governments trying to work out who pays for what.

"We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes – did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care. So it's not just about taking cloud computing and automating the healthcare system we have today, it literally means innovating and reinventing the health care system to make it it much more patient-centric."

"Big data analytics" – the analysis of colossal amounts of data which could amount to terabytes of information – will change healthcare, he forecasts, from one where doctors are paid to carry out procedures, to one where they're paid based on keeping people well. (In that sense, it sounds like the longstanding Chinese principle where a doctor's quality is measured on how infrequently patients get sick, not how quickly they're cured.)

And helping that will be computing that will analyse everything – even the levels of proteins in our blood. "I'm working with a company right now where we're doing this – you can track in real time peoples' vital signs and take that data, you can imagine that's massive amounts of data when you're tracking each individual in real time, the vital signs – it could be their heart, could be how much they weigh, could be their fluid retention, could be even tracking proteomics, which are protein changes inside the body.

"If you can take that data and then be able to analyse it, it means that the future of medicine is going to be able to make predictions and measure outcomes of patient health improvement at a level of accuracy and a level of personalisation that we've never seen before."

All this, he says, will rely on the computing power brought together by the cloud: "It isn't just the compute power, it's that you can enable the big data analytics, in a specialised way. That's going to give us hope that what looked like insolvable problems like health care can be solved."

Don't expect overnight change, but do expect change: " It may not be done in a few years," Sculley warns. "it may take five or 10 or 15 years to see the impact, but there's no question in my mind that it's going to have as big an impact on things like healthcare as personal computers did in empowering individuals and really created the productivity we've had for 30 years with knowledge workers."

The cloud doesn't just stop with people, though. Imagine too a world where there are around 20bn internet-connected devices – but only around 7 billion people, as there are now. That's the forecast from various research companies for 2020.

"Having 20bn connected devices means that the majority of those connected devices will be machine to machine," Sculley explains. "It means we're just at the beginning era of very powerful sensors that can be built into clothing, that can be used for tracking almost anything that one can conceive and doing that in real time and using cloud computing to manipulate data which is going to be many many orders of magnitude larger and more complex that anything we've ever considered before."

Speaking of connected devices, might one of the flaws in the Newton have been it lack of connectivity – something that now exists through mobile broadband? Sculley has, of course, had a long time to reflect on this.

"Well, I think the idea [of Newton] was right, it was just 20 years ahead of its time. So actually, a lot of people were able to see where the industry's going, the hardest part is to figure out when it's going to happen.

"In the case of the PDA, the idea was right – that the content and communication and computing were going to converge – but I think we greatly underestimated that we needed broadband, that we need far more powerful devices, that we needed something a lot more powerful in the background which we now know as 'cloud' to be able to handle the tremendous amount of data, and connecting people up through social networking. So it was a good idea, but it was just several decades too early."

Was it then one of those projects that simply gets out of hand, and acquires a momentum that can't be stopped as it thunders into the market? "We never looked at Newton as being the seminal product. That was just one step along the way, You can get a much better view of the seminal experience if you go back – you can go to YouTube, i think it's 1988 [in fact 1987], a concept video we created called Knowledge Navigator."

Indeed, Knowledge Navigator ) – from the days when Apple made concept videos – has become famous for prefiguring many elements we're now familiar with: tablet computing, internet search, voice control. It shows the internet as a graphical medium – predating the web, which hadn't yet been invented – and suggests effortless interaction with digital "assistants".

Knowledge Navigator, says Sculley, "is really something we couldn't build at the time. But technically we could use special effects and be able to simulate what the experience would be like. That was 24 yeas ago and if you look at that, I think is pretty accurate, almost to the point of being uncanny as to what the experience of tablet computing and mobile devices have turned out to be like."

Which leads to the obvious final question: how does he organise his computing life? Is he, to coin a phrase, post-PC? "I'm clearly post-PC," he replies. "I carry an iPhone, a BlackBerry, a [Samsung] Galaxy Note, and I carry an iPad. When I'm in my home office I use a Mac, so I think I'm more typical than not in using many, many different devices."

The post-PC era doesn't mean the end of devices, he says: "It means you can be on any device that you happen to have, and everything basically is more and more connectible through the cloud."

β€’ John Sculley is giving the keynote address at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London on 12-13 June

(Wed, 16 May 2012 14:51:00 GMT)

ISPs told to come clean on broadband speeds

TalkTalk and BT the worst offenders in mystery shopping exercise that showed broadband companies often fail to offer a speed quote to potential customers

Broadband companies are failing to offer a speed quote to potential customers in 41% of their sales calls, in breach of a code introduced last year to protect consumers.

A mystery shopping exercise carried out for telecoms watchdog Ofcom tested how many broadband providers followed the rules by offering an estimated speed without prompting by the customer.

TalkTalk was the worst offender, offering an unprompted quote in just 47% of cases, compared to an average across all providers of 59%. BT Total Broadband was the second worst, offering a quote in only 48% of calls.

Since July last year, a voluntary code signed by all the largest internet service providers requires them to inform potential customers of their likely maximum speed, in the form of a range, as early as practicable in the sales process.

This should happen well before customers are asked to place an order or hand over their financial details.

The mystery shop, which involved 1,369 approaches online and over the phone, found that BT's agents only provided detailed speeds once the customer had agreed to proceed with an order.

Customers need to receive the information in writing, in their online account details or be prompted to write down the quote.

Both BT and TalkTalk have agreed to address the issue by amending their staff training and sales processes.

A BT spokesman said: "Ofcom has suggested we should make a minor change to mention the speed quote earlier in the sales conversation, which we are happy to do and will implement straight away.

"Overall, Ofcom found that the level of compliance with the code has improved since our previous mystery shopping exercise in 2009."

A spokesman for TalkTalk said: "No one enters a contract with us without receiving a speed estimate tailored to them. Anyone can log onto our website and get an accurate speed estimate, based on the capabilities of their phone connection."

Speeds for customers on the same broadband package can vary widely depending on how far a home is from the local telephone exchange.

Many broadband providers are now reluctant to advertise headline speeds, which means customers are dependent on individual quotes in order to compare services.

"If you are trying to get the best deal it is very difficult when there is such variability," said Ofcom director Claudio Pollack.

"What really matters is to be transparent to customers about what they are paying for, and give them the right to end a contract if what they get comes below that commitment."

The best performers were Karoo – part of the Kcom group in Hull and East Yorkshire, which complied in 76% of cases – Sky at 72% and Plusnet at 67%.

Overall, Ofcom found that the level of compliance with the code has improved since our previous mystery shopping exercise in 2009.

Responding to Ofcom's research, Marzena Lipman, policy manager at campaign group Consumer Focus, said: "The most common problem for broadband consumers is ending up with a slower broadband speed than they expected.

"So, while it's good news there have been improvements, it is disappointing that this research shows many providers still aren't being as up-front with their customers as they should be."

(Wed, 16 May 2012 09:45:59 GMT)

Ask Jack: using a VPN to protect your web use

Dave Null is looking for a good free VPN (virtual private network) to ensure his privacy while using open Wi-Fi hotspots

Lots of us surf using unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and where I live in the US, Starbucks doesn't require a pass code and the Wi-Fi is up 24/7 regardless of whether the shop is open. Are there any good free VPNs for privacy in such a situation? I'm using Cocoon with Firefox, but I don't have the means to compare it with alternatives.
Dave Null

A VPN, or virtual private network, creates a virtual "tunnel" of encrypted data running over the public internet. VPNs first became popular as a way of connecting different parts of a company without the high cost of leasing dedicated phone lines. Secure encryption was needed to protect corporate data, and one consequence was that nobody else – internet service providers (ISPs), snoopers etc – could see what sort of traffic was inside the data stream.

Today, many individuals are using VPNs for the security and privacy they provide. Some people use VPNs at Wi-Fi hotspots to prevent snoopers from collecting private information. Others use VPNs at home as a way to get around ISPs and service providers blocking certain websites, which may include Pirate Bay, Facebook and BBC iPlayer. Of course, cybercriminals also use VPNs and anonymous proxy servers, though Tor might be a more likely prospect.

The simplest type of VPN is one that runs at the application level, typically inside a web browser. In your case, this is Cocoon, which is available for different browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and different operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple's Mac OS X and Linux). The drawback is that it only protects what's in the browser. If you were to run another browser alongside Firefox, or a separate email program, the data from these other programs would not be protected by Cocoon's VPN.

The most popular VPN for personal users – which I mentioned in response to your similar question in 2010 – is probably AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield. Like many other cheap or free VPNs, Hotspot Shield is based on open source OpenVPN code, so it encrypts all the internet traffic on your PC: every web browser, email program, and so on. It supports Windows, Mac OS X, and Apple iOS devices, with Android to come.

The drawbacks with Hotspot Shield are that, as with Cocoon and some other VPNs, the free versions are supported by showing adverts, though you can avoid these by upgrading to a paid-for version. Hotspot Shield also switches your home page and default search engine, though you can switch these back. This can be annoying and has prompted some users to look elsewhere, but you can pay AnchorFree $29.95 per year for its Hotspot Shield Elite service, or if you use it for travelling, buy 20 one-day passes for $10.

There are, of course, dozens of alternative VPNs, and there's a big list on the internet censorship wiki. The ones worth considering include SecurityKiss, CyberGhost, and It's Hidden. CyberGhost's servers are in Germany, and It's Hidden's are in the Netherlands, which may not suit US users.

One of the features of a VPN is that your internet connection appears to come from wherever the server is based: it acts as your proxy on the internet. This can confuse websites that do a lot of geolocation and personalisation, such as Google, which will serve up versions in the local language. This can, of course, be useful. Europeans can use a US-based VPN server to watch videos that are otherwise blocked in our region, while those who live outside the UK can use a UK-based VPN to watch TV programmes on, for example, the BBC's iPlayer. Indeed, AnchorFree produced ExpatShield for Windows, so that pining Brits could get a UK IP and access content available only in UK from anywhere.

If this kind of thing is important to you, then Hide My Ass! now offers a Pro VPN service that supports different protocols (so you can use OpenVPN for maximum security or PPTP to stream video, for example) and access to 247 servers in 43 countries. So, yes, you can actually get a fast IP address in Japan. However, the service costs $11.52 per month or $78.66 per year.

The Best VPN Provider comparison website lets you select from dropdown menus such as Destination Country, Protocol and Price/Month to find potential VPN suppliers. However, it only suggests commercial services.

Most if not all VPN providers have lots of terms and conditions that forbid you from doing bad things, including spamming, and say that they will co-operate with police and other authorities if required. If you plan to use peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as bittorrent, check that these are allowed under the T&Cs. Also check how long they keep records. TorrentFreak has a good article on Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

Using a VPN protects you from snooping in your local coffee shop and by your ISP, but the VPN provider is decoding your datastream and putting it on the internet, so it sees everything. It has to be a company you trust.

