17/03/2012 Click

I will be back at the top of the hour with a full bull et inn. Now

it is time for -- bulletin. Now it is time for Click.

Wow! Someone who shares exactly the same interests as me and they are

really close. I wonder who on earth This week on Click we are finding

out more about those around us by peering into the social future,

along with a few thousand other geeks. Yes, it's the South by

Southwest Interactive Festival. We are on the hunt for the next big

thing. We will get up close and personal to someone who prefers

intimate gatherings to large parties. How to avoid death by

power point in Webscape and a round up of Tech news. That is all coming

up in the next hour. Welcome to Click. This month, a small town in

Texas is getting a lot of attention. It is Austin's South by Southwest

Interactive Festival. The bit we are interested in, the

interactive part, celebrates its 18th birthday this year. Last year,

19,000 people crammed into Austin for the interactive festival. There

was a lot of talk about location- based games like foursquare, which

now has 15 million users and a new way of making money. They give

businesses a rich source of data, namely what kind of people check-in

to their establishment. Gou, another similar service, has now

been -- Gowalla, another similar service, has now been bought by

Facebook. There is the app and Group Me. It

was here, five years ago, that a call called Twitter first started

to get noticed. With all these trendy adopters on the ground, it

is no wonder smaller companies come soo see if there is any -- come to

see if there is any venture capital. It is difficult to predict for

certain the next big thing. Or otherwise I would be a very rich

man... And I'm not. We sent LJ Rich to find us a few small companies

which could be the next big household name.

It is a week filled with compulsory partying, compulsory queuing and

compulsory 24/7 networking. It could only be South by Southwest

Interactive Festival, where start- ups live and die by how well their

considereds can connect with the world's most social citizens. One

of the trends is curating. Pinterest has expanded

significantly. They just announced a re-design. The wrd is to collect

the best bits of the Web and display them to others. It is the

equivalent of ripping out bits of magazines and saving them for later.

Another app - Storify, launched last year has a suped up interface

to help people curate with less efforts.

Think of kurration as a search England and results page made by a

human, not a machine. We had this explosion due to things like

blogging, Twiting, whatever it is. -- Twittering, whatever it is. At

the same time we are buried in it. There are ways to cope with it.

Either you can filter out the best stuff, but it is about humans

helping to find the best of what is out there and give audiences

something they want to read. I think what is the important next

step of the way the web is going. What is the future....? By far the

most talked about story here is social discovery, which builds on

the location-based theme. Instead of checking where you are, it is

about knowing how close everyone else is. The latest crop of apps

take advantage of the fact they know where we are. Where it gets

interesting is instead of me searching for people I know who

might be close by, I can now search for people I just have a few things

in common with. Having similar interests with someone a few metres

away, gives perspective networkers a great excuse to break the ice.

The creator of this app hopes to reassure us that we are only giving

a rough idea of how close we are to prospective new friends. It doesn't

let you see where people are. It lets you see a little bit more

information about the people around you. It seems like a difference,

but it is important. Highlight is off, so we don't check other data

from other services. If you are highlight it shows you have signed

up. The real world is kind of like this bizarre version of Facebook

where it is a photo. That version sucks. A thought shared by many who

prefer their smartphone to real life, as long address the battery

holds out, that is. One thing early users have found apps like this are

thirsty, using up power finding out where you are all the time. There

are so many things we need to fix and change and improve. At South By

feedback is part of the plan. If you are not in beta, what are

you doing here? These aim to save the bother of going on first

impressions or the horror of actually speaking to people. Social

discovery comes with the inevitable consequences of unmodified personal

exchanges. Finding like-minded geeks at an event like this appears

to work well. It could be a different story in the real world.

People are steps away, rather than being pin-pointed on a map.

We don't want -- we want women to feel comfortable, so they don't

have anybody saying "I want to talk to you." Most of the apps have an

in-built messager. I went shy at the thought of this, even though I

like to communicate with other people I don't know on other media

platforms. These are called social luebcapbts.

There might be some on these apps. There will be consequences. For

example, we take the risks, the consequences because there is a lot

of dead wood. I rolled into Los Angeles, I saw four people on my

screen, all of whom are people who would be here at South by Southwest

Interactive Festival. CEOs, venture capital lists. The question is,

does it get outside of -- capitalists. The question is, does

it outside of that comounty? It is a good predictor of yes, it will.

The trends are potential data gold mines. While we are busy making

people like us with our likes and collecting what we think is cool,

companies can get a better idea of who we are. We will probably find

out what that means for society when the next batch s wind up in

the social sand box. LJ Rich tells us she plans to spend the next week

asleep after her geek-out. Yahoo is taking Facebook to court saying it

has copied ten pay tents. Facebook, which plans to flot on the Stock

Market, denies the allegation. In 2004, Yahoo successfully sued

Google ahead of its flotation, settling for shares of its rival.

The US military has tested a non- lethal weapon, which can make

targets feel as though their skin is burning. It is 100 times more

powerful than a regular microwave. The US authorities say it

penetrates the upper layer of the skin and the burning sensation is

reversable. They say it could be used for controlling crowd control

and managing check points. The oldest language encyclopaedia,

Encyclopaedia Britannica will concentrate only on its digital

version. It has been in print since 1768. It says the books account for

1% of its total revenue. The 20- year old on line version is going

great guns, with 580 million visitors a year. Not hard to see

why. The books cost $1400. A year's online subscription is $14. A

robotic handy man has conpleeted its first trial run on the

International Space Station. Dextre managed to re-- recover tools and

use a wire-cutting tool, all under Back to Texas. We have a look at

the General Trans and look at some of the players, but now something

more specific. And that is one social networking out that that has

called -- caught the eye of the earlier the crowd. Pat was created

by this man. It has 2 million users, enticed by its twist on the regular

social networking paid. Facebook and most of the new ones assume we

are open to making connections with distance acquaintances or strangers.

