Details are slipping out about Verizon’s Android smartphone.

Harry McCracken, Technologizer

Verizon Wireless, which recently announced it was hopping on the Android smartphone OS bandwagon big time, has started whetting our appetite for It’s launched a TV ad for the phone, the Droid, and a teaser site. And so far, it’s mostly promoting the phone by bashing the iPhone, with pseudo-Apple text pointing out that “iDont” have a physical keyboard, (third-party) multitasking, a five-megapixel camera, much in the way of customization options, widgets, “open development,” the ability to take photos in the dark, or a removable battery. The Droid (whose name is licensed from Mr. Lucas) presumably has all of the above.

It’s an entertainingly combative ad, and a pretty effective one given that it doesn’t even show the phone (which apparently looks like this). Of course, the fact that the Droid beats the iPhone on a number of spec- and feature-related fronts doesn’t make it a breakthrough. It’s quite common for smartphones to theoretically trump the iPhone in multiple ways, but the iPhone’s level of hardware/software/service integration and the vast quantity of available apps remain unique. No other phone is going to catch up with the iPhone’s software catalog anytime soon, so if I were an Apple competitor, I’d concentrate on trying to vaunt into the same league in ter ms of integration. Not that that’ll be easy. The Droid arrives next month, so we won’t have to wait long to judge it.

The other interesting question about the Droid commercial is this: Does all its cheeky iPhone-bashing signal that Verizon has no plans to sell the iPhone anytime soon? It not only mocks the phone but mocks Apple in a way that suggests that it doesn’t plan to go into business with it, despite rumors. I took the implied message of the ad as being something like this: “Yes, we know that a lot of people want a Verizon iPhone, but hold on-we’re going to have a smartphone that’s better than an iPhone.”

(Then again, I’m fascinated by this Verizon ad that says a non-Verizon BlackBerry is a paperweight-it might be an effective ad, but it seems like an odd thing to do to BlackBerry maker and Verizon partner RIM.)

Anyhow, here’s the “iDon’t” ad:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/173865/verizons_droid_targets_iphone.html

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Big Brother is watching you shop

Increasingly facial recognition is picking out people in a crowd

A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.

Face recognition, behaviour analysing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.

Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.

“There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalised location advertising, whether it is on your cellphone or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores,” says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.

“This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable.”

Emotional reactions

Are adverts watching you?

New surveillance technology could even evaporate the advertiser’s favourite grouse that “half of advertising is wasted, but we don’t know which half”.

Advertisers are turning to “intelligent” digital billboards that use cameras to watch you watching the ads.

In Germany, developers have placed video cameras into street advertisements attempting to discern people’s emotional reactions to the ads, according to the Washington-based privacy advocate outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

It warns that this type of surveillance encroaches on civil liberties. Such face, voice and behaviour technology could be a means of tracking individuals on a mass level across their entire lives, it says.

Pushed by the demands of advertisers and security-minded governments, these technologies are becoming so increasingly smart and intrusive that they now resemble something out of science fiction, it warns.

Science fact

Some of the technology available now seems to have overtaken fiction.

When an interactive ad shouts out to Tom Cruise’s character in the 2002 film Minority Report: “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness!” It identified him as he walked through a mall by scanning the unique pattern of his iris.

This is now pretty standard. Face recognition technology is proving to be a handier, more sophisticated tool to pick us out on the street, a crowded room or at passport control.

Such systems are able to automatically detect and identify human faces using recognition algorithms.

The first step for a facial recognition system is to recognise a human face and extract it from the rest of the scene. Next, the system measures the distance between the features — a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery.

Matches can then be found in databases in under a second, although 100% accuracy is not yet guaranteed.

Currently the private sector is finding such systems useful for what it calls “targeted marketing,” or “dynamic advertising.”

Japan’s NEC, for instance, sells face-recognition technology to allow advertisers to tailor what ad is showing on a digitised screen depending on the viewer’s sex and age.

Tracking systems, such as these, can determine the viewer’s gender 85-90% of the time, approximate age and ethnicity, and change the ads accordingly.

NEC denies the system raises privacy concerns as it does not store any images, only the analysed results (age and sex) based on those images.

But as Schneier points out systems like these are likely liable to “function creep” where a technology is brought in for one purpose, to profile your sex while viewing an ad for example, and then begins to push the boundaries.