Also bear in mind that while your ISP cannot see what is in your data stream, it can certainly see you sending lots of encrypted traffic to Hotspot Shield, Hide My Ass! or whatever. So much business traffic now goes via VPNs that I don't expect this is particularly noticeable, but ISPs could filter the obvious free VPNs.

There's an increasing tendency for websites to use the https Secure Sockets Layer (SLL) system, shown by a padlock in the browser, and this already encrypts data to protect it from casual snoopers. However, the appearance of "session jacking" software such as the Firesheep add-on for Firefox means a VPN is probably a good idea when using public Wi-Fi hotspots for important data.

But it's also a good idea to start getting familiar with VPNs because of government attempts to monitor people's internet use. If this becomes a reality in the UK, then perhaps we should all start using VPNs all the time. Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." The internet has more or less delivered that right, and using a VPN may be the simplest way to preserve it.

(Thu, 17 May 2012 12:56:17 GMT)

Google unleashes sparkly new search tool

Search process tries to pinpoint context surrounding search term and will carry more graphical elements and pop-ups

Google is revamping the way it handles searches in the United States to give users quick access to answers without leaving the page, the company said.

The new search process is based on what Google calls the "knowledge graph" – meaning that it tries to pinpoint faster the context surrounding its users' keyword searches.

"Over the years, as search has improved, people expect more," said Amit Singhal, vice-president of engineering at Google and the head of search, in an interview. "We see this as the next big improvement in search relevance."

The redesign, which for now affects only US-based English language users, is gradually being introduced starting Wednesday on desktop, mobile and tablet platforms. Google plans to eventually expand the new search features outside the US, Singhal said, without specifying when.

Many of the results will carry more graphical elements, compared to standard lists of search results, such as maps and pictures of related results, often in separate pop-ups. The idea is to let users easily discover what related material interests them and click through to it, Singhal said.

The offering is the latest example of search companies moving away from offering a list of text-based links as search results. Last week, Microsoft's Bing unveiled a redesign that includes a "snapshot" column. Last year, Yahoo rolled out its "search direct box".

Google is by far the leader in search, with 66% of the US market, according to Comscore. But it sees other sites such as Facebook as competition, as users there can poll their friends and acquaintances for information on various topics without leaving the Facebook ecosystem.

Under Google's existing algorithm, a search for "kings" might pull up results for the ice hockey team, the basketball team, and the TV series, all on the first results page.

On the revamped Google, a box will pop up in the top right-hand corner of the screen, giving users the option right away to limit their search to the desired meaning of "kings".

For some searches, such as on prominent people, Google will automatically pull up a summary box with key information on that topic. The summary box will also appear on the top right of the page.

A search for architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, pulls up the first line of his Wikipedia entry, plus dates of birth and death, thumbnail pictures of his best-known buildings, and thumbnail pictures of other architects people commonly search for.

The upshot is that many users will end their internet search without leaving Google's pages, when in the past they might have continued to a site such as Wikipedia, which is collaborating with Google on the new search features.

Google said it could actually drive more traffic to Wikipedia, which will be prominently linked to in the summary boxes. A Wikipedia spokesman said Google is using Wikipedia information in an appropriate way.

The new techniques are based in large part on work done at online data collection Freebase, Singhal said. Freebase was developed by Metaweb, a company Google acquired in 2010.

Google is also working on being able to better answer more complex questions such as "What are the 10 deepest lakes in Africa?" that require its algorithms to factor in several different criteria.

But it may never be able to crack some users' toughest questions, such as "Does my hairstyle make me look fat?" which Singhal said was a real search question.

(Wed, 16 May 2012 20:49:00 GMT)

Cory Doctorow: the problem with nerd politics

If we don't operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, then we will lose

In the aftermath of the Sopa fight, as top Eurocrats are declaring the imminent demise of Acta, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership begins to founder, as the German Pirate party takes seats in a third German regional election, it's worth taking stock of "nerd politics" and see where we've been and where we're headed.

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In "nerd determinism," technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it's true that geeks can get around this sort of thing – and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers – this isn't enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn't matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

What's more, things that aren't legal don't attract monetary investment. In the UK, where it's legal to unlock your mobile phone, you can just walk into shops all over town and get your handset unlocked while you wait. When this was illegal in the US (it's marginally legal at the moment), only people who could navigate difficult-to-follow online instructions could unlock their phones. No merchant would pay to staff a phone-unlocking role at the corner shop (my dry-cleaner has someone sitting behind a card-table who'll unlock any phone you bring him for a fiver). Without customers, the people who make phone-unlocking tools will only polish them to the point where they're functional for their creators. The kind of polish that marks the difference between a tool and a product is often driven by investment, markets and commercialism.

That's not to say that some dedicated hacker won't polish the hell out of a semi-legal or illegal tool for the sheer satisfaction of a job well done, but those heavily polished gems are the exceptions. Leave aside the self-interest geeks should have in good technology rules – the fact that you, personally, can't start a business based on supplying the tools your less-savvy neighbours can use. Without self-revealing, easy-to-use tools, the benefits of technology are only extended to technologists. If you want a world where only the clued-in get to reap the benefits of technology, you are a technocrat, not a geek. What's more, as you age, and your ability to stay current on technical subjects is eroded, you will become a serf along with your poor neighbours.

"Nerd fatalism" is the cynical counterpart of "nerd determinism." Nerd fatalists hold that the geeky way of doing things – the famed "rough consensus and running code" – and have an ideological purity that can't be matched by the old-time notions of deliberation, constitutionalism, and politics. These things are inherently corrupt and corrupting. If you move to Whitehall to defend technology, in a few years, you will be indistinguishable from any other Whitehall wonk, just another corrupted suit who sells out his ideals for realpolitik.

It's true that politics has internal logic, and that habitual participants in politics are apt to adopt the view that politics is "the art of the possible" and no fit place for ideals. But there's an important truth about politics and law: even if you don't take an interest in them, it doesn't follow that they won't take an interest in you.

So we can design clever, decentralised systems such as BitTorrent all day long, systems that appear to have no convenient entity to sue or arrest or legislate against. But if our inventions rattle enough cages and threaten enough bottom lines, the law will come hunting for them. The law will seek out arbitrary victims – think of how Sopa set out to prohibit hardening DNS against fraud and phishing because it would be convenient to use fake DNS entries to stop people from reaching The Pirate Bay. When it does, technology can't save them. The only defence against a legal attack is the law. If you don't have an organised body for someone else to sue, it means that there will be no organised body to mount a defence in court, either.

If people who understand technology don't claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don't operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don't speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.

(Mon, 14 May 2012 15:13:08 GMT)

Life is tweet, says John Prescott

Twitter has helped shift the balance of media power from press barons to the people – a true champagne moment

Tuesday marked a turning point for the UK mainstream media. The combined total of people who buy daily national newspapers is 9,002,963. The number of people on Twitter in the UK is now 10 million.

Where once press barons were courted by politicians and PRs, the people have now established their own media. It costs nothing, is faster than mainstream media and galvanises people into action.

Back in 1996, I went to a do with Pauline. A photographer took a picture of us at our table. The following day the London Evening Standard ran a picture with the caption "champagne socialist".

There was no bottle of champagne at our table – the paper had cropped the picture to make a bottle of Becks look like a bottle of MoΓ«t. Another beer near my hand was airbrushed out completely.

I complained but, after a few days, I'd heard nothing. So I released a statement which was published in the Independent and, eventually after weeks, I received an apology from the Standard.

In June 2011, the Sunday Times wrongly reported I had told "friends" that my party's new leader had not made "a good start" to his leadership. The headline read "Labour Big Beasts Maul Ed Miliband".

I tweeted: "I see there's a quote purporting to be from me in the Sunday Times. It's completely made up. An absolute lie."

Within an hour, the paper replied "Due to a prod[uction] error a quote was wrongly attributed to @johnprescott. We apologise for the confusion & are happy to set the record straight."

Both stories illustrate how power in the media has shifted dramatically. Twitter has created an important and speedy check on our newspapers – a role the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) failed miserably to fulfil – and finally made press barons accountable to the people.

Even Rupert Murdoch, who vented his spleen in Sun editorials, realised the power shift and cut out the middleman by finally joining Twitter in January.

The Jan Moir Twitter storm about her terrible Daily Mail piece on Stephen Gately's "sleazy" death led to thousands of tweeters, myself included, posting the link to officially complain to the PCC. A record 25,000 did and Moir was forced to apologise.

Twitter users also bombarded News of the World's advertisers after accusations it had hacked Milly Dowler's phone. O2, Boots, Halifax, Dixons, Sainsbury's, the Co-op, npower and Ford all withdrew their advertising and the paper was closed within a week.

Social media also helped set up the Leveson inquiry. While very few media outlets covered the Guardian's original phone-hacking investigations in 2009 in any detail, it was kept alive on Twitter as new information emerged.

They wouldn't let it lie and the mainstream media were ultimately compelled to investigate the story, leading to a critical mass of public anger and official action.

Twitter is OUR media, the public have become the news editors and the Twitter trend list is the running order.

It's given me a voice and a connection to millions of people that the distorted prism of the mainstream media denied.

So for me, life is tweet. Though it would be even tweeter if they verified me.

LOL!

β€’ John Prescott is the former deputy prime minister. He joined Twitter on 22 January 2009 and presently has almost 132,000 followers.

(Tue, 15 May 2012 16:06:40 GMT)

Former Yahoo CEO diagnosed with cancer

Thompson, who quit amid allegations that he had lied on his CV, reportedly said his illness contributed to his decision to resign

Yahoo's ex-chief executive Scott Thompson, who quit on Sunday as Yahoo sought to defuse a row over allegations Thompson lied on his CV, has reportedly been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

After a board meeting on Sunday morning, the company announced that Thompson, who has led the embattled web giant for less than six months, would be replaced by Ross Levinsohn with immediate effect.

Thompson's decision to step down from Yahoo was in part influenced by his cancer diagnosis, reports the Wall Street Journal. But his resignation had seemed inevitable amid demands by Daniel Loeb, an activist shareholder whose firm, Third Point, owns a 5.8% stake in the company.

Yahoo did not immediately return calls from the Guardian.

Thompson's diagnosis had reportedly been made even as the board was investigating why the his academic record had erroneously included a computer science degree – a falsehood that appears on Yahoo's regulatory filing.

Over the weekend, Yahoo said it would appoint several new board members including Third Point's Loeb, the person who had had spotted Thompson's misstated academic record in a Yahoo regulatory filing in April.