Pat is intended on leading us down a less well-trodden route towards

networking, a cul-de-sac, with a maximum of 150 people in your

backyard. We caught up with the boss. We are looking at a lot of

research out of the United Kingdom and round this idea the human brain

can only sustain 150 stable, personal social connections. So we

thought it would be interesting to give that a shot as the first way

we tried to maintain quality and intimacy on the network. You keep a

personal journal or path of your life, which you share with close

friends and family. A major competitor in this so called

scrapbook arena his Ince to grammar which is a hit with iPhone users,

then share them up for others to look at. What they're doing is

different. They have pioneered this more advanced way of thinking about

photos and Sheringham across a lot of different networks in a public

way. -- sharing them. It is what people love. We want to create a

private space for you to share just with your family. ONS all of these

elements an amalgam of other applications we know and love. Do

we need another social network to chew away up precious time. What is

so compelling about this to make us go there in particular? I compare

it to your dinner table at home. You feel like you can trust the

experience and have deep conversations. That's the kind of

space we are trying to create. It is different than a public or

social space. The focus on keeping your private content private,

appears to have been bitten in the backside. Last month it turned out

pack, along with several other applications were uploading your

phone book and content. There was no intent, but the way we designed

it was not the way consumers wanted it to work. So we found that out

very quickly. We realise this ourselves and we rolled out a

change to our android clients a week before all this stuff began to

happen. So what we did was try to be very transparent and apologised

to the user's and to the world. Refreshing for someone to admit

their mistakes. Buts a company that needs to maintain the trust of its

users, it still has a lot of work to do to regain that trust. And the

boss acknowledges that. One of the Greater actions we took duty this,

we went and deleted all of the data. -- due to this. It was a token of

good faith. We did not mean to cause this problem, but we are very,

very sorry. Here is not just a simple action, but an action that

goes there the two showed its is indeed of values. It is very

important to do, because talk is cheap and action speaks much louder

than words. Pat is also taking action by Updating version 2.1

known as an application programming interface. Nike+ will be the first

to partner, posting running Mac's two profiles. Is that recovery

under way? Every start-up, every technology company is trying to

build that new experience for use. It will always take time. It is

less and a comment, and more of them as a people that they stick

with us. We are trying to build an interesting spaces for people on

the internet and those things take time. As William Gibson said, the

future is here but is it not evenly distributed yet.

I love a good presentation, pie charts, graphs and people reading

their own ball at points of the overhead projector. But some people

would like to put themselves in the eye with the US beat Stich than use

PowerPoint. Kate Russell has something to alleviate it your

boredom in Webscape. Even the most informative

presentation can feel like wading through treacle. Masterful use of

transitions and keeping word count to a minimum can help. But if you

are finding it hard using the mainstream desktop passengers, head

over to Prezi .com and relax. We looked at this site in 2009 on

Webscape. But things have moved on since then. They have spent a lot

of time and money keeping up with technology so it is worth a second

look. It is an absolute joy to use now. With a few clicks you will be

building a cascading, mind map. Drop in slides containing images,

graphics and video and even bowler pointed lists if you want them. Set

the path for your presentation. It let you create things open to the

public. It he wants privacy and an address for sharing, you will have

to pay the subscriptions. Spend a lot of time on phrase book?

Don't you just hate it when they changed the interface? Like taking

away the common button or adding the annoying like box. Don't you

wish you could put it back the way you want it? That might not be so

far-fetched it you install the social plug-in. There is a tweak

for everything, including getting rid of the like box. You will have

to wait a fraction longer for each page to load, because all this

application is doing is skimming the day to head into your browser

from Facebook. Whether or not the New Look pages are worth the extra

weight, only you can decide. It's hap feature is a useful feature.

Spetchley it you have a lot of friends giving you something in

Thom Bell. It can be switched off with one click.

A couple of huge books which have been reworked for the eye pads and

take advantage of the graphics and sound. Inside the world of

dinosaurs is an encyclopaedia which crams a huge amount of high-quality

images, videos and sounds into a beautifully constructed interface.

It is a plus it to explore and five hours of narration by Stephen Fry

is the icing on the cake. It might have been tiny but it was a

ferocious fighter. That and the 3D dinosaurs frozen in mid-flight.

Inside the world of dinosaurs is about the price of a coffee-table

book, which seems expensive, but when you compare the content, 6 D

animated and interactive photo realistic dinosaurs, seems pretty

good value to me. Cycle PDA is not cheap, but if you

are a bike enthusiast he will want to jump right on the saddle with

this one. Another interactive encyclopaedia, it celebrates 100

bicycles that changed cycling history. Just don't get so absorb

due let your computer go flat. And, parts of the press - therefore

World Atlas application launches this weekend. It has been

engineered to take advantage of the new retina displayed and quad call

graphics. Tango dancers, Argentina. I have always wanted to be Dr Who's

sidekick. Thanks to a new role playing games, I can be. Launched

this weekend, you create a character, make friends, and that

will all of the Dr's favourite enemies. The games are simple but

fun, and you can kit yourself out and room with upgrades. Or you can

paint real cash for credits that let you jump ahead. But I like

winning around London in my pyjamas. If you missed any of those links,