App-makers fully geared up for Boris's cycle scheme

As London's Barclays Cycle Hire scheme launches, there's already a third-party Android app to go with it

As sure as night follows day, mobile applications follow location-based public pronouncements.

It should come as no surprise then that canny Android developers Little Fluffy Toys have knocked up a widget to follow on the heels of London mayor Boris Johnson's launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Cycle Hire Widget, a free application, uses a mixture of live Transport for London data and crowdsourcing to display the availability of bicycles at the nearest docking stations. Because TfL doesn't currently share details about the availability of bikes at specific locations, the application screen scrapes TfL's data and repurposes it for the app.

(From my chair at Kings Place, you're probably not interested to know, the nearest docking station is 506m south west, with apparently only two bikes taken from nine slots.)

We spoke to Kenton Price, director of Little Fluffy Toys, to find out more about what's behind the app:

"Many of the cycle apps that existed for other cities already, and to be honest a bunch of the new London ones, are really not much more than a Google Maps mashup of a bunch of locations superimposed on a map.
"We also chose the tiniest widget you can choose – a 1x1 that takes 1/16th of one of your home screen. Into that we've packed information about the nearest three locations, including the direction and distance, and the colour-coded known status of that location: Green for all OK, red for closed, orange for not enough bikes, yellow for not enough slots.
"But we expect most users will then click it again to open it up. And inside there we show more info about each location, including the best info we have about the status of the location. If we have recent live info from TfL, we will show the number of bikes and the number of slots, and the time at which we retrieved it.
"If we don't have info from TfL then we can use crowdsourced info. If a user is within 50 metres of a hire location that doesn't have recent TfL data, s/he will be prompted to report back on its status. That info is then shared with other users. You can select a location for walking directions to it. If for some reason you don't want to show a location, perhaps because you know it's closed whatever the buggy TfL feed tells us, long-press to exclude it from the widget."

TfL relaxed its terms and conditions (find them here) in preparation for the cycle scheme launch, with the aim of encouraging third-party developers to create "innovative" apps based on "reliable and accurate information". But Price claims his attempts to access TfL's live data have been met with a wall of silence – TfL, on the other hand, said they have been in conversation with third-party developers from early on.

Price says: "We wrote to them the day they announced the locations were free-for-all, asking for free/busy status. They replied saying [there were] no plans. And that's the last we heard from them. This £100m+ scheme that said it was reaching out to developers – and we haven't had any replies at all to our emails since. We've done the best we can – the BarclaysCycle Twitter tag appears to be publish-only, no one gets responses from them.

"It's very disappointing that we've basically filled in the blatant holes in their massively expensive scheme and we've had no thanks or even acknowledgement that we exist – although Boris started following us on Twitter the other day."

A TfL spokesperson refused to comment on particular developers, but told the Guardian third-party developers will have access to more data in time. For the time being, TfL said, the "fundamental information [being used by developers] has to be right."

"The up-to-date information listing all docking stations that are live in London is available on the developers' area and must be used," the spokesperson said. "The first thing is to get that information correct and have up-to-date information about where the docking stations are. It might sound slightly dull but the first port of call is that we know where they are and that the information is correct."

There is no timeframe for the next bout of data rollouts, TfL said, but they are "forthcoming".

For now, Price is happy. As he concludes: "It's been a riot, I've loved it. My favourite moment so far was when CNet said we had all that geeky goodness with our crowdsourcing stuff – I practically burst with pride."

iPad or 'me me me' Pad? | Media Monkey

Random pointless survey of the week time. The Daily Mail reports that a poll of 20,000 consumers decided that iPad owners come from a 'selfish elite' and likely to be, er, unkind. According to the survey, iPad owners are six times more likely to be 'wealthy, well-educated, power hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30- to 50-year-olds'. That's a mouthful. Monkey is off to dust down his trusty Commodore 64.

Guardian Viral Video Chart: a fishy football celebration scores top spot

It might take a while for our Viral Video Chart to live up to the spectacular heights of last week's Newport ditty. But we'll try.