Yahoo also announced that Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman, would leave and be replaced by Fred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive.

"The board is pleased to announce these changes and the settlement with Third Point, and is confident that they will serve the best interests of our shareholders," Amoroso said in a statement on Sunday night.

Despite a massive online presence, Yahoo has been struggling to keep up with Google and Facebook. Yahoo's share of overall US online ad revenues, which reached 15.7% in 2009, declined to just 9.5% last year, according to eMarketer.

Yahoo shares rose 1.7% after Sunday's announcement.

"Investors are likely to take comfort in fresh leadership, particularly at the board level, as eight of the 11 board seats were named in the past year," wrote Evercore Partners analyst Ken Sena in a note.

Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter said that the management changes were necessary, even though he worried that Yahoo would essentially start from scratch again with its strategy.

"As a practical matter, what this means for the company is that the past four months have been little more than a false start, and it must once again start at the beginning in terms of establishing a strategic direction," Schachter said in a research not.

Analysts welcomed Levinsohn's appointment because of his history in media and advertising sales. Schachter said he may be "auditioning to take on this role on a permanent basis."

"We view Mr Levinsohn as well-equipped to lead the organization and to build off of the company's core strengths – advertising products and digital media," said Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang.

However, even with Levinsohn at the helm, Schachter said that Yahoo's future is uncertain: "The bottom line is that the situation at Yahoo is a mess."

(Mon, 14 May 2012 15:41:00 GMT)

All today's Technology stories

(Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:53:52 GMT)

Finally, mystery of the famous faces of art may be revealed

Californian university project will use facial recognition software to identify subjects of paintings

A Californian university has won funding to use advanced facial recognition technology to try to solve the mysteries of some of the world's most famous works of art.

Professor Conrad Rudolph said the idea for the experiment came from watching news and detective shows such as CSI which had a constant theme of using advanced computers to recognise unknown faces from murder victims to wanted criminals.

Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at the University of California at Riverside, realised he might be able to apply that cutting-edge forensic science to some of the oldest mysteries in art: identifying the real people in paintings such as Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hals's The Laughing Cavalier or thousands of other portraits and busts where the identity of the subject has been lost. Work on the project should begin within a month or so.

Police and forensic scientists can use facial recognition software that identifies individuals by measuring certain key features. For example, it might measure the distance between someone's eyes or the gap between their mouth and their nose. In real life such measurements should be almost as unique as a fingerprint. Rudolph is hoping that the same might be true of portraiture, whether it is a sculpted bust or a painting.

To start with, his team will use facial recognition software on death masks of known individuals and then compare them to busts and portraits. If the software can find a match where Rudolph and his team know one exists, then it shows the technique works and can be used on unknown subjects to see if it can match them up with known identities.

The identity of the subjects of some of the most famous pictures in the world are unknown, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, the 17th-century portrait that inspired a film starring Scarlett Johansson. The Imagined Lives exhibition now running at London's National Portrait Gallery features portraits of 14 unknown subjects. Many of those paintings were once thought to be of historical figures such as Elizabeth I, but the identities are now disputed. The truth behind several paintings of Shakespeare – such as the Chandos portrait and the Cobbe portrait – has also been much disputed. It is possible facial recognition software could help solve these mysteries.

To be identified, the subject of a portrait would need to be matched to the identity of another named person in a separate picture. But Rudolph has some tricks up his sleeve. He believes that another forensic technique – whereby an "ageing" programme is run on a subject – could also help solve art mysteries. In fighting crime the software is usually used to produce "adult" pictures of children who have been missing for many years. But it could see if the Girl with a Pearl Earring had been painted again as a much older woman, whose identity might be known.

Away from the high-profile cases there are a legion of other unknown subjects that might be more easily identified. In many works from before the 19th century wealthy patrons often inserted themselves, their families or friends and business associates into crowd scenes.

Facial recognition technology could be used to identify some of these people from already known works and thus provide insight into personal, political and business relationships of the day. In other cases families in wealthy homes commissioned busts of relatives that were often sold when estates went bankrupt or families declined.

The new technique could identify many of these people by linking the busts to known portraits. "These are historical documents and they can teach us things. Works of art can show us political connections or business links. It opens up a whole new window into the past," Rudolph said.

In order to transfer the process to analysing faces in works of art, some technical issues will need to be overcome. Portraits are in two dimensions and are also an artistic interpretation rather than a definitive likeness. In some cases, the painter might have simply not been very accurate, or attempted to flatter a subject, which would make recognition more difficult.

"It is different using this on art rather than an actual human," said Rudolph, "But we are trying to test the limits of the technology now and then who knows what advances may happen in the future? This is a fast-moving field."

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:08:02 GMT)

There's power dressing and then there's Steve Hilton | Catherine Bennett

The singular sartorial style of David Cameron's former adviser smacks not of eccentricity, but arrogance

Ridiculously, the search engine for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies retrieves nothing about local dress codes. All that can be assumed from related images is that scholars within this prestigious research centre, part of Stanford University in California, favour dark suits and ties for formal occasions, open-necked pale blue shirts for seminars, accessorised with a pair of trousers and, one gathers, shoes. Steve Hilton, whose arrival at the institute is expected any time, has been celebrated, throughout his residency in Downing Street for coming to the office in a T-shirt, shorts and plimsolls, the latter removed on arrival.

There is a hint of the man's daring, perhaps, in the FSI's announcement of its new asset, in which he is introduced to unsuspecting suits as "Cameron's top adviser". His academic function is to "focus on innovation in government, public services and communities around the world". But omitted from this encomium is what must surely pass for Hilton's greatest contribution yet to modern international relations: wearing socks to meet President Obama.

In The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie claimed dress as a means of communication, albeit one which can be a bit one-sided. "Even if we are never introduced," she explains, "clothes tell about class status, age, family origin, personal opinion, taste, current mood or even give information about erotic interest and sexual status."

So: Steve Hilton. What have his clothes been telling us or, more specifically, the prime minister and the US president? Not forgetting those bureaucrats who have been treated, these past two years, to his lectures on the uselessness of bureaucrats? Sometimes, given that a Hilton T-shirt might say "Big Society", the message was necessarily incomprehensible. But was there meaningful content, too, in his Bart Simpson-wear? In the Downing Street context – one in which, like many offices, people are expected to dress formally or pay the price – Mr Hilton's creased shorts seem, at their most polite, to have been a permanent reminder to colleagues that he was/is different, to wit, a dashing free spirit, young beyond his years and endowed with creative talents on a scale that liberate him to move on any time his plans for trashing the state should cease to be appreciated by the resident dullards, including the neatly pressed prime minister.

His determination to affirm this specialness to Barack Obama through the ancient language of socks is slightly less easy to read and may even have been a miscalculation, given that sock-wearing can mean, in some cultures, "I'm a complete git". Was it wise, now that Hilton has transferred his mission to the States, to advertise his intellectual superiority to the White House's dapper, highly polished black shoe-wearer? Even Hilton's greatest rival for in-your-face sartorial insolence, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, wore a jacket, tie – and shoes – to meet the president.

Definitely indecipherable, to those of us communicating at a distance with Mr Hilton's clothes, has been their level of hygiene. Now, thanks to the political writer Sue Cameron, who chose the week of Hilton's departure to record a story about his arrival at a policy meeting in shorts and shoe-less, with a plastic bag of oranges, we can experience his clothing in Sensurround. "Mr Hilton started inexpertly peeling an orange," she says. "There was juice everywhere, not least over the crotch of his brushed cotton shorts. Unabashed, he went off to his next meeting – with some military top brass."

Compared with this, Boris Johnson's trademark I'm-too-clever-for-my-shorts state of dishevelment is actively ingratiating. Hilton's power stains were a clear "fuck you" to passing dignitaries, more akin to Mark Zuckerberg's historic visit in pyjamas to a venture capital firm called Sequoia, which had previously sacked his partner. David Kirkpatrick, his biographer, quotes Zuckerberg saying he now regrets the insult: "I assume we really offended them and now I feel really bad about that."

But Zuckerberg has, of course, stuck doggedly to his old, Harvard genius outfit of hoodie and jeans, Silicon Valley's answer to ermine. "He's actually showing investors he doesn't care that much; he's going to be him," a suited analyst, Michael Pachter, complained to Bloomberg TV recently, having received, accurately, Zuckerberg's message of unshakable entrepreneurial confidence. "I think that's a mark of immaturity," he added, usefully enhancing the young Facebook brand at the same time that he condemned Zuckerberg to a lifetime in formal slobwear. In fact, thanks to Zuckerberg and The Social Network, it could be many years before any other technological visionary gains access to venture capital without being dressed in whatever would get a normal person banned from Tesco.

Perhaps this modern adaptation of sumptuary laws, whereby only the very richest and most powerful enjoy a licence to dress like losers, helps account for a reported tendency for Oxford students to arrive in their pyjamas for breakfast in college halls where, since the catering staff are presumably washed and dressed, their disarray can be read as a crass assertion of privilege. Unless, as some disgusted comment assumes, far from being inspired by brainy iconoclasts, the students are simply replicating the habits of that other, growing section of the British population that has taken to staying in pyjamas and slippers for the rather different reason that, like depressives, they see no point in getting dressed. Alternatively, now that leading designers have, inevitably, attempted their own dismal take on outdoor pyjamas, the students may merely attest to the terrifying reach of fashion's Stella McCartney. Whatever the reason, public confusion around the language of pyjamas suggests enough lingering interest in dress codes to make public nightwear a risky choice outside Wall Street.

With their hypersensitivity about appearances, our Olympic authorities will naturally be wondering how to raise standards. What will the world make of our pyjamas? Our mayor? Will it be enough to clear the litter, exile Hilton and tie a large label reading "English eccentric" to Johnson's ear? How worrying is it that, in Shanghai, prior to the 2010 World Expo, its traditionally pyjama-wearing citizens proved remarkably resistant to dedicated nightwear police and signs saying: "Pyjamas don't go out of the door"?

As so often, President Obama has something sensible to say on the matter. Asked about another clothing nuisance mysteriously overlooked by Tesco – that of visible underpants and low-slung jeans – he rejected official action. "Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. There are some issues that we face, that you don't have to pass a law, but that doesn't mean folks can't have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear – I'm one of them."

Bear in mind, however: this was the liberalism of a brother who had never seen Steve Hilton with orange stains all over his crotch. But that is America's problem now.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:24 GMT)

Improve efficiency – switch off your smartphone

The 'always-on' connectivity of email on smartphones has become a life-destroying monster. You need help…

One of the great cautionary adages of our culture is: "Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it." And it applies in spades to the kind of instantaneous, always-on connectivity that many of us now enjoy, courtesy of the internet and mobile phones. Except that enjoy is perhaps not quite the right word. Talk to any busy person nowadays about the joys of email, for example, and the most common response is a rueful shrug. A technology that was once a magical tool for communicating has somehow become a millstone round people's necks.

