Executive Chairman of Google has lambasted Britain as a society that favours "luvvies" over "boffins

The Executive Chairman of Google has lambasted Britain as a society that favours "luvvies" over "boffins" and warned that unless it takes action to support science in education and business "the UK will continue to be where inventions are born – but not bred for long-term success".

Painting a bleak picture of Britain's future as a hub of technological innovation, Eric Schmidt said he was "flabbergasted" that computer science was not a standard subject in British schools. "That is just throwing away your great computing heritage," he said.

Mr Schmidt said Britain was "the home of so many media-related inventions", including photography and television. "You invented computers in both concept and practice," he added. "Yet today, none of the world's leading exponents in these fields are from the UK."


He said Britain had a fundamental problem in supporting innovative businesses. "The UK does a great job at backing small firms and cottage industries. But there's little point getting a thousand seeds to sprout if they're then left to wither or get transplanted overseas."

Giving the prestigious annual James MacTaggart Lecture to an audience of media executives in Edinburgh, Mr Schmidt warned: "If you don't address this, then the UK will continue to be where inventions are born - but not bred for long-term success."

The head of one of the world's biggest technology companies said Britain needed to look back to its Victorian age when it held the sciences and the arts in equally high esteem. "You need to bring art and science back together," he said. "Think back to the glory days of the Victorian era. It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges. Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time, he was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford."

Mr Schmidt has previously criticised Britain as a base for innovation; in May he responded to Prime Minster David Cameron, who said in March that "the founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain".

Mr Schmidt claimed not to be aware of the quote, but told the BBC in May: "You need to be able to get enough steam behind you before you get injuncted out of existence [in Britain]." In the past 100 years, the UK "has stopped nurturing its polymaths", he said. "There's been a drift to the humanities – engineering and science aren't championed. Even worse, both sides seem to denigrate the other. To use what I'm told is the vernacular, you're either a 'luvvy' or a 'boffin'."

Having referred to Carroll and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who was also a published poet, Mr Schmidt then picked on one of contemporary Britain's favourite business innovators, Lord Sugar, comparing the Amstrad founder's attitude towards engineering to that of Barack Obama, who recently promised to train 10,000 more engineers a year. "Alan Sugar said engineers are no good at business. Really? I don't think we've done too badly," Mr Schmidt said. "Take a lead from the Victorians and ignore Lord Sugar: bring engineers into your company at all levels."

Responding to Mr Schmidt's criticism, a source in the Department for Education admitted there have been "serious problems with science policy reaching back many decades", but pointed out the Government is "greatly increasing bursaries to the top maths and physics students who want to become teachers". The source added: "We have prioritised maths and science in departmental spending. We are encouraging more children to do science GCSEs and we have made maths and science the top priorities in teacher training."

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills rejected the suggestion that the Government wasn't doing enough to promote innovation, insisting it was "committed to giving businesses the incentives to invest in ideas to drive economic growth". He added: "We are introducing measures to give companies a reduced rate of tax on profits arising from patents. We are also increasing the amount of support for small and medium-sized businesses."

A vision for the future of television

*Google TV, an online television platform that will enable viewers to surf the internet while watching programmes, will be launched in the UK early next year.

The launch was announced by Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

Google's arrival into the market is likely to be in advance of the delayed YouView internet television project, which is supported by British broadcasters, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and is aimed at Freeview customers.

YouView was expected to appear this year but the launch has been put back until "early 2012". BSkyB and Virgin Media already offer some television services over broadband internet.

Google TV launched nearly a year ago in the United States, where its broadcast partners include HBO.

It is seen as a more open service than YouView and will take advantage of Google's expertise to offer users the opportunity to comb the internet and apps for content and access it instantly. But Google TV has failed to bring on board key American broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, which have blocked their websites from the service. The UK launch, though expected, will alarm those British broadcasters who have long feared Google's domination of their sector. Last night, Schmidt sought to allay those concerns by saying Google had no ambition to compete with programme makers.

"Actually our intent is the opposite," he said. "We seek to support the content industry by providing an open platform for the next generation of TV.

Microblogging site Tumblr is reportedly poised to receive a big round of funding that would send its valuation to about $800 million.