It's not quite the Welsh wonder we were treated to last week, but Scotland has given us Glasgow State of Mind. Next week: one of England's fair cities? Elsewhere this week we have "heaps" of hipsters in one car, a 30-minute YouTube inteview with Katy Perry, and the Twittersphere's favourite young gun getting mobbed by screaming girls.

Scoring the top spot this week is a 15-second goal celebration now viewed more than 4.5m times. A million views for each minute it took to put together?

Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and edited by Josh

1 Best celebration ever in football
Nearly 4.5m views on this now, how long to practise?

2 Glasgow State of Mind
A controversial second place, I know. Glasgow, it's not quite Newport, is it?

3 Aeroplane/helicopter in moment of terror
Staged? Maybe, but still – the fear in his voice is pretty convincing.

4 How much hipster can you pack in a Jazz?
"Heaps", apparently...

5 iPhone 2G/3G/3GS/4 speed comparison
I know, I know; you're meant to leave the techie stuff at the door.

6 The YouTube interview with Katy Perry
If you've got a spare half hour, check out Ms Perry answering YouTubers' questions.

7 Old Spice commercial starring Bruce Campbell
Bruce who?

8 Justin Bieber almost gets trampled
Just take a second to imagine a day in the life of Mr Bieber. And then move on.

9 Guy walks across America
Bloody love America. Good jeans, too.

10 Hands commercial
OK, it's not that good.

Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 14:30 on 29 July 2010. The weekly Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs.

PeerIndex: Ranking your online influence?

I've been playing with PeerIndex, a new Twitter authority ranking tool that's the latest project of former Reuters innovation boss Azeem Azhar. As Robert wrote on paidContent:UK yesterday, PeerIndex seems the latest in a series of ideas concerned with ranking and contextualising comment in the social media space.

In a freemium style, Azeem will hope that it will be widely used by the masses and paid-for, through a more detailed version, by brands and agencies looking to identify and target real 'influencers'. Plenty of work to be done though, not least filtering out the fakers; Sergey Brinn [sic] is ranked at 11/100, 'Steve Ballmer' ranks at 43 but Steve Jobs isn't listed at all. Apparently you're no-one without an active Twitter profile.

These 'analytical' tools appeal to our egos and our professional competitiveness, but properly assessing someone's influence requires more than an algorithm. It's an area Azhar has been preoccupied with for a while and is not an easy nut to crack. But it does show that there is a role for human editors, after all.

Mapping Google's legal issues

New map pinpoints where web giant faces lawsuits

Ever wondered what it's like to be an internet company operating multiple products built on the philosophy of openness and sharing?

This map of lawsuits faced by Google shows just what comes with video-sharing sites, street mapping services and internet search.

Competitive analysis firm Aqute Intelligence are behind the map, referencing each litigation placemark to a news article.

The Aqute research director, James Macaonghus, explains the motives behind the map: "We created this map a couple of weeks ago. There's a few countries where the services have been blocked so they're blank.

"The point we're trying to make is that as Google gets more powerful it's coming up against more legislature and they've got a lot of balls to juggle at the same time. We'll update on a regular basis and keep up as long as the issues keep arising."

Of course, the map does not take into account investigations by information officers in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Canada, the Czech Republic and Italy. And it should be remembered that legal action is par for the course for most multinational technology giants.

Can Amazon turn ebooks mainstream?

Anyone unlucky enough to commute will know that dead tree media still rule the roost, as least on the nation's public transport. But ebook readers, including the odd iPad, are starting to creep in, along with mobiles, games consoles and even DVD players on long journeys.

There's a deep-seated resistance to digital versions of a centuries old traditional of printed books, which have rightly enchanted, educated and enlightened readers since movable type. So what will it take for ebooks to become mainstream?


Photo by cloudsoup on Flickr. Some rights reserved

There are dozens of ebook readers on the market, all largely comparable in size and offering from the lesser know Astak, Kobo and Alex readers to the Kindle, Nook and Apple iPad. Amazon's launch today of a smaller, cheaper Kindle is significant for two reasons: firstly, it pushes arguably the most popular ebook reader towards a more mainstream audience by making it more affordable.

Secondly, it's a sign of Amazon's increasingly aggressive strategy in competing with the iPad, which has stolen much of the spotlight in the ebooks debate (even though books are just one function of the iPad) because of its colour touchscreen. The iPad remains a more exclusive product for a wealthier section of the market, with ebook prices to match – but it is also a notebook, and so has an LCD screen that is much harder on the eyes than sympathetic electronic ink.

For once, Apple is swimming uphill in the ebooks space with a publishing industry largely cautious of the format; it has seen the impact of Apple's iPod on the music space, and other limbs of the industry are concerned the ambitions of Google's ongoing books project.

Amazon, meanwhile, is keen to push Kindle as the mass-market alternative with 400,000 ebooks on sale at what it claims are the lowest prices. Digital books are a natural extension for Amazon, which can more easily 'escalate' its web-familiar customers to digital versions of books.

This all explains Amazon's slightly dubious claim to have sold more ebooks than physical books, with little evidence offered – perhaps designed as a prelude to the new Kindle announcement.

eBook manufacturers, noted Gartner analyst Allen Weiner last month, are increasingly adopting the strategy of having their device, brand and books on as many platforms as possible – a strategy Amazon has taken with Kindle apps for competing devices. And this could be the key to making the device more mainstream.

"The strategy of having your reading platform's interface/app on as many devices as possible as well as some in OEM [original equipment manufacturer] deals (such as Barnes & Noble on the Pandigital Novel) seems to be picking up steam. Making money from sales of your own device, books sold on your own device, and books sold on other devices may define not only the ebook retailing space but also begin to reveal who is in the hardware space for the long haul and who is just looking for a means to showcase their platform."

So mainstream? Not yet. But Amazon's move to offer a cheaper Kindle does make ebooks just slightly more accessible to slightly more people. For students with dull, bulky textbooks, ebooks are very practical. But for the public at large, ebook readers remain a novelty.

June ABCes: World Cup gains modest for newspaper sites

Telegraph.co.uk posts biggest month-on-month gain as sites follow strong showing in election month

The World Cup generated a modest traffic boost for all the UK's newspaper websites during June, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.

Telegraph.co.uk managed to generate the biggest increase in percentage terms from the previous month, with average daily browsers up 6.72% to 1,775,764, an increase of 23.1% from June 2009.

Mail Online increased its daily browsers by 3.99% from May to 2,485,431, up 44.15% year on year.

Guardian.co.uk saw daily browsers rise to 2,036,449, an increase of 1.3% from May and 24.45% year on year.

Mirror Group Digital's sites increased by 5.01% from May to 527,564, an increase of 12.21% year on year, while the Independent's daily browsers rose 2.16% month on month to 492,375, up 11.54% from June last year.

In terms of UK users, the most valuable demographic for advertisers, Mail Online now has the largest audience with 15,464,724 unique monthly UK users or 36% of its overall audience.

Guardian.co.uk has 14,076,692 UK users monthly, or 40% of its users, while Telegraph.co.uk has 11,548,812 – equivalent to 34%.

Just over 42% of Independent.co.uk's unique users are UK-based, or 4,452,570, and Mirror Group Digital has 5,893,197 or 53%.

The Times and the Sun no longer publish online traffic figures after deciding to implement a commercial paywall strategy. In January, publishers agreed that ABCe would adopt average daily browsers as its core metric for web traffic, replacing unique users per month.