It was bad enough when email was confined to desktop PCs. But, once the smartphone arrived, first with the BlackBerry then via the iPhone and Androids, email had the power to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the day – and night. The result was an inexorable lengthening of the working day, especially for those working in high-pressure jobs, because of an expectation that they could always be reached by email – and a corresponding expectation that any message would receive a speedy response.

Email has become the central communications channel of all modern organisations, to the point where none of them could now function without it. But there's increasing evidence – both anecdotal and empirical – that it has become dysfunctional. It eats into people's working and thinking time, for example, distracts them from doing "real" work and generates guilt feelings that ratchet up stress levels to unsustainable levels.

In the old world of desktop PCs, you could at least leave it behind when you left the office. But the advent of the smartphone changed all that. Email has now infiltrated leisure time, family time – even sleep time. It's become a monster that's destroying our lives.

Deep down, most of us know this. But we daren't talk about it out loud, for fear of seeming inadequate. After all, our colleagues seem to be able to cope. So each individual comes to see his or her inability to cope with the email torrent as a personal failing, and therefore as a problem to be solved on a personal level. We make resolutions to be more efficient, to respond immediately (and as succinctly as possible) to each message as it arrives, to archive and file messages at regular intervals, and so on.

These personal strategies appear to work for a week or two, but they're doomed to failure. This is partly because the more efficient you are at responding to email, the more quickly your inbox fills up in return. But it's mainly because the email problem is a systemic one rather than a manifestation of the inadequacies of individuals. If you work in an organisation that is dysfunctionally addicted to email, no action that you take on your own is going to solve that; indeed, it may have serious downsides for you.

Which brings us to some intriguing research by a Harvard academic, Leslie Perlow. Four years ago, Professor Perlow conducted a pilot experiment with a six-person team at the Boston Consulting Group, an elite business consulting firm. The team was a classic example of "always-on" professionals who were caught in what Perlow christened the "cycle of responsiveness".

"The pressure to be on," she writes, "usually stems from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones. People begin adjusting to these demands – adapting the technology they use, altering their daily schedules, the way they work, even the way they live their lives and interact with their families and friends – to be better able to meet the increased demands on their time. Once colleagues experience this increased responsiveness, their own requests expand. Already working long hours, most just accept these additional demands – whether they are urgent or not – and those who don't risk being branded as less committed to their work."

Perlow persuaded the team to try an experiment – collectively to agree to disconnect from their smartphones and computers for a few predetermined hours every week. She called it Predictable Time Off (PTO). The results surprised both her and them. The consultants reported that they felt more motivated, had increased job satisfaction and were more satisfied with their work-life balance. They also reported that they had become more efficient, effective and collaborative as a team. The PTO experiment was then replicated across most of the teams working in the BCG's north-eastern US offices – with results that confirmed the findings of the pilot study.

Perlow has now published an extensive account of her research in a new book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, which should be required reading for any senior executive concerned about the dysfunctionality of "always-on" connectivity. It shows that, while the email monster might be impossible to slay, it can be tamed by collective action. And that's definitely something worth wishing for.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:54 GMT)

The investors on the trail of a British Facebook

London has become the scene of a big-money race to find an internet firm with potential to be as profitable as the US social networking site

Davor Hebel, a Croatian-born and US-educated partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, a Β£100m fund, is explaining where venture capital (VC) investors fit into London's technology ecosystem. It all boils down to the question of whether you back the jockey or the horse. Angel, "seed" or early-stage investors tend to back the jockey – the entrepreneurs themselves – in the knowledge that their idea will undergo a number of iterations before a winning formula is found.

A VC, by contrast, usually takes a rather more cool-headed approach. Yes, he or she will assess the team's credibility, but ultimately they will back the horse. "Not every company needs venture capital investment, of course," says Hebel. "They can grow at a certain rate without us." He leans forward, flashing a Colgate smile, to emphasise his next point. "But when you raise VC investment, the VC will want you to go for a huge exit – that's an exit of Β£100m plus. They will want you to hit the ball out of the park."

There are three things you get used to if you spend time talking deals with VCs such as the affable Hebel. First, they talk in telephone-number sums. Even the European minnows (by comparison with Silicon Valley's breed of great whites) run funds comprising breathtaking amounts of cash. A fund of less than Β£100m is considered small – or in the words of one investor, "boutique" – while the biggest European players, such as Accel Partners, a global powerhouse that has backed both Facebook and Groupon, has a kitty of $1.5bn (Β£946m) to invest in entrepreneurs on this side of the Atlantic.

Second, technology venture capital in Europe is a very small world. Most of the VCs, who raise their own cash from pension funds and wealthy individuals or families, seem to know each other well. This is because they've often scoped the same deals and worked the same rooms at events packed with twentysomething techies with promising businesses.

Third, they pepper conversation with the word "disrupt" – as in: "This company is going to disrupt the social gaming/alternative finance/pedigree pet-grooming world." And by "disrupt" they don't mean "mildly unsettle" or "interrupt". They mean "turn upside down".

Arguably, however, it is the VCs themselves, alongside other investors, who are currently doing much of the disrupting. Eighteen months after the prime minister expounded, at a venue in Brick Lane, his vision for east London's transformation into a global technology hub, "Tech City", as it is known to some, ("Silicon Roundabout" to others), is the scene of increasingly cut-throat competition between investors. The once familiar refrain that, compared with the US, talented startups with a breakout idea struggle to get capital investment in the UK is increasingly rarely heard. Indeed, the (bespoke, hand-sewn) shoe is now very much on the other foot: it is frequently the investors who must do much of the fawning and pitching.

"The best startups not only always get funded, but there is real competition to fund them from a growing number of angels, accelerators [growth hothouses] and VCs," says Robin Klein, venture partner at Index Ventures, whose out-of-the-ballpark UK investments include Lovefilm (acquired by Amazon for "close to Β£200m"), Mind Candy and TweetDeck (sold to Twitter for around Β£25m). "The availability of capital here far exceeds that of any other European centre. London is now the European technology hub."

Indeed, so intense is the competition for the outstanding startup ideas that VC investors are having to elbow their way in much earlier in the game. Where once they could leave the early stage or "seed" investing to friends and family (often derided as "fools and family"), tech incubators/accelerators and angels, today they have to scour tech networking events, meet-ups and demo days (at which startups pitch their businesses) to catch entrepreneurs before they have proven business models – or else risk missing out on the next Facebook or Wonga.

"This is because the costs to get tech companies up and running are decreasing," explains Tom Hulme, design director of IDEO and angel investor in GoCardless and retail "gamification" platform Fantasy Shopper. "Startups can use cloud services to scale [up] or can tap into social networks to market [themselves]. So whereas VCs used to have to wait until businesses were bigger, you see a lot starting to invest at an earlier stage."

One such firm is Mangrove Capital Partners, a Luxembourg-based €100m (Β£80m) fund, which focuses on Europe and emerging markets. Its VCs invest before a product launch and, if viable, follow up with further backing (totalling €15-€20m) later.

"We want to build up a reasonable stake in companies at an early stage because that allows us to have success in our funds," says Mangrove partner Michael Jackson, formerly chief operating officer of Skype. "The mathematics of our funds mean we need generally large companies to be created reasonably fast. Typically, we invest in between 30 and 50 companies per fund, of which we're hoping one will be fantastic."

Jackson explains that the best small funds ("typically €50-€200m") have all had one or two large successes. "If one company is going to pay back, say, a €100m fund, which is what we all dream of, it means the VC has to have 10% of a billion-dollar company when it's sold for it to work. What tends to happen if you have 30 companies is that you have one success, if you're lucky, which puts the whole thing into profit and then you have two or three others that do pretty well as well, which delivers some solid extra returns for people who invest in us."

The investors vying for a slice of the action, high valuations and acquisitions such as Facebook's $1bn (as yet uncompleted) purchase of photo-sharing service Instagram – especially when set against Europe's struggling "real" economies – have led some to speculate that we are in the throes of another dotcom bubble. But that theory finds little sympathy from VCs such as Klein, who says that, unlike 2000 – the year of the last dotcom crash – the fundamentals of the tech boom are very strong indeed.

"Internet adoption continues to grow and smartphones accessing the web means that many more people have access for longer periods and in different situations. Building companies has never been cheaper. Platforms such as Facebook, iPhone and Android are facilitating wide, global distribution; Google gives consumers easy access via search to goods and services; and technology becomes simpler and more intuitive every day."

Pointing to his portfolio of companies, he says: "We are seeing 50%-plus year-on-year growth. Clearly this is not happening in other parts of the economy."

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:52 GMT)

Max Payne 3 – review

Xbox 360, PS3, Rockstar, cert: 18, out now

Max Payne is looking pretty good for his age. Well, Max himself is looking awful; older, fatter, drunker, and sporting a beard that only serves to highlight his more than passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. But Max Payne 3 looks absolutely amazing.

It plays like a dream too – albeit a pretty dark one. Max shoots baddies. He shoots them in SΓ£o Paulo, New Jersey, football stadiums, favelas, speedboats, helicopters, in the arm, the chest, the groin, the head … and, of course, in "bullet time".

Bullet time is not new. But the flawless way the new game engine handles the slow-motion combat that is the essence of all Max Payne games is something to behold. And because it's a Rockstar title, this potentially gimmicky glue holds great big chunks of story, double-cross and humour together beautifully. Never leave a TV set unwatched: the effort that has been put into the news reports, ads, offbeat cartoons and crazy Brazilian soap operas has to be enjoyed, whether or not you speak Portuguese.

You'll be hooked from the moment Max's gravelly voice starts moaning about a succession of very bad days at the office, and want to play it again even before you've finished it. Not least because you will miss some of the clues and dismantled golden guns hidden in every level. These not only bling up your arsenal (Max can now carry a mere two handguns or submachine guns and one rifle or shotgun) but do significantly more damage.

Just as Red Dead Revolver was completely eclipsed by Red Dead Redemption, it seems that Rockstar has done it again, this time with a significantly better-known and better-loved hero. They have taken the essence of Max Payne and added a better story, better targetting, improved enemy AI, an arcade mode that ramps up the already relentless shooting still further, plus multiplayer and workable multi-person bullet time. Oh, and gangs that you can take with you to Grand Theft Auto 5.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:25 GMT)

Car review: Bentley GTC | Martin Love

If you want to know what it's like to drive Bentley's beautiful new GTC soft-top, just ask the chauffeur…

Price Β£149,350
MPG 17.1
Top speed 185mph

We all know chauffeurs drive, but having spent a day chauffeuring at my cousin's wedding, I can tell you that that's the easy part of the job. The hard part is the waiting. To sit at the wheel of a spectacularly beautiful supercar, its 2.5-tonnes of buffed steel, double-stitched leather and burnished walnut held in abeyance, like a crouching sprinter waiting for the gun that never comes, requires reserves of self-control you can only guess at. To idle and feel a peerless 6-litre twin-turbocharged engine burble beneath your poised foot and know that if you moved that foot just 6in you'd hit 100mph in a shade over 10 seconds, but also to know you are going nowhere fast, is… well, let's just say that Tantalus had it easy. At the end of my day's chauffeuring in this 186mph car, my average speed was a staggering 13mph! But weddings are days to linger over, and my slow day at the wheel of one of the most rapid cars on the road gave me a chance to sit back and squeeze every ounce of savour from it.

The new Bentley GTC – the convertible version of the hard-topped GT which has been dazzling self-made millionaires in China and America since it arrived in showrooms at the end of last year – is a sumptuous four-seat cloth-top decked out in marshmallow-soft leather, deep-pile carpets and polished wood. It oozes effortless class all the way from its jewel-like daylight running lamps at the front to the double-horseshoe design of its rear lights.

There's a new man at the helm of Crewe's great ship, the amiable Wolfgang DΓΌrheimer, who has come from Porsche. And though there is talk of hybrid engines and even an SUV in the future, he knows that what Bentley does well is the past. It's the Julian Fellowes of cars. And nothing expresses that better than Bentley's exhaustive, pathological attention to detail. Whether it's panel gaps thinner than credit cards or the gentle snap of a slow-closing glovebox, nothing seems too insignificant to have the magnifying glasses of the designers pausing over it. An almost imperceptible change of background colour to the winged "B" motif, for instance, is accompanied by a flurry of press releases.

As a chauffeur sitting patiently in this great car – I feel really I should have been driving in white gloves – I had time to soak up some of the flawless craftsmanship that is at the heart of these unparalleled cars. Everything is carved, burnished, lacquered, stretched and stitched with solicitous care. The walnut used in the veneer which wraps itself around the chrome dials and shining organ-stop buttons of the dashboard all comes from the trees in 81-year-old Cyrus Jones's orchard in the US.

But all chauffeurs have a guilty secret. When the client gets out, it's their time – and the car's. The leading rein comes off and it's a chance to shake out the enforced stillness. After dropping my cousin and his new wife off at the end of their first day as a married couple, I turned the GTC for home. The all-wheel drive car isn't some stately lady to be treated like a fragile maiden aunt. It's a car built for drivers. Hit the throttle and the vast engine ignites. Power pours over you like an avalanche. It's exhilarating, breathtaking, joyous, spine-tingling… and yet rock solid. It's everything I hope their marriage will be.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:09 GMT)

Following the footsteps of Steve Jobs in California

Steve Jobs was the ultimate tastemaster, but the Apple co-founder lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Follow Jonathan Margolis on our interactive map as he follows Jobs's trail

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:00 GMT)

On the trail of Steve Jobs in California

He was the ultimate tastemaker, but Apple co-founder Steve Jobs lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Jonathan Margolis follows his trail

β€’ Click here to see an interactive map showing Jonathan's tour of the valley

The bestselling biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is most notable for revealing that the innovator and aesthete genius behind Apple – the world's most successful company – was in many ways a giant, semi-autistic toddler. With his boundless egomania, temper tantrums and quirks like refusing to wash, Jobs does not come out as your everyday hero. Yet Steve was my hero. His wacky idea of making computers easy appealed to me as a technology writer. That, along with his maverick unpredictability, made him the Brian Clough of electronics – Clough being my other hero.

The second most remarkable thing about Steve, though, was that for someone who changed the world so fundamentally – it's because of him that we all have computers – he seemed to have been brought up, worked and died within a small radius of his childhood home near Palo Alto, California. Somehow I always imagined Steve – barefoot Buddhist, design guru, tastemaker – not as a hometown boy, but someone more metropolitan or bohemian, or who would seek out a remote "spiritual" place to live.

His background also sounded surprisingly suburban. I've always been intrigued by the incongruity of extraordinary people coming from ordinary backgrounds. And when I peered on Google Street View, the addresses Isaacson lists in Palo Alto – where everyone from Apple to Google has their HQ – looked as mundane as Esher or Altrincham. So I had the idea of taking a couple of days out of an upcoming US trip to visit the key spots in Steve's life. I also thought it would be kind of cool – OK, not cool, but amusingly geeky – to be photographed with my iPad at each location. To call what I proposed a "pilgrimage" would be too strong, a "curiosity" too tepid, while to say it was "to seek insight" would be too earnest. It's the same reason I'd love to visit John Lennon's childhood home – a case of informed interest in someone of my generation, who was not only a million times more successful, but who I also wouldn't actually have minded being.

First stop on my personal Via Dolorosa was 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos. The modest bungalow where the Jobses came to live in 1967 and the garage in which Steve started Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak is as suburban as America gets. What happened here was immense, but there were no signs or tour buses, and someone seemed to live there, so I was emboldened to knock on the door. What a coup if, at my first Station of the Cross, I could get a picture of me, with my iPad, in the founding garage.

An elderly lady answered the door. I apologised and said she must get bothered a lot. No, she said, a couple of hundred a week take photos, but none had knocked until me. Slightly miffed that I wasn't even close to being the first Steve tourist, I was nonetheless relieved that it clearly wasn't that eccentric a thing to be doing.

"I'm Marilyn Jobs," she said. "I married Steve's dad, Paul, after his mom died." This I hadn't bargained for, but she was so friendly I began to think I stood a chance of getting into the holy garage. It turned out Marilyn loved England, especially Harrogate in North Yorkshire. So we spoke at some length about Bettys Tea Rooms there, and I may have agreed to send her some teacakes in the post.

So, how about a peep in the garage? "No," said Mrs Jobs, "there's really nothing in there, just a washing machine and a car. There wouldn't even be room to take a photo." As I was setting up a tripod for an exterior photo of the house, a young guy in a small rental car pulled up. He was from Tooting, wouldn't you know it, and between job interviews was doing the same Steve tour. No, he wouldn't give his name – he didn't want to appear a sad geek – but was happy to take my photo, while two more drive-by tourists slowed down for a shot. "It's so normal you forget that everyone here is living ahead of the curve," said Tooting man. "There are people here who know what the iPhone 6 is going to be like, let alone the 5."

My next stop was 2101 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, the current Jobs home and another surprise. Not only was it quite twee, but it was also relatively modest – and remarkably exposed for a "celebrity" home. One of Steve's trademark grey Mercedes sports cars was parked outside, looking a bit forlorn and splashed with bird poo. I wouldn't have dreamed of disturbing the family, but in case I had any ideas, Donald from Apple security leapt out of a black van to introduce himself. I explained that I just wanted to see where Steve lived and take a photo, and he kindly took it for me.

"We log about 100 to 150 tourists a day," Donald said. "People expect he would have lived in a fortress or a castle, not right here." Donald revealed that although he hadn't been inside the house, "it's apparently in the style of an English cottage". The great taste Nazi and minimalist, living in a Country Living interior? I was shocked. Donald also revealed something else quite bizarre – he's not really called Donald, he's Steve. "So you can't be called Steve if you work for Apple?" Steve/Donald said nothing, but smiled.

Next, the Whole Foods Market on Emerson Street. (It was in the store's small car park just before the iMac was launched in 1998 – a signal event in Apple's history that started the company's rise – where the detail-obsessed Steve was spotted sitting in his car screaming into his phone: "Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!") Then Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc) at 3333 Coyote Hill Road, where, in 1979, Steve saw a prototype computer mouse and graphical computer screen with icons and "borrowed" the idea for Apple.

On the way to Jobs's favourite lunch restaurant, Jin Sho, on S California Avenue, it occurred to me that Steve had been wise to maintain a modest, normal lifestyle in a suburban house with a front lawn rather than the celebrity life he could have led. The fact that, as a zillionaire whose company and counsel presidents sought, he could pad around the (organic) equivalent of Sainsbury's unmolested because he'd, well, always been around and was just Steve must have been a secret delight to him.

"Funny, Steve hasn't been in for a long time," my Jin Sho server, Noriko, said. The present tense was unnerving. Should I tell her? Maybe not. "Would you like to sit where Steve has lunch, or where he goes with his family in the evenings?" she asked. I went for his spot on the lunch bar, where she volunteered to take the now standard goofy photo with my iPad. The $16 special was delicious, but had to be one of the smallest lunches ever served in the US.

At Apple's huge but still oddly underwhelming HQ on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, where I expected security to be all over me, I was wholly ignored. The computer store, the Byte Shop at 1063 West El Camino Real, where Jobs and Wozniak sold their first Apple machine in 1976, turned out to be a sex shop in a dodgy part of town. The woman running the place said she had been there 30 years without knowing the store's connection with the world's most successful company.

My last stop was the cheekiest. I wanted to be photographed with my iPad on the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, an hour from Palo Alto, on Mission Street, San Francisco. This was where Steve publicly launched the iPad and many other Apple products. To my amazement, I was allowed in and permitted to go on to the stage, and one of their staff even took the photo. There was only one proviso: that I didn't show the set of the classical play currently on the stage. So with a soupΓ§on of clumsily applied Photoshop, I turned the set black. Just like it always was when Steve strutted the same stage.

Being Steve Jobs, I concluded, standing up there, thinking what it would have been like to have your words and ideas beamed round the world live to breathless geeks like, er, me, must have been, as he would say, kinda cool.

Essentials

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(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:00 GMT)

Facebook is going to need all the friends it can get | John Naughton

Facebook still has a long way to go to make its value credible

The interesting thing about the Facebook IPO (initial public offering) is that there was no first-day "pop". In other words, the shares ended the day trading at just about the price at which they had started.

Given the advance hype, this surprised many observers and led some to speculate that the underwriters (the banks that handled the flotation) were discreetly buying shares to prop the market up. So could it be that the world is finally wising up to the truth about Facebook?

What is that truth? Simply this: Facebook is an advertising business: last year, 82% of its revenue – about $4 per user – came from that source.

Social networking is really just a means to an advertising end. It is achieved by providing an addictive service for millions of people who spend unconscionable amounts of time freely giving away the thing that advertisers really crave, namely detailed information about their lives and interests.

But therein lies a serious contradiction: Facebook cannot easily exploit this bonanza because its users obstinately continue to regard the platform as a private space: in a recent AP-CBNBC poll, for example, more than 50% of respondents said they felt "not safe at all" using Facebook to make purchases. Yet Facebook needs them to make purchases – lots of them. Those who know about these things think the company needs to make $20 a year from each user to justify the $105bn (Β£66bn) valuation produced by Friday's IPO.