Shaky economy or not, some investors are still steadily placing bets on tech startups with cool functionality but no clear revenue stream, and microblogging site Tumblr appears to be the latest example.
The New York-based Web platform is poised to raise $75 million to $100 million in venture capital, an investment that would place the company’s value at $800 million, sources told the Wall Street Journal today.
Tumblr’s lack of revenue—it doesn’t charge most users to create a blog— kept some major Silicon Valley venture firms from signing onto funding, but Greylock Partners, an investor in Facebook Inc. and Groupon—is among those planning to plunk down big bucks on the company, based upon its sizable user base, the sources said.
The new round would add to the $30 million the company received in December from Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures in an investment that valued the company at $120 million. Neither Greylock nor Tumblr would confirm the fresh investment, the Journal notes.
David Karp, then a 20-year-old high school dropout, launched the site as a way to make blogging easier back in 2007. Now CEO of the company, whose name stems from tumble log or mixed media blog, Karp has been earning business awards, such as Best Young Entrepreneurs 2009 from Bloomberg Businessweek, and rave reviews from tech writers for its ability to let bloggers quickly add photos, quotes, links, music and video.
Karp spoke about the company’s quick growth at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in May, explaining that the exponential growth in users and the size of the staff (it went from about five to reportedly 45 now) kind of knocked the young company for a loop at first.
Tumblr boasts 13.4 million unique U.S. visitors, as of July 2011, up from 6.7 million users in December, according to comScore statistics cited by the Journal. That means it lags behind rivals such as WordPress, which has 44 million users and Blogger, which is owned by Google and boasts 64 million users. But it bests both of those competitors by large margins when it comes to another key metric: U.S. page views, for which it had 3.8 billion in July versus 282 million page views for WordPress and 718 million page views for Blogger.
Why so many clicks versus uniques? Tumblr is very popular in the fashion community, with about 20 percent of the company’s 27 million blogs related to fashion, making heavy uses of images. Maybe fashion types and investors are on the same page: if something looks good, it counts.

 

In 2008, Michael Grade, then chief executive of ITV, branded Google a “parasite”, along with other internet companies that “live off our content”.

Tonight, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, will take to the TV industry’s most prestigious platform to give the MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh.

The Edinburgh International TV Festival’s annual keynote speech has been on steady rotation between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 for most of its 35-year history, with the recent exception of News Corp Europe chief James Murdoch’s 2009 attack on the BBC.

So the symbolism behind the podium space granted to Google, Facebook and Twitter this year should not be underestimated.

But how much have relations really warmed between Google and the content world in the last three years?

As WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell noted earlier this week, Google still makes medialand nervous.

“There are concerns among broadcasters and content providers on a number of issues,” says Ian Maude, head of internet at Enders Analysis. “The bottom line is it’s about control… the potential impact on their business models and the commoditisation of their content.”

In the UK, YouTube has plenty of shows from Channels 4 and 5, as well as BBC archive hits such as Top Gear. Live events such as Indian Premier League cricket and a U2 concerts have been more successful, says Screen Digest analyst Dan Cryan, because YouTube can gain global online rights and aggregate a much bigger audience than country-specific programming. Mr Schmidt’s speech itself is being  live-streamed on YouTube.

But British content still matters to British viewers and YouTube still lacks longform content from ITV, in spite of years of on-off negotiations. Nobody is expecting Adam Crozier, ITV’s current chief, to leap on stage and shake Mr Schmidt’s hand tonight.

What observers are expecting is the latest bout of a charm offensive that has been in progress for many years. Mr Schmidt is likely to stress that Google is not in the content business – a point he’s had to repeat many times before – and that, as with the newspaper industry, Google can be a constructive partner, fuelling innovation in the TV world.

In spite of speculation that Google might offer some kind of handout to independent TV production companies, but a voluntary YouTube tax seems unlikely. Google has always resisted the suggestion that it should somehow be responsible for bailing out industries that are not blessed with its double-digit revenue growth.

But in the newspaper world, there have been gambits such as grants for innovation in digital journalism as well as products such as Fast Flip and Living Stories that Google believes can help print’s transition to digital.

There are some parallels to this in TV land. YouTube’s NextUp programme has given €20,000 in funding, as well as training and promotion, to help professionalise up-and-coming talent using Google’s video-sharing site. That was aimed at smaller film-makers but the recent Life in a Day experiment saw YouTube snippets edited together by Last King of Scotland director Kevin MacDonald and produced by Ridley Scott, with the  resulting movie polished enough for a cinema release.

Staff changes are also trying to bring the tech giant closer to the media world. Google recently hired Ben McOwen Wilson, former MD of ITV.com, as director of YouTube in the UK and Ireland.

Mr Schmidt’s speech might be expected to encompass these more piecemeal measures rather than one big announcement.

Reports this morning suggest that he will announce that Google TV is coming to the UK but the reality is that Google does not yet have very much more to say about its much-hyped assault on the living room.

After its first version flopped, a second iteration is in development, with a redesigned user interface that puts more emphasis on icons and less reliance on horrible qwerty-keyboard remotes.

The FT understands that several hardware partners from Google TV’s first release have gone rather cooler on the idea. That’s before Google even begins to negotiate content partners – remember that big broadcasters such as NBC, ABC and CBS blocked its set-top box from accessing their online content.