Mail Online

Daily average browsers: 2,485,431

Month-on-month change: 3.99%

Year-on-year change: 44.15%

Monthly browsers: 43,119,182

Monthly change: 1.77%

Guardian.co.uk

Daily average browsers: 2,036,449

Month-on-month change: 1.3%

Year-on-year change: 24.45%

Monthly browsers: 35,259,914

Monthly change: -1.21%

Telegraph.co.uk

Daily average browsers: 1,775,764

Month-on-month change: 6.72%

Year-on-year change: 23.10%

Monthly browsers: 33,634,623

Monthly change: 3.49%

Mirror Group Digital

Daily average browsers: 527,564

Month-on-month change: 5.01%

Year-on-year change: 12.21%

Monthly browsers: 11,182,776

Monthly change: 4.28%

Independent.co.uk

Daily average browsers: 492375

Month-on-month change: 2.16%

Year-on-year change: 11.54%

Monthly browsers: 10,592,144

Monthly change: 0.06%

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

ITV names Paul Dale as chief technology officer

Newly created role for former BSkyB and BBC senior executive to address technology 'lag' at broadcaster

ITV has appointed Paul Dale, a former BSkyB and BBC senior executive, to a newly created role to address the technology "lag" that has dogged the broadcaster in recent years compared with advances made by rivals.

Dale, who is currently the chief technology officer at Asian pay-TV operator Astro, joins ITV in the same position.

ITV's chief executive Adam Crozier said that hiring Dale represented a "commitment to completely reshape our digital future".

"ITV has lagged behind its competitors for too long in terms of technology," said Crozier. "Paul's arrival signals a commitment to completely reshape our digital future. At Astro he led the transformation of the company into an innovative 2010 platform. His experience and expertise will be vital as we continue with our plan to transform ITV."

Dale, who has previously held the role of future media and technology controller for BBC Vision and prior to that technology director at Sky Media, will join ITV's management board.

Crozier said the role was the latest move in forming a new management team designed to deliver on a three to five year strategic plan for ITV.

Dale will lead the newly formed technology and platforms directorate and will be responsible for transmission, broadcast services and push ITV content on to all manner of devices.

"This is the first time ITV has had a CTO on its management board," said Dale. "[It is] a major shift for the company, which acknowledges that great content and technology go hand in hand to create a sustainable business that will take ITV into the future".

The new role is not expected to clash with the responsibilities of Carolyn Fairbairn, ITV's director of corporate development and strategy. Fairbairn's brief includes multiplatform distribution deals and the Freeview video-on-demand platform Project Canvas.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Google Wi-Fi data capture cleared by Information Commissioner

Ruling that gathering of personal data by StreetView mapping cars did no harm described as 'farcical' by privacy campaigners

The Information Commissioner has ruled that Google is unlikely to have collected "significant amounts of personal data" with its StreetView mapping cars.

The decision was described by privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch as "farcical".

The independent information watchdog has been looking at the data collected by Google to see whether it infringes personal privacy, and has now judged that there is "no evidence as yet that the data captured by Google has caused or could cause any individual detriment".

In a statement to the press, the Information Commissioner's Office said: "While Google considered it unlikely that it had collected anything other than fragments of content, we wanted to make our own judgment as to the likelihood that significant personal data had been retained and, if so, the extent of any intrusion.

"The information we saw does not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person. As we have only seen samples of the records collected in the UK we recognise that other data protection authorities conducting a detailed analysis of all the payload data collected in their jurisdictions may nevertheless find samples of information which can be linked to identifiable individuals.

"However, on the basis of the samples we saw we are satisfied so far that it is unlikely that Google will have captured significant amounts of personal data.

"There is also no evidence as yet that the data captured by Google has caused or could cause any individual detriment. Nevertheless it was wrong to collect the information. We will be alerting Privacy International and others who have complained to us of our position. The Information Commissioner is taking a responsible and proportionate approach to this case. However, we remain vigilant and will be reviewing any relevant findings and evidence from our international counterparts' investigations."

Google is facing investigations around the world – including in the UK – for its interception of personal data about home wireless networks, taken from the company's StreetView mapping cars. The search giant admitted to inadvertently intercepting extracts of personal data in May.

The Big Brother Watch director, Alex Deane, described the findings as a "whitewash". Speaking to the Guardian, he said: "This decision is little short of farcical. Information commissioners all around the world are investigating Google's Wi-Fi intrusion. In Britain alone, our commissioner has whitewashed the company's wrongdoing.