Power, someone once said, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Maybe. But money runs it close. At any rate, a reality distortion field (RDF) surrounds anyone or anything that has lots of it. Thus the RDF surrounding Facebook's market valuation produced selective amnesia in many observers who should know better. It caused them to forget AOL, for example, which at its IPO in 1992 was valued at $70m, soared to $150bn 10 years later – and is now worth about $2.5bn.

And then there's the RDF surrounding Mark Zuckerberg – net worth currently $19bn plus – which seems to have blinded observers to the uncomfortable fact that the shareholding structure of Facebook means that he has total control of the company.

There are two classes of share – A and B. Each class B share carries 10 times the voting rights of its class A counterpart. Zuck owns 27.1% of the class B shares outright and the company's pre-IPO filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed agreements with other owners of class B shares to assign their voting rights to him. The net result is that he has voting control over at least 57.1% of the class B shares. In other words, he's omnipotent.

This would be a problem even if Zuck had the brains of Einstein and the wisdom of Solomon. But, alas, he doesn't. He is undoubtedly a smart and talented guy, but he also happens to have a megalomaniacal obsession – that everything has to be social, ie public. And if you're a Facebook user and don't like that – well, tough.

So we now have another powerful media company with a shareholding structure that renders its charismatic, single-minded founder immune from shareholder pressure. Remind you of anyone? Hint: it begins with "News".

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:52 GMT)

Akai Katana – review

Xbox 360, Rising Star, Cert: 12, out now

Set during a violent conflict in a lusciously detailed alternate reality, Akai Katana is the latest western release from the respected Japanese arcade games maker Cave.

What makes this particularly special is the scoring system, which gives an apparently simple, exhilarating 2D shooter real depth. To master Akai Katana you have to learn the nuances of various weapons and techniques, which makes for a really rewarding experience. Its various modes can still be enjoyed in the most basic way – dodging dense clouds of bullets and shooting enemies – but to truly experience the intensity the game can deliver you need to grasp its many intricacies. Fortunately, it comes with some well-considered guides.

Akai Katana is not easy, but that is perhaps the point. It sets out to be a proper, teasing challenge for gamers who have grown used to hand-holding blockbuster action releases, and it does a superb job.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:33 GMT)

Tom Phillips and A Humument: how a novel became an oracle

New print and digital editions of the painter Tom Phillips's extraordinary work mark the artist's 75th birthday

Thursday marks the 75th birthday of the artist Tom Phillips and much celebration is in order. He is best known for his ongoing project A Humument, new editions of which, in print and digital, coincide with this anniversary.

A Humument is an altered novel, begun in 1966 and first published in 1970. Phillips paints, draws and collages over the pages of an obscure 1892 novel – WH Mallock's A Human Document – leaving gaps for the original but transformed text to show through. Phillips has worked over the novel continuously through the decades: this year's edition will be the fifth. In 2010 A Humument appeared in digital form, as an app for iPhone and iPad. The technology suits it well: the brightly lit screen displays the pages at their best, as Phillips himself notes, "in colours more glowing than my pens and paints could achieve, almost like church windows at times".

What's really interesting about A Humument's digital counterpart is that it's not just a facsimile edition of the print version. Instead, Phillips implements something he's wanted to be possible all along: the ability to select two pages at random and gain an insight from the juxtaposition, in the tradition of such divination books as the I Ching.

"Very soon after starting the book in the 1960s I dreamed of its use as an oracle, and it has taken 40 years for technology to make that possible." He is so pleased with the outcome that: "I've become my own consumer. Each night after midnight I consult, somewhat furtively (even though alone), the Oracle I have made. I'm often surprised by pages made long ago and almost forgotten, as well as by the sometimes uncanny predictions they offer their maker."

As technologist Tom Armitage notes: "This isn't about the technology of display, the iPad. This is about the way delivery changes the relationship a reader has with a text, be it one they wrote or just one they've subscribed to." And we get the pleasure of watching it happen and experiencing it too. Happy birthday, Mr Phillips.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:16 GMT)

VVVVVV – review

3DS, Nicalis, cert: 3, out now

When it appeared on PC last year VVVVVV quickly became an underground hit, despite, or perhaps because of, its simplistic graphics and lo-fi gameplay.

Captain Viridian has crashed his spaceship and lost his five crewmates (whose names also happen to start with V, hence the title). In order to find them and escape this weird new environment he must explore his new surroundings, scurrying along the floor, or, having flipped gravity, along the ceiling.

This simple (and single) game mechanic makes for some truly stupendous puzzles, mind-boggling twists and three or so hours of completely flawless gameplay.

So, if you have a 3DS, buy it. You won't regret it, although you will have to wait to get the level editor that featured in the original.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:34 GMT)

The Walking Dead – review

Xbox, PS3, Steam, Telltale Games, cert: TBA, out now

Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead has been a slow-burn success story. From cult comic book to popular TV series, it was only a matter of time before the games industry came calling. Thankfully, Kirkman chose to spare the world another generic zombie shooter, instead teaming up with adventure studio Telltale Games to deliver an emotional and story-focused version of his apocalyptic tale of survival.

The first chapter of this downloadable game introduces escaped convict Lee Everett. While it's unclear if he actually committed the murder he's accused of, between avoiding the flesh-eating undead and protecting Clementine, a young girl he meets early on, there are more important concerns.

Play harks back to classic point-and-click games, though you can actively explore locations. Occasional hidden-object puzzles test your wits, but the real challenge is a moral one. Choices have real weight to them, with life-or-death consequences. The people you meet, including some important figures from the series, how you treat them and who survives will affect how the story plays out in future chapters, which will be released later this year.

Writer Sean Vanaman perfectly captures the bleakness of the original Walking Dead (comic book readers will grin at coy nods to Kirkman's other printed work), while the visuals are a brilliant reflection of co-creator Charlie Adlard's art. Tense, gripping and wonderfully entertaining, this is unmissable for fans and newcomers alike.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:13 GMT)

Waterstones boss poised to join the e-reader battle

Bookseller James Daunt remains upbeat about traditional books even as he plots a digital revolution

When you consider the prospects for literature in the age of the ebook, just four names seem to dominate the digital future: Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. These American west coast giants, founded respectively in 1994, 1976, 1998 and 1975, are locked in a battle for audiences whose outcome no sensible person could predict. The future looks digital, but traditional books and booksellers still play an important role, possibly thanks to the war between these behemoths.

Last month, Microsoft challenged both Apple and Amazon with a $300m investment in Barnes & Noble, a stake in the digital operations of the world's largest bricks-and-mortar book chain to exploit and develop the Nook (the B&N e-reader) in direct opposition to the Kindle. Game on! And also an extraordinary reversal. Scarcely a year ago, industry analysts were suggesting that Barnes & Noble was doomed to follow another giant book chain, Borders, into administration.

Traditional bookselling, in other words, has more life left in it than meets the eye. In the UK, one bookseller who holds this view, James Daunt of Waterstones, is a retailer for whom the glass is distinctly half full. I sat down with him a few days ago to review the situation.

Daunt, approaching 50, has described Amazon as "a ruthless money-making devil". In private, he's less incendiary than steely, a rather clinical Cambridge-educated history graduate who had several years as a banker at JP Morgan before launching his eponymous London bookstore in 1990.

In July 2011, Daunt was appointed Waterstones MD by the new owner, Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, accepting what many saw as a poisoned chalice.

After a difficult first year, Daunt claims he's beginning to see daylight. "People in publishing believe that books are recession-proof", he says, "but that's simply not true." Turning Waterstones round in double-dip recession UK has been uphill work. The company enjoyed a golden launch in the 1980s, but was subsequently mismanaged "by people who weren't booksellers, who made some idiotic decisions".

To make headway in an adverse, shape-shifting marketplace, Daunt says that he has implemented "a lot of quite simple, bookseller-y changes that have immediately made a difference". Selling books that readers actually want to buy was a start. Waterstones' London flagship stores, notably Piccadilly, Kensington, Notting Hill Gate and Hampstead, have been encouraged to be independent, within the strict guidelines laid down at head office. Daunt is a great believer in systems. He has also taken a tough line with the publishing community, scrapping the age-old policy of "returns", the semi-corrupt practice by which publishers effectively lent their books to the trade.

Waterstones has about 300 stores in the UK. Despite what many – including this column – have predicted, Daunt has not set out to close redundant outlets, despite some anomalies from the boom days. "In Norwich," says Daunt, "you could see a Waterstones branch from the front door of another Waterstones."

Daunt agrees that, while Waterstones has begun to recover, book publishing remains in a state of flux. "If everything stayed the same, we would be on course to win our customers back," he says. But this is the biggest IT revolution since Caxton. So what does a modern British bookseller do about Amazon, Apple et al? "When I took over last year," Daunt replies. "Waterstones was selling a range of e-readers, very badly. I stopped that instantly – at a considerable cost to the balance sheet." Does this mean he's the enemy of the ebook revolution that's sweeping down Main Street USA, and beginning to be felt here in the UK ?

Far from it. "I'm selling reading," says Daunt, who shares my view that, from many perspectives, this is a golden age for the consumer. "We have to insinuate ourselves into the process, and we have to be seamless." On closer examination, "seamless" turns out to mean persuading Waterstones customers to choose an e-reader (and ebooks) through a Waterstones-sponsored device. Daunt won't say when this will happen – "it's the bit we have to get right" – but it's imminent. "We'll be different from Amazon," he says, with characteristic ebullience, "and we'll be better."

In the UK, the e-reading revolution is about to get really competitive.

Furious Bayley rounds on rival in 'Pitch' battle

Stephen Bayley, formerly the Observer's architecture correspondent, has always been on the side of the underdog. Now, I hear, he has found a thrilling new cause: himself.

Three years ago, Bayley co-published (with marketing guru Roger Mavity) a popular guide to self-advancement entitled Life's a Pitch: How to Sell Yourself and Your Brilliant Ideas. This paperback proved so contagious that, in the ultimate flattery, the journalist Philip Delves Broughton decided to explore its "brilliant idea". He is about to publish Life's a Pitch: What the World's Best Sales People Can Teach Us All.

Delves Broughton's publisher, Penguin, has so far resisted Bayley's outraged protests about what used to be called "passing off". But our former correspondent is known to like a challenge, especially when it involves himself, so I suspect the book trade has not heard the last of this spat. NOTE: I HAVE COPIES OF BOTH COVERS

A stroke of genius

Stroke afflicts 150,00 people a year in the UK, but it rarely appears in literature. A notable exception is the death of Billy Bones at the beginning of Treasure Island. This gap has been filled by the publication of Interactions (Roast Books), a collection of short pieces by some distinguished writers with experience of stroke, headed by Seamus Heaney and Alan Ayckbourncorrect. The therapeutic idea behind this initiative is that live readings stimulate the minds and creativity of stroke patients, and can sponsor remarkable recoveries. The InterAct Reading Service enjoys the patronage of stroke survivor and theatre director Max Stafford-Clark, who also mobilises actors to read these remarkable stories. Hats off to a wonderful charity.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:11 GMT)

Facebook investors hoping for a second bite of the Apple effect have arrived too late

Zuckerberg's company is going to have to end the internet's free-love era in the way that Apple spurned "homebrew" computing in order to justify its valuation

Mark Zuckerberg status update: richer than George Soros. When the closing bell rang at the end of Facebook's first day on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange, its founder was worth $19.4bn (Β£12.2bn). The Wall Street analysts whose job it is to build logical arguments about why the online equivalent of a school reunion should have a market value of $104bn have torn up their financial models.

The lacklustre trading performance on day one suggests Facebook's share price may have peaked before it floated, but Friday's initial public offering was not about putting a price on a company. Those who did buy into the stock were paying for a slice of American history.

The dotcom crash that marked the beginning of this digital century left no room for celebrating the transformational power of the internet, but with Zuckerberg jumping on stage the party has resumed.

Silicon Valley's figureheads are more than rich business people. In hoodies and jeans, avoiding taxes and regulators and delivering free and unlimited access to the world's information (and its music and films), the digital entrepreneurs running Amazon, Apple and Facebook have become the new folk heroes.

They are the agents of social upheaval, a role once played by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. One time Google chef Charlie Ayers cooked for the Grateful Dead before he began serving brown rice and mung beans to computer programmers.

Perhaps that's because the internet pays better than rock and roll. Bono's venture capital firm has made more from its Facebook shares than U2 have done during their entire career.

For many, the decision to buy a Facebook share may have been prompted by disappointment at missing out on the Apple phenomenon. Apple's recent success was a slow burn. It started with brightly coloured desktop computers when the internet was in its dial-up infancy, gathered pace with the iPod when music file sharing took hold, soared when the iPhone put the web in our pockets, and culminated last year in the near deification of Steve Jobs.

But buying a Facebook share in the belief that it may one day replicate Apple's success is a monster bet. Facebook doesn't sell beautifully-designed and engineered physical objects. It sells advertising and Facebook credits.

And one of America's biggest advertisers has stopped liking it. Carmaker General Motors, America's third largest advertiser, has become the first big client to say it no longer wants to pay for ads on Facebook. Will it be the last?

Mobile is another sore point. Despite the fact that 425m users access the social network via their smartphones every month, Zuckerberg was forced to warn investors that he has not found a way to sell meaningful amounts of advertising on the smallest screen.

One of the greatest forces working in his favour is inertia. The list of rival social networks overtaken by Facebook – from Britain's Bebo to Friendster and Myspace – is a long one. But those were in the days when we were entranced by the novelty of the genre.

Now we have established the marital and professional status of former friends and lovers, the incentive to sign up to a new network has evaporated, at least for those over 25.

Social networking has redefined how much of our private lives we are prepared to share. Facebook is betting that the new generation, raised on a diet of advertising-funded kids' TV channels, will be more willing to tolerate a relentless stream of targeted marketing.

There will surely come a day when content is no longer free on the internet, and those with the biggest audience when the music stops will be best positioned to make money. But to justify its valuation, Facebook will have to bring the internet's free-love era to a close.

Citizen Bob

Get this. Barclays is holding a "citizenship day" this week. Seriously, this is not a joke – although the very idea may be making your sides split. After all, this is a bank that riles its shareholders with a pay policy that allowed its chief executive, Bob Diamond, to take home Β£17m in 2011 – in a year that he himself deemed "unacceptable".

More than 30% of shareholders failed to support the remuneration policy at the annual meeting last month. This is the bank that irked HM Revenue & Customs with tax avoidance schemes so aggressive that the government took the unusual step of issuing retrospective legislation to shut them down. This is the bank that ran into trouble when it emerged that it had paid just Β£113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it made record profits of Β£11.6bn.

Diamond has made citizenship one of his priorities for his tenure as chief executive, which began at the start of 2011. As an American, perhaps he cannot see the irony of his bold claims about making it one of the bank's goals. When the bank published its citizenship report last month, he said: "The challenges ahead will not detract from our commitment to demonstrating that Barclays is a good corporate citizen. I believe wholeheartedly that this is the right thing to do for our customers, shareholders and society as a whole."

Believing is one thing, seeing is another. Diamond will only be seen to be living by his promise of citizenship if he addresses the ongoing concerns about his own pay, which apparently caused something of a boardroom fall-out before the shareholder revolt.

In the report published before this week's invitation-only event, Barclays states that there are "three pillars" to its citizenship goals – growth in the economy, the way it does business and supporting communities. There is also an acknowledgment from Diamond that "delivering on our agenda will take time; restoring people's trust may take longer". Replace "take longer" with "be impossible" and it becomes a statement that is easy to agree with.

Posen bows out

Fancy earning Β£101,000 for a three-day week? You'll need a firm grasp of the economy, and a fine turn of phrase to explain to the hard-pressed British public why the economy is still flat on its back.

The Treasury is about to advertise the job of independent member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, after the American Adam Posen decided not to serve a second three-year term.

Posen told the Observer in 2011 that he wouldn't stay on if his pessimistic view about the state of the economy, and his expectation that inflation would fall sharply, was proved wrong.

So far, he's been half right: his colleagues finally joined him in approving more QE last autumn, as the economy slipped back into recession, but inflation remains way above the 1.5% he was expecting by mid-2012.

Still, Posen should return to Washington with his head held high: his record is not perfect, but he was a lot more right than the MPC members who believed until last summer that the best medicine for Britain's flatlining economy was a rate rise.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:07 GMT)

Q&A: London's leading technology investors

The capital's investment experts tell us how they go about identifying the next big thing – and about the opportunities that slipped through their fingers

SONALI DE RYCKER

Sonali De Rycker is a partner at Accel Partners in London. From offices around the world, Accel manages funds totalling $9bn. De Rycker's investments include Spotify, Wonga and Seatwave.

What's good about the scene in London right now?

Silicon Valley has no monopoly on talent and innovation, but in London ambition has not always been as prominent as people like me would have liked. What's struck me in the last 18 months is that the level of ambition here is rising dramatically.

What qualities are you looking for?

We like to back what we think will be the No 1 player in what we hope to be a disruptive and large category. We like companies that can be very big because we're a hits-driven business – make no mistake about that – and we take all the risks that come with that.

What does it take to do your job?

Having a nose for the next big opportunity. Huge tenacity and hustle. Almost every single company we've done well with has involved us chasing and hounding. Before I did this job, I thought you'd just sit at your desk and wait for people to come to you. But we've called companies 50 times before we even got to a second meeting.

Which investment are you proudest of?

The one I think really does define its category in an extremely innovative way is Wonga.

And the one that got away?
I really admire the team at SoundCloud.

BRENT HOBERMAN

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com, is investment partner at PROfounders Capital, an early stage Β£26m fund whose investments include easyCar, bespoke furniture site made.com and TweetDeck. He is also a non-executive director of Observer and Guardian publisher GMG.

What do you do all day?

There's a lot of going out and finding new talent. One of the secrets is filtering which companies you meet with, because there are huge numbers you could meet.

What's good about the scene in London?
Startups are hot, people want to mix with them, bigger companies want to do deals with them. But a lot of the buzz is about the creative talent wanting to be in London.

What qualities are you looking for?

It's got to be about passion and not about making a quick buck – I always get worried when I meet founders who are thinking about the exit right at the start. But the thing I get most excited about is disrupting industries that haven't yet been disrupted.

What does it take to do your job?

If you've gone through the rollercoaster of being an entrepreneur yourself that definitely helps you empathise with the people you invest in.

Which investment are you proudest of?

I really like [home from home rental service] onefinestay, because it's not a copy of airbnb [the social accommodation network valued at $1bn], but an innovative take on that model.

And the one that got away?

There are quite a lot of them. The main one is [black cab app] Hailo – the first time I used it I thought, How could we have passed on this?

DAVOR HEBEL

Davor Hebel is a partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, a Β£100m fund, whose portfolio of companies includes fashion site Stylistpick and Wahanda, a health and beauty marketplace.

What do you do all day?

We spend our time finding deals, doing deals and managing our portfolio. For the first of those, we may identify 1,000 companies to do one deal.

What qualities are you looking for?

We look for large markets undergoing fundamental transformation. After that, we look for great teams, good products and business models – companies that have actually built something that is differentiated.

What does it take to do your job?

It's a combination of a few things: strategy, operational expertise, analytics and people skills. Sometimes you need to be bullish and really supportive of entrepreneurs. But ultimately, we are investors of capital – so we have to make a return.

Which investment are you proudest of?

That's like choosing among your children. One I'm very proud of is InnoGames, a German company whose founders dropped out of school to build a free-to-play game. They now have almost 50 million registered users.

And the one that got away?

Spotify. It was very early and very expensive when we met them. We loved the team, but it was a difficult business model. Now I think it could potentially be a $10bn company.

EILEEN BURBIDGE

Eileen Burbidge is a partner at Passion Capital, an early stage or "seed" fund of Β£37.5m (Β£25m of which is government money), whose investments include social micropayments site Flattr and GoCardless, an online payments service.

What do you do all day?

It's pretty much meeting people – my partners, the founders of the companies we've already invested in and getting a feel for entrepreneurs who are looking for investment from us.

What's good about the scene in London?

There's just a huge amount of energy and excitement, which comes from things like the impending Facbook IPO, the Zynga and LinkedIn IPOs from last year, acquisitions like Instagram's by Facebook. All this helps to churn up a lot of activity and attention and this sense from startups of: "We can do it as well anyone else."

What qualities are you looking for?

It all comes down to the founders. How much passion, enthusiasm and tenacity they have. And their ability to assess what's happening in the market and adapt to those conditions.

Which investment are you proudest of?

One we're very excited about is [academic research management system] Mendeley, which is disrupting a publishing market worth in excess of $25bn.

And the one that got away?

Smartphone market research tool Qriously is a great team and proposition, but credit to them – they were able to secure a valuation beyond what we target for our seed investments.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:03 GMT)

Facebook staff celebrate multi-million dollar windfall outside the limelight

As the social network floated on the stock market, its employees marked the occasion with discretion … and onion rings

The guests wore jeans and T-shirts. The venue was a sports bar. The menu was buffalo wings, mini-burgers, pizza and beer. The entertainment was a mechanical bull, which bucked in a corner, and screens showing basketball and football. Welcome to a hundred-billion dollar party, Facebook-style.