“If we are building up to a refresh of Google TV, that entire process of saying ‘We are a friend not a foe’ comes more sharply into focus,” says Mr Cryan.

In the end, the symbolism that it is Google delivering this year’s MacTaggart may be more significant than its contents.

Google dumps TV flop on UK

Be still, beating hearts! The expensive flop that embodies Google's difficulties in working with the media industries is coming to the UK. Eric Schmidt is expected to make the announcement at the annual Edinburgh TV festival that a consumer product will launch within the next six months.

In the United States, where free-to-air television is of low quality, Google TV initially caused great excitement. But flagship US manufacturer Logitech recently scrapped the product, selling off remaining stock in a firesale.

Google's as a TV platform provider was always going to be difficult; internally executives admitted that its YouTube service was a "rogue enabler of content theft". But Google TV flopped because Google didn't really like TV in the first place, and certainly didn't understand why people watch it. The box was fundamentally a computer first, with a TV output that displays on a big screen.

As one of the (few) favourable reviews put it, Google TV is "[at heart], a text-based search engine that hasn't been conceived to deal with the complexity and massive volume of web video."

Others wondered how it was ever released by the Chocolate Factory in the first place.

"Google TV is basically unusable," Matt Millar of Tellybug told us. "Any system that requires you to move a mouse pointer around a TV screen will fail".

 

Post to your blog from mobile devices

Who wouldn't want to blog for a living? Low pay, even lower esteem among your publishing peers, and the scorn of anonymous readers who aren't shy about telling you and the rest of the world what an idiot you are.
Yes, blogging is a career of the future, right up there with correctional officer and bankruptcy attorney.
Cynical? Moi? Actually, I've been blogging now for almost four years and I love it. Maybe somebody not named Arianna Huffington or Perez Hilton is making beaucoup dolares from a blog, but I haven't met that person. Still, money isn't everything... is it?
The fact is, blogs allow most everyone to express themselves to the masses, or whichever segment of the masses they're able to reach via search engines. There's an immediacy to blogs that no other publishing medium can match. And while most posts originate on a PC, there's no reason bloggers should feel bound to their computers.
To put mobile blogging to the test, I tried out the WordPress app for the iPhone and iPad, and Blogger's SMS and e-mail posting features. (The WordPress app is also available for Android devices and other mobile phones and tablets.) There used to be a free "Lite" version of the $2.99 BlogPress app for posting to Blogger, but that version appears to be no more.
Blogger's SMS-post feature requires that you first create a new blog and then merge the new blog with an existing one. I never got the SMS component to work reliably, but e-mailing posts to Blogger worked well enough for me.
Posting without a hitch via the WordPress mobile app
After you install and open the WordPress app for the iPhone or iPad, you're offered a choice of starting a new blog at WordPress.com, posting to an existing blog hosted at WordPress.com, or posting to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

 

BlackBerry users might soon be able to download Android apps

The move would address criticism that BlackBerry does not have enough applications by allowing the devices to run those built for Google’s rival Android operating system. It would also lessen RIM’s struggle to persuade developers to write apps specifically for BlackBerry.
Reports from Bloomberg suggest that suggestions in February may still prove true. Originally, it was reported that RIM was working internally on a project to make its Playbook tablet compatible with Google’s 250,000 apps; this was later confirmed by RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis. At the Mobile World Congress show earlier this year, software maker Myriad was also demonstrating its Alien Dalvik software, which can make Android apps run on other platforms. Now the new capability is also set to launch with BlackBerry’s forthcoming mobile phones, based on new operating system QNX, due in early 2012.
App ShopSavvy said on its blog in February that according to its “logs someone in Waterloo, Ontario (where RIM is based) has been running ShopSavvy for Android on various BlackBerry devices”.
According to the firm, the 8300, 8600 and 8520 were recorded running ShopSavvy this year. They added that “This makes sense since BlackBerry OS can support Java Virtual Machines and it would be pretty easy to compile Android in one of the them. This is a pretty interesting development – we would love to optimize ShopSavvy for the new BlackBerry+Android”.
While RIM has said that its QNX-based PlayBook tablet will run Android apps, it hasn’t confirmed that QNX phones will have the same capability.

 

California lawmakers try to head off Amazon sales tax referendum

State lawmakers escalated their war with Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday with a fresh attack aimed at the Internet giant's refusal to collect taxes on its sales, which a new law requires.

The legislative move would halt Amazon's campaign to put a referendum on the June ballot asking voters to overturn the state's Internet sales tax law, which took effect July 1.

In a bit of legislative legerdemain, the state Senate Appropriations Committee took the language of that law, tweaked it and put it into a so-called urgency bill.

As an urgency bill, the legislation, should it pass, would nullify the existing law, invalidating Amazon's voