24/12/2011 Click

and kicked by troops. The biggest topics of 2011, the

hottest trends of 2011. Forget those, these are the best clicks of

2011. This week, we are looking back at

some of our favourite reports from the last 12 months. We will ask if

plans to bring the internet to some of the poorest and most isolated

areas on earth can succeed. We will also check out a brand new piece of

camera technology which should make everything clear, even after you

have taken the shot. If you are in no mood for a song and dance, we

will take you on a tour of some of the best places to get your music

online. There is an glimpse into the future, with a sneaky peek at

tomographic TV, and we will round up the very best apps of the year.

Welcome to the best of Click 2011. We start the year with a trip to

Africa, to find out what happens when the internet suddenly arrives

in one of the most remote parts of the world. Dance Simmons was in

Zambia, to discover have going online create a vibrant mix of new

technology and old traditions. This village is a long way from

anywhere, but it is home to a pioneering scheme to bring the

internet to do for out of five Zambians also a living outside the

cities. Zambians like Fred, who like his father, has lived and

worked on his family farm since he was four. -- since he was born.

When we met up, one of his cattle was built. The vet is hundreds of

miles away, but the village has had a mobile signal for some years. But

there is another way too. With Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,

I just contacted him, and he was able to respond within two minutes.

Skype Mac. We will get connected to scrap, and a veterinary officer can

talk to us. In the past year, Fred has also got the radio station back

up and running, giving locals something local to listen to. It is

a chance to preserve African culture. Local bans use the studios

to record songs, which I then uploaded to the web but to share.

Not your typical African village, then, so how did it become Zambia's

technology showcase? The satellite link came with the local malaria

research centre, but what has made a difference here is the way that

link has been shed, showing ordinary Zambians had the internet

can help them. -- shared. The water tower is the village's highest

point, and he's used to relate a signal across wife back hot spots

which have been connected to create a mesh network. There is now

wireless internet in the restaurant, across many homes, and at a

cybercafe where anyone can drop in. Teachers and now children from the

age of four are given weekly computer lessons starting from

scratch. It seems this entire village has gone PC crazy. There

are over 100 computers connected to the internet here. But there is

another lesson being taught as well, and that is that nothing in life is

free. When the generous foreign donors leave, this village wants to

be able to pay for itself. So, six months ago, a voucher system began.

Everybody needs a voucher, even the nursing college. But can this

unique experiment be used to connect other outlying villages.

Ones that did not get their head start that this one did? At this

village, there is no land line, no mobile signal, and no electricity.

Until six months ago there was no internet. Now, a British chatter a

-- charity, computer aid, has installed Zambia's first solar

internet hub. There is just one PC inside, hidden at the back. To save

power, the other 10 screens are virtual desktops running off it,

and sharing their 128 kilobit per second connection. It is hoped that

the blueprints which have already been rolled out to seven villagers

will Cup connect hundreds more. But whether this works for the rest of

the country will depend on whether ordinary Zambians think the web is

worth it. Since we first ed that report back

in January, computer aid have delivered another 500 computers,

and another solar-powered Internet cafe to the village.

Now, the internet is a great way to discover, listen to and by music.

In fact, it is now bent main way that people buy individual singles.

So if you have been thinking about getting into listening online, you

need to hear are essential diet that we aired earlier this year.

The internet is brimming with music, thanks to thousands of radio

stations sharing gas streams. Live, 365 .com and iTunes all have

extensive listening stations from various corners of the globe. But

do not forget traditional broadcasters like yours truly, ABC

and NPR. But here, it is the stations which picks the tunes.

They pandered to that audience and there is every chance you will get

fed up of their small player lists. When that happens, it is time to

ditch the DJ and head for the internet. The next generation of

radio stations offer personalised streams with played this you

control. Simply fire up your browser and pick a genre to get

started. It is all legal, but the music is interrupted every now and

then with an advertisement you cannot skip. It is also difficult

to choose the exact sites -- songs you want to hear, because some

sites limit the number of tracks that you can skip. Last dot FM is a

website that analyses the music you this and took to create a profile.

Then it acts like a social network, making it easy to spot trends and

plain you some of their favourites. It is supported by a lot of

handsets and music players, so you can add lots of information to your

profile even when you are listening to your collection. Groove that

Sharp offers similar features to other websites. -- Groove Shark.

Mix Cloud is focused on DJ sets, some of them an hour long. The

stuff of the highest quality should filter to the top. Not sure what

you fancy? You can pinpoint your state of mind and get a playlist

suited to your mood. To discover something new, try this 61. Here,

unsigned artists cannot sign up a track and listeners can vote with

their clicks. Pandora is a streaming service which uses humans

to categorise the genes of each track. Each artist and Sybil --

single is picked to match. It is free, but due to licensing it can

only be heard in the US. So, what about taking music to your mobile?

Last dot FM can come with you on your mobile, as can seven. Paying

for a premium subscription gives you access to the same library of

millions of songs on an iPhone or Android handset. It is possible to

listen for free, but a premium subscription removes the ads and

lets you transfer music to your mobile. So, plenty of options to

get tunes at your fingertips, but be warned. As most services stream

live, if you are without a solid connection, you may find the

buffering frustrating. At the start of the year, we were

all being told that 2011 a would-be MBA year of 3D television. -- would

be the year of 3D television. Still a while to go, but in the last 12

months we have come across a couple of other technologies which are

capable of capturing and presenting 3D images in a completely different

way to normal 3D television. First, from February, this.

3D displays make your eyes worked in an unnatural way. When you look

at objects in the real world, your eyes will focus on. All converge at

the same point. But when watching 3D images, although your eyes. At

objects that are supposedly in front of or behind the screen, they

remained focused on the screen itself. This is true of the greedy

that works with and without glasses. -- true of 3D. Critics are saying

that too much 3D content, or 3D Webber depth is too much, and the

viewer could get eyestrain and headaches. But some critics have

suggested an alternative to the current 3D technology which will

not cause eyestrain. They say that the only way to do three D properly

is with holograms. This is a holographic television. At the

moment, it is still an early, early prototype. The image is dim and

flickering, and that is just when you are running it in one colour.

Full colour is even worse. But it can cope with either computer

generated images, or video that has been shot using existing 3D

technology. And it does look greedy when you sit in front of it. --

looked a 3D. It uses the same principles as holographic photos

which she may have seen over the last few decades. The image itself

is stored on film, or in this case displayed on the screen, as an

intricate set of interference patterns. They only formed the

desired image when you dude from the right ankle and eliminate it

properly. For each object in this scene, the light is being projected

out of the screen to converge at the point where the object would be

if it were really there. That means that my eyes can converge and focus

on the same point, which is what your eyes did in the real world

when they are looking at real 3D objects. It is not what they do

when they are looking at traditional 3D, where they always

have to focus on the screen but then swivel to somewhere in front

of the screen. What that means is that with holographic TV, you can

bring the image way forward to the front of the screen or way back to

hide it without causing ice cream. Unfortunately that last seen was a

mock up of what I can see from my position. The problem is that in

order to view a hologram from any angle, television would be to

display many more interference patterns, and that would take an

enormous amount of data. This system gets around that by tracking

the viewer's eyes with two cameras, and only creating the interference

patterns for the point that you are looking from. Although this

severely limits to concede a hologram, the system is capable of

tracking up to four pairs of eyes at once, and projecting images to

each of them. Although this is just a first generation prototype, it

already generates a convincing 3D image. The next generation will get

rid of the flicker, and let you watch full-colour video. It will

also be a lot thinner, because this has been built from old medical

equipment. All the teething problems have to be sorted out by

the end of 2012, because that is when the developers hope that

holographic TV will go on sale. So it is still at least a year away,

but something for the makers of the greedy TV sets to think about.

The second technology which brought something new to the 3G sphere this

year was a new type of camera, which captures images in a very

different way. They can do some pretty incredible things your

pictures, after they have been taken.

It is a scene which will instantly resonate for anyone with kids. Try

to capture that precious moment through a lens. Memories may be

priceless, but all too often they end up as worthless. This is the

website of a Silicon Valley start- up which recently received a

whopping $50 million funding. That idea is to develop a consumer

camera whose images you cannot refocus after you have taken them.

Clicking around these Flash animations on the website gives a

good idea of what you can achieve. Being able to refocus post shutter

click is quite mind-blowing, especially when you can share the

experience with others. Three social networks, through the

internet, through mobile phones, people will be able to receive

pictures from people that have one of these cameras and interact with

it to experience the whole story of the picture. Interact with it to

focus on why they want to see and The camera will be released at the

end of the year. Precious few details have been released. They

are showing the science behind the camera. It is built on the

principle of light fields. It was developed in the 1990s.

definition of the light field is about all of the likes travelling

in every direction at any point in space. It can be captured with

literally 100 cameras plugged into a supercomputer in taking millions

of photographs at the same time. It is interesting to tried to put the

room full of cameras into one single camera to make it possible

for people to take this type of picture. One company has already

stolen a march. Matrix has spent the last year selling cameras using

similar technology. A PC does the software processing. It is captured

using the same light field techniques. What is happening is

that instead of a camera sense of capturing a single flat image,

thousands of images are captured in a different way by an array of

micro lenses housed in a glass away for placed in front of the censor.

This will help capture different views of the scene. Then, the

location of these point in space is walked out. This means that any

image can be focused by combining different pixels of the micro

lenses. There are drawbacks, though. The most glaring is that the final

process resolution is only a fraction of that scene in a regular

car -- camera. Adobe Make a programme that has been used by

camera enthusiast for years. They see challenges in bringing a camera

to market but they are in no doubt as to the impact of the technology.

We think this is the future of imaging. It is the next great

revolution in digital imaging. It used to be about digitising what

you could see. Then we started to capture more information and for

you did ways to run algorithms on what was captured so we could have

more flexibility to do things after the shot. This takes that to an

entirely new levels. The creator is passionate about his new camera's

potential. As we change the perspective, you can see the light

reflecting a through these droplets of water. Some critics are deriding

it as little more than a novelty that will be confined to unleash

audience. Others are pointing out that an in Focus shop will not

prevent bloody picture taking resulting from cameras shaking. The

artistic direction of taking a photograph could also be a

compromise, according to this man. He still thinks there could be a

real appetite for its. Photography is shifting away from print based

media to something that we do online. This could possibly really

take-off. I can imagine a scenario when the latest Facebook posts, the

latest online photography posts have a version. It could be the

next must have way of viewing photographs on the market. If it

does, it will take-off in a viral way. Since we first showed that

report, we have got our first glimpse of the camera. This is what

it looks like. It is very unconventional. It is simple and it

does not have very many buttons. Over the last 12 months, tablets

and smart phones have continued to get ever more popular. The number

of apps available for them has continued to explode. Kate Russell

takes a look at some of her favourites and it the best of

Webscape. This time last year, I would have struggled to pick out a

handful of really stand out smart phone apps. Smart phones have

become such an important part of everyday life since then. I am

going to bring you my favourite apps for 2011. When it comes to

picking up around town, location based check in apps are all very

well. Your friends need to use them. Ecole They call turns the model on

its head. -- EchoEcho. You send your friends a request when you

want to know where they are. You can use it straight out of the box.

This app was recommended by a viewer who is an actress in Los

Angeles. For her, it is being able to grab an impromptu coffee with

her friend without putting her privacy at risk by doing an online

check-in that is the real draw of app. I have to say, I totally agree.

It helps you find a good local venue close by. If you contact does

not want to download the app, you can view it on an online version.

This is a breath of fresh air. Hands up if you've ever fallen

asleep on the train, over a shot just station and ended up a bleary

eyed and confused trying to find your way home? It can happen to the

best of us. With his app, you do not need to worry. It is such a

simple concept. You just said what should you want to be cut by and

your phone's GPS -- you just set what location you want to be cut at

and your phone's GPS will trigger a wake-up alarm when you get there.

The Android version is free. You will have to pay for the iPhone

version. If your destination is in a connection dead spot, there is

still a chance you could miss you spot. At least you want a cup at

the end of the line. Smart phone app builders are

springing up all over the Web at the moment. This has to be it the

ultimate in phone Customisation. In this case, nor heavy programming

language to learn either a. This is one that you will have to read the

manual for. They have made it so you can create really complex

programmes as well as simple ones. The interface can look a little

daunting. Use the tutorials to get the basics and you will soon be

able to get your head round this logical, progressive system.

I first showed you at this app in 2009. If you Mr Deng, shame on you.

You should take a look now. -- if you missed it and then. The iPhone

app let you search for images online, and it is applied through a

3 the interface wall. The graphics have been toned down a bit for the

iPhone version to make it more data efficient. You can use that tilt

feature to sweep backwards and forwards across the image wall. The

iPhone app lets you search for images online through a scrolling

wall. You will have to go into preferences and punt on tilt

control if you want to use it. This will lead you use all of the other

features as well. Clive Shea is another app that is available. --

Live Share. It lets you see your contact as they appear. It is great

for music festivals. That is it for this week. Next week