"The Metropolitan police are currently investigating Google over this very issue. If the allegations against Google merit an investigation by the police, who have to consider the criminal standard of fault, how can those allegations not be said to merit an investigation by the ICO?

"The ICO has really let British people down. We deserve better from those who are given the responsibility of protecting our privacy."

The ICO came in for criticism earlier this month from the pressure group Privacy International, which requested an investigation into Google's actions by the Metropolitan police. Speaking at a public debate on Google and privacy, the Privacy International director, Simon Davies, accused the office of being "both spineless and gutless" in its approach to the issue.

Google was unavailable for comment when contacted.

How 100 million Facebook users ended up in a list on BitTorrent

News that details of 100 million Facebook users was understandably met with some panic - particularly because the data was then dumped on file-sharing service BitTorrent alongside pirated music, bulk credit card details and the odd bit of legal content.

The real story was a little more curious. It was Canadian security researcher Ron Bowes who downloaded the data - 2.8Gb of it - by creating a crawler script to pluck information from Facebook's open access directory.


Photo by aralbalkan on Flickr. Some rights reserved

But all of this data was publicly available, because this data is open to search engines and includes any Facebook user who has not chosen to hide their profile from search results.

The data Bowes pulled included account names, profile URL and contact details - and also the names of those users' friends, even if they have chosen not to be listed in search engine results.

While alarming that Facebook's information should be harvested in this way, it is not illegal. Rather, it is a useful exercise in reminding people what 'public' really means, and that once your information is out there, you don't have any say over what happens to it.

It also opens the debate on openess, because until the majority understands the implications of being 'open', it may be wise to adopt 'opt-in openness'. That won't be popular with sites, who get faster take-up if friends can find each other more easily. But there is a price to pay for that.

So why did Bowes do it, and how?

He wanted to contribute to the open source Ncrack project, which is testing 'brute-force' login attacks. The data he'd collected from Facebook might be useful for other researchers, he thought, so he put it on BitTorrent. It has subsequently been downloaded several hundred times, and is also on Pirate Bay.

Bowes original interest was in spidering the site for data on the most popular names, Ars Technica explains. While that doesn't pose any risk to Facebook users, it could become the basis for automated cracking software that would target common usernames. Because Facebook is global, that makes it a more efficient target than a country-specific census, for example. Bowes found the top three usernames were jsmith with 129,369, ssmith with 79,365 and skhan with 77,713.

"As I thought more about it, and talked to other people, I realised that this is a scary privacy issue," said Bowes in a (cached) blog post. "I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook. Facebook helpfully informs you that "[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings" - but that doesn't help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!"

Facebook has insisted that no private data was compromised. "People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want," it said in a rather defensive-sounding statement. "In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. Similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook."

Bowes has said that he wanted to raise awareness of the "scary privacy issue" of public data being used in this way, but even he must be surprised by the response. And how many times has this happened before, on any profile-hosting sites, without any of us hearing about it?

Don't think for a minute, by the way, that the cute kitten name that's your top secret password is anything like secure. Just a glance at the software on offer on a site like brothersoft.com will give you a minute window into the vast and subterranean hacking industry is. But remember, don't have nightmares...

Don't abandon Birmingham, Gisela Stuart tells BBC

Birmingham MP Gisela Stuart is to confront the BBC over its presence in the region amid fears the West Midlands is being eclipsed by the North-west as a media production centre.

TV show Hustle to return to the West Midlands

BBC One TV drama Hustle will return to the West Midlands this summer thanks to behind-the-scenes public sector funding.

Newsline PR to promote Stratford BID

Stratforward, the business development project to promote Stratford town centre, has appointed Warwickshire agency Newsline PR to handle media publicity.

Roger Shannon: Vital regional support for film must continue

Film director Roger Shannon, a recipient of UK Film Council funding, laments the planned scrapping of the organisation and its looks at its implications for regional film support.

Rice Media builds EH Smith e-commerce site

Birmingham web firm Rice Media has helped builders merchants EH Smith launch a new e-commerce website.