“Once the cameras are installed and operational, once they’re networked to central computers, then it’s a simple matter of upgrading the software,” he says.

“And if they can do more — if they can provide more “value” to the advertisers — then of course they will. To think otherwise is simply naive.”

And when advertisers start to follow us, our privacy, our right to be left alone will be severely compromised, he thinks.

More control

EU commissioner Viviane Reding wants to see tighter controls

Democratic governments, charged with protecting us from such violations, are beginning to wake up to these practices.

The US is about to propose a bill to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them. The EU promises to rigorously police what it claims are already stringent controls on our personal data.

“Europeans must have the right to control how their personal information is used,” Viviane Reding, the EU’s commissioner for information society and media told BBC news. “We cannot give up this basic principle, and have all our exchanges monitored, surveyed and stored, in exchange for a promise of ‘more relevant’ advertising.”

Despite such assurances, given the pervasiveness of such technologies firstly on the internet and now spreading to the physical world, what we do about them in the next few years will be crucial. It might control our privacy for generations to come say human rights advocates.

“Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us and once these practices are commonplace it will hard to reverse them,” says Marc Rotenberg director of EPIC. “Particularly as, ironically, we lose privacy these companies are gaining secrecy.”

It would seem sensible to debate now how far business and the state should be allowed to tag us while we still have a privacy to protect.

The player does not hold a controller, but uses their entire body to manipulate the game.

Flash moves on to smart phones

One of the most common technologies for watching video on a computer will soon be available for most smartphones.

Flash software is used to deliver around 75% of online video and is the key technology that underpins websites such as YouTube and Google Video.

Until now, many smartphones and netbooks have used a “light” version of the program, because of the limited processing power of the devices.

The new software is intended to work as well on a smartphone as a desktop PC.

Adobe, the maker of Flash, said it should be available on most higher-end handsets by 2010, although Apple’s iPhone would continue not to use the software.

“The sort of rich apps we now see being delivered on PCs will now be coming to the phone,” Ben Wood, director of mobile research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told BBC News.

“You’ll be able to access a lot of the cool stuff that web designers are coming up with.”

Web boom

Flash is one of the most common pieces of software installed on computers.

It is found on about 98% of PCs and almost 75% of all online video is delivered using the software, according to Adobe.

Apple’s iPhone does not yet support Flash software

It powers services such as the BBC iPlayer and around 70% of web-based video games.

However, until now, the full version of the software has not been available on smartphones.

Instead, users have had to use Flash Lite, a stripped down version of the media software that does not make the same demands of the device’s memory or processor.

Flash Lite is currently installed in around 40% of all new mobile phones and will continue to be offered on lower-end handsets, Adobe said.

Flash 10.1, as the new software is known, had been developed because the mobile web was “booming”, said Mr Wood.

In addition, he said, developers and users demanded a consistent web experience from desktop PC to smartphone.

“We’re addressing that need,” Anup Muraka of Adobe told BBC News.

“Years ago, browsing on smart phones was almost non-existent – nobody was worried about desktop experiences on phones,” he added.

“But a tremendous level of capability has been added to these devices in recent years and as a result that has changed.”

A recent report by CCS Insight predicted that by the end of 2009 44% of mobile users will access data via their handsets, whilst smart phones are expected to account for around 17% of the more than one billion handsets shipped during 2009, according to forecasts.

“[Mobile phones] have gone from being a voice device to a very visual device that you hold in front of you,” said Mr Wood.

Apple anomaly

The new software supports high-definition video and can also be used with touchscreen devices.

It is the first major product of an initiative known as the Open Screen Project, which aims to create a flexible media platform for films and games that can run on any device – from set top boxes to mobile phones.

The intention of the project is to develop flexible software that will mean developers will only have to write code once, rather than tweaking it for different platforms.

The software can also be used on other devices

The Open Screen Project is backed by nearly 50 companies including Google and Nokia.

The new software will be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year.

Trial software for Google Android and the popular Symbian operating systems are expected to be available in early 2010.

However, it will not be available for the Apple iPhone, according to Mr Muraka.

“We’re going to need Apple’s cooperation,” he told BBC News. “At the moment Safari (Apple’s web browser) doesn’t support any kind of plug-in [on the iPhone].”

“But we’d love to see it on there.”

Mr Wood said he thought that time would come soon.

“As momentum builds, I think Apple will have little choice but to embrace it [Flash],” he said. “Watch this space.”

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

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