This is probably going to be the first of many rants about the drive to make everything possible "mobile". Just because you can, doesn't mean you should... At CES a couple of years ago the industry buzz was around mobile video - ways to deliver it, devices for consuming it, stores to buy it etc etc.

Clearly I'm not "in the know". I don't have any access to sales figures or forecasts so I'll have to go on common sense: Does anybody spend money on downloading an episode of lost/desperate housewives/big brother/whatever to watch in jerk-o-vision on a crappy 320*240 screen, when they could just wait a couple of hours and watch it on the 40" telly at home? Really? Sure, I could see myself catching up on the news or watching a podcast if I've got an hour to kill but those services are essentially free. Plus I don't care about the quality too much. Actually spending money on a mobile download though? I just don't get it.

Prediction time: Mobile TV will not be the killer app that lights up the 3G airwaves and makes the world a better place! Just like WAP it won't go away, because its here now so why not keep it around, but I don't see it growing.

This assumes portable playback devices stay as limited as they are now. If somebody invents a 3 foot wide holographic screen, all bets are off but until then the mobile viewing experience will just remain painful. And yes, I know the N95 is pretty good but it's all relative - "pretty good" compared to other phones, but "woefully inadequate" compared to a decent TV.

This site has (as yet) no traffic as it's just getting started, but if one day you find this in google and happen to have spent money on a TV / video download to your phone - leave a comment and tell me why, OK?

(image courtesy of letsgomobile.org, reporting last year that the mobile video market was set to explode)

It may come as a surprise to know that the Segway personal transporter is illegal for use on public highways in the UK. That means roads, pavements and cycle paths are a no-no, although you can use it on private land. The quoted reason for the ban is safety concerns - although I'm cynical enough to think that it's got more to do with our elected leaders being unable to classify it which means tax and regulation can't follow. (seriously "safety concerns" - I've been run off the pavement by motorised shopping carts and bicycles before now so I can't see a Segway is any more dangerous)

Anyway I digress. Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik flouted the law yesterday by riding a Segway to work in an attempt to draw attention to the device and get it legalised. I'm behind the guy, Segways are very cool and could work wonders in an inner-city environment. Unfortunately they won't.

Why? Simple - they're damned expensive!  In the UK you'll pay between £4500 and £5500 for a new Segway. (roughly $9000 US if you're reading this over the pond).

I can buy a cheap, small car for £2000 that has better range and will shelter me from the rain, or I could buy a motorbike for similar money. If I want to stay green and avoid burning fossil fuels, I can compare the Segway to the new electric pushbikes where even the top end, long range model with all the toys is £1400 - still £3000 cheaper than a Segway.

Basically I think Segways are a fantastically cool way to travel short distances and I'd have one tomorrow if I could afford it, but the cost will keep them out of general circulation and no legislation will change that. They need to get the price down to under £1000 before it'll become a serious contender in the personal transport stakes.

 Tomorrow they (assorted boffins from around the world) turn on the Large Hadron Collider. I'm in awe of the engineering that this represents - it's the largest machine ever built on the planet as far as I know; it's a 27km underground circular tunnel with several massive support buildings above ground and it's initial purpose is to replicate the conditions present in the Big Bang. It does this by shooting really, really small particles down the tube really, really fast and watching what happens when they collide. 

(Where "really, really small" is "sub-atomic" and "really, really fast" is "as close to the speed of light as we can make it". Not the most accurate description you've ever seen I know, but it's all you're going to get from me; I'm not a particle physycist!)

There is also a "non-zero probability" that it will create an artifical black hole which will destory the planet and end human existance. Which technically brings it just within the remit of this site, since I can say "not likely". Mainly though I just wanted to put something down about it, because it's cool! 

Tomorrow we should know a little bit more about the world we live in. Actually it'll probably take them several years to analyse the data, but it all starts tomorrow. I'm all for that.