It looked like college kids out for a typical Friday night, but the scene in the Old Pro, an unremarkable bar tucked off a sidestreet in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, was the celebration of a cultural and financial milestone which mesmerised the world.

"Yeah, it's been a big day," grinned a lanky software engineer. "So we're here chugging a few." He checked his watch. "Still happy hour."

He and his colleagues clinked beers, manifestly happy. Facebook had just completed its first day as a public company after one of history's most frenzied share sales valued it at $104bn. The trading took place in New York but the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stayed with 2,000 employees at their colony in Palo Alto, the capital of social media.

As the largest shareholder Zuckerberg, 28, ratcheted up a paper fortune of $20.4bn. An estimated 88 employees saw the value of their individual holdings exceed $30m. The extraordinary sums, the website's mercurial rise and its role in connecting more than 900 million people made the initial public offering (IPO) an event watched far beyond Wall Street.

Had they received this windfall, Russian oligarchs might have celebrated by buying Manchester United. Investment bankers might have bought bigger yachts and jets. The lords of tech munched onion rings. "The taste that can't be beat," according to the bar's website.

"This town, it's a very unusual place," said David Batista, manager of the Palo Alto Creamery, a cafe where Zuckerberg used to map strategy over milkshakes. "You could be sitting beside a billionaire and not know it. A day like today and where do they go? A sports bar. It's all very low key."

Internet revolution, Hollywood movie, global impact on human interaction, byword for self-promotion – few outsiders consider Facebook to be discreet. But employees are exactly that.

"You might think as soon as they make a million they buy a house in Palo Alto, but a lot of these guys live in apartments, don't have girlfriends and bicycle to work. And they work all the time," said Alan Dunckel, an estate agent. Those who did buy houses – $1,000 per square foot – did not flaunt wealth, he said. "They wear T-shirts and hoodies." Many sellers, said Dunckel, had withheld properties in hopes of a boom. "Expectations are huge." Facebook has promised $1.1m to Menlo Park's cash-starved authorities to fund capital projects, prompting hopes more will follow.

The employees' celebration at the Old Pro, however, was muted. Whereas non-Facebook groups booked tables with their names on them, Zuckerberg's troops clustered in anonymous little knots. They had been drilled by headquarters not to speak to the media. Ostensibly it was to avoid spooking the markets at a delicate time but it followed a company tradition of reticence – opacity, critics say – ironic given concern over Facebook users' privacy guarantees.

"Sorry, buddy. Normally I'm really interesting to talk to but I just can't right now," one employee, drinking an ale, smiled sheepishly. Others recoiled as if questions were radioactive. One confirmed a rumour that Zuckerberg was hosting a party for some staff that night at his home – a relatively modest $7m house – several blocks away.

Blink on the highway and you could miss the company's Menlo Park headquarters, a nondescript complex of two and three-storey buildings which employees of the previous occupier, Sun Microsystems, nicknamed San Quentin, after the jail. An entrance billboard with the familiar thumbs-up icon is Facebook's only concession to marketing.

Instead of trumpeting its historic day the company rebuffed interview requests and corralled television crews in a car park across the street. While the Observer interviewed an employee's mother inside the grounds – "a historic day for the way the world is going", she was saying, beaming – security guards swooped, complaining about trespass, and threatened to summon police.

Friday's bounty was preceded by austerity. On Thursday night employees made a round-the-clock "hackathon" of writing code. They wore newly printed T-shirts which said: "Stay focused & keep hacking."

Some emerged early Friday for a ceremony at the centre of the complex known as Hack Square, where Zuckerberg rang the opening bell to start the Nasdaq stock market's trading. Then they returned to their computers.

Canteens with free gourmet food and outstanding coffee keep staff inside the complex, disappointing nearby restaurants and cafes. Hairdressers like Nina Phana, however, who runs a salon two blocks down, say the techies emerge for the occasional trim and blowdry. "They tip good."

A hundred billion dollars is a gargantuan sum for a company started eight years ago in a college dorm, and the fact that Friday's frenzied trading ended with shares at $38.23, just a fraction over the opening price, stoked claims the company was overvalued.

Ali Ghotbi, an executive at Box, a cloud computing developer, shrugged off concerns of another dotcom bubble. "Back in the 90s it was, oh, you have a website, here's a million dollars. Now it's more controlled, more selective."

A colleague, Tom Cochran, predicted Box would be Silicon Valley's next big thing. "Our chief executive, Aaron Levie, is a genius like Mark Zuckerberg. But with charisma."

The rate of startups in this corner of San Francisco bay – renovated premises filled with newly arrived geeks with Harvard and MIT baseball caps – suggests widespread confidence. Or hubris.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 17:21:59 GMT)

Should you do business in a hoodie?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can afford to dress down, even when he's courting Wall Street suits. But what are the rules for the rest of us?

Tom Lamont Let's break this in two. Should Mark Zuckerberg (who earlier this month upset potential Facebook investors by attending a meeting in casual clothing) do business in a hoodie? Absolutely. The founder of a society-altering business, the de facto president of an online nation-state with a population exceeding Europe's, should do business in any clothes he wants. In his underpants, if the fancy strikes. In yours.

But should I, or you, or anyone else below Zuckerberg's level of important-enough-to-act-with-impunity do business in a hoodie? Well, sure. Within reason there ought to be the freedom, in all forms of professional life, to dress in which ever way you feel you'll work best. This is at the root of Zuckerberg's admirable commitment to gymwear, surely. He did the early graft on the $100bn-valued Facebook while snug in a $30 hoodie from Gap, and at no point, as he watched his business grow, did it seem sensible to change out of comfortable clothes.

I work better in a jumper than a jacket, too. A suit isn't comfortable to me, it doesn't make me feel confident or capable, and just as importantly I don't feel I've got the time or the spare loot to buy and then maintain a formal wardrobe. I don't see why fusty tradition, principally upheld by the FTSE-Ferrari crowd, should insist on it as the professional norm.

Alex Preston I hate Mark Zuckerberg. I also hate the late Steve Jobs (hated? No, the hate's still there). I don't hate them specifically for their wardrobe choices: the casual grey hoodie, the Spirit of '68 black polo neck. But their attire says a great deal about them. They are both what Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek would call "Liberal communists": counter-culture geeks who take over big corporations. By dressing as they would in their free time, they seek to destroy the traditional boundaries between work and leisure. Zuckerberg's hoodie marks him out as a denizen of the 24-hour mobile office, a globalised work-machine interfacing via his BlackBerry and iPhone with the world's markets. He doesn't wear a suit because suits can be taken off. Zuckerberg is still a CEO in his pyjamas, still CEO at 3am on a Sunday morning, still a CEO when drinking with Justin Timberlake at a disco (I may have mangled fact and fiction there…)

I have no wish to dictate what you wear to the office, Tom. And one can imagine the donnybrook that would ensue were the Observer to insist on suits and ties. But not all are lucky enough to work within the light-filled halls of a thriving media empire. Uniforms can be a carapace, a way of getting through the day. For most of the world, work is a five-day slog bookended by brief bright weekends with loved ones. Being able to pull on a uniform – whether that's a suit, overalls or a white coat – helps people distinguish between who they are at work and at home or with friends. This is important, and I know I appreciated it when I had a job I loathed.

And one more thing: the hoodie Zuckerberg was wearing wasn't from Gap. Embossed upon it in oh-so-subtle slightly darker grey was an advert for Facebook. Even in his dressing down he is ever the corporate man.

TL The noisiest complaints about Zuckerberg's hoodie came from Wall Street figures who felt his outfit showed "immaturity" and (crucially) not enough respect for the wealthy businessmen who attended his meeting. Bit off, I think, for you to bring smocks and overalls into the equation, as if corporate suits were only another type of necessary professional uniform. Formal tailoring is one of those petty elitist ways that those in big-money jobs tell us and each other how well they're doing. In Dickens's day businessmen ate themselves fat to flaunt success. For a while, though, it's been a case of getting down to Zegna to buy whatever virgin-wool pinstripe is on the inside cover of How to Spend It.

I loved that Jobs never wore a suit, and it gives me great pleasure now to think of the bafflement of the "dress for success" types when they consider Apple and Facebook, soaring despite being bossed by men who couldn't give a shit how many ticket pockets you've got in your two-piece.

The Observer is brilliantly, admirably non-restrictive about employee attire, and I'm lucky to be relatively free to dress myself of a morning. I'm tall and skinny, and on the rare occasions I have to wear formal clothes I'm never quite at ease (like a footballer inspecting the pitch on FA cup final day). It's a privilege to be able to choose, and it could only be a good thing – not the flummoxing burden you suggest – if such a relaxed attitude extended into other areas of work and business.

AP I felt justified calling on those other professions, Tom, because the heft of your argument seems to rest on what you wear to your job at the Observer – hardly a hotbed of corporatism (or is it?). We all know that journalists are a slovenly bunch, and I'm sure no eyebrows would be raised were you to turn up at your desk in egg-stained Y-fronts and a fuchsia foulard. But I'd hazard a guess that if you had a meeting with your editor to "map out your career trajectory", or if you were called on to interview an MP at the House of Commons, or the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, you might pause before the wardrobe in the morning. And this is because what we choose to wear sends a clear message to the person we are meeting with.

Zuckerberg's hipster attire is an eloquent statement of his disregard for those on whom his business's continued expansion relies. On this, a red-letter day for his blue-logoed company, when he was turning up cap in hand and asking a group of professional investors to trust him that Facebook was worth its (ludicrous) $104bn valuation, his choice of dress was a sign of arrogance, a condescending reminder to the money-men that he isn't one of them (except, of course, we all know he is). I'm leaning on rather old-fashioned concepts of respect and good manners here, and the fact that his investors are, as you point out, Wall Street monsters who eat boiled babies for breakfast should win the day for your pro-scruffy stance. But if I'm giving a lecture or a reading I'll wear a jacket. I might even wear a tie. I'll choose to dress in a way that conveys to the audience my regard for them, my thanks that, of all the things they might have been doing that day, they chose to come and listen to me.

Clothes are a highly complex system of signs and symbols, our most sophisticated means of sending messages about ourselves to the world around us. You may think it strange that anyone still cares about what we wear, but people do. By choosing to address a formal audience in informal dress, we not only risk making them feel foolish; we say to them that we don't care about their values, about the conventions of the world they inhabit. It feels contemptuous and presumptuous and unpleasant. I'm not saying everyone should wear a suit to work every day of the week – I'm merely suggesting that we should think carefully about what our choice of clothing says about us and our regard for others.

(Sat, 19 May 2012 17:00:01 GMT)