Posted by
Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs)
Aug
18
Shocking news for the British video games industry this week - one of its most innovative firms, created by an industry legend, is in deep trouble.
Realtime Worlds has called in the administrators and the jobs of 200 staff at its Dundee headquarters are under threat. The firm, which was founded by Dave Jones, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, can only survive if the administrators find a buyer pretty quickly.
The news confounds the expectations of analysts and journalists that this could be a world-beating games firm. Just last October Realtime Worlds was named "hottest prospect" by the accountancy firm PWC at a ...
Posted by
Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs)
Aug
16
Has BT just blown a hole in the concept of net neutrality - in summary, equal rights for all forms of internet traffic? And if the telecoms giant has done that, is this an issue of any concern at all to British web users?
It was a line in an interview conducted by my colleagues at BBC Click which provoked those questions. Jon Hurry, the commercial director at BT Retail told the programme:
"[A]t the moment with our TV service, BT Vision, we deliver entertainment content, video, at peak time to consumers via our network and we prioritise the traffic in order to be ...
Posted by
Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs)
Aug
13
How on earth can you make money out of social networking - and in particular from Twitter? A question I've wrestled with but suddenly I'm a little clearer.
The answer is in mining the vast flood of data now produced by hundreds of millions of people sharing information over theses networks and it is the reason, some say, that Google is now getting very nervous about the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
At least that was my conclusion after a chat with Nick Halstead, founder of Tweetmeme, one of the few British web businesses to be making waves in Silicon Valley.
Tweetmeme is one of ...
Posted by
Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs)
Jul
29
Remember the Kindle, the device that was going to cause an earthquake in the publishing industry, while saving the travelling bibliophile from backache and excess baggage charges? Well, according to some technophiles, Amazon's e-reader is already sooooo last year, made redundant by the arrival of a shinier, smarter tablet device from a rival technology firm.
Not so fast. Today Amazon is unveiling a new version of the Kindle, and making clear the scale of its ambitions in the UK. For the first time UK users will be able to order the e-reader from its UK store rather than have it shipped across the Atlantic, and then ...
Posted by
Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs)
Jul
27
Here are some headlines from Ofcom's broadband briefing:
• the advertising of broadband speeds in Britain is scandalously misleading
• BT's copper is incapable of delivering decent speeds
• Virgin Media is showing that fibre is the future
• the digital divide between town and country is bound to get wider
Ofcom's boss Ed Richards did not put it in those terms in fact he resisted pressure from journalists to be a little more black and white, but that was certainly the regulator's message as he took us through the latest study of the broadband speeds consumers are actually getting.
...