I said you'll see Chrome eat into firefox in 3 months. I my have been slightly pessamistic - according to StatCounter it took 1% of the global browser share in 1 day! Ouch - watch out Firefox, the Google steamroller is heading your way...

From Statcounter via TrustedReviews 

I did say I was going to seed site this with some of my earlier predictions, and the ones I could remember were wrong. Which is slightly embarassing but there you go, never let it be said I'm not honest!

In the "how wrong can you be" pile today we have Skype. When Skype first burst onto the scene VOIP was a pretty new concept - ICQ was the dominent (only?) IM client and transmitting voice on the net was a pretty hit and miss affair.

There were two competing technologies at the time, or at least I viewed them as competing. SIP was just getting started as an attempt to generate an open standard protocol for transmitting voice over IP. (actually for the pedants SIP is one of a numper of related protocols needed to make this work, but it'll do for my purpose here). Skype meanwhile was proprietory and closed.  To be fair Skype always had noticably better voice quality right from the start. I said at the time though that it's closed, proprietory nature would be it's downfall as people were starting to talk about about standards, interoperability etc.

So what happened? Well it turned out that SIP and it's associated standards were a nightmare to get working on a PC - the complicated nature of the protocol means you're into firewall hell (especially with NAT) and the voice quality of PC based SIP clients remains pretty poor even now (IMHO, obviously). Skype meanwhile has evolved to the point where it "just works" and is capable of better voice quality than my landline on a good day.

SIP didn't die - it's used in enterprise level VOIP applications, inside corporates and big telcos. There's probably a fair chance your international phone traffic is carried by VOIP using something like it. At that level interoperability is pretty important, so adhering to a standard becomes a real necessity and the networking / firewall problems can be resolved by people who know what they're doing and hardware designed to take it.

Meanwhile for the home user who just wanted to talk and didn't care about standards, skype offered an easy to use, good quality and free product which shows no sign of dying out.

Perhaps this is a lesson in "perspective". I was right about skype from a business perspective, in that I don't see corporates rushing to deploy skype across their desktops (I'm sure some do, but I reckon they're the exception rather than the rule). I wasn't thinking like a consumer though, so overall I got it wrong.

Google Chrome should need no introduction. In the past few days the buzz on the net has been about nothing else and I'm not going to repeat everything that's been said about it here. Put simply, Chrome is a brand new browser from Google, based on the open source and standards compliant Webkit engine. There are a bunch of other cool things going on under the hood that make it pretty compelling technically but that's not really what I want to look at here.

I'm trying it out and so far I like what I see. It's fast - really fast - seems stable and has some lovely UI touches. It does need some plugin support and I'm amazed they didn't integrate google bookmarks into it but for a version 1 product it's remarkably complete.

From the perspective of this site though the question is: Will Chrome overtake firefox / IE as the browser of choice?

Actually that's an almost impossible question to answer because generic browser stats are impossible to find so working out which one is more popular isn't easy. It depends on the site's target audience - sites concerned with web development will be 85% firefox but apple.com is probably 85% Safari! 

I think I can make a few assumptions though. To start with I think that firefox is used, by and large, by people who actually know it exists. By that I mean people who are interested in technology or the internet at large and are comfortable with experimenting on their PC. The archetypical "Power user" if you will.

There are an awful lot of other people out there who just use the browser that came with their PC - IE on a Windows box and Safari on the Mac. Those people will be harder to reach because by their nature they're not interested in changing something that already works for them.

Then there are corporates, who are a law unto themselves. Some won't touch firefox because it's not supported by MS. Some won't touch IE because of percieved security holes. Some don't care.

Chrome is really good, especially for a version 1 product and it can only get better with time. So here's my prediction: Chrome will eat significanty into the Firefox ("power user") market. If you own a website, give it 3 months and you'll see Chrome eating into firefox in your browser stats. I don't think it'll dent IE much, not because it's worse than IE but because google have some work to do in convincing IE users to switch.

And Safari? Google need to make a mac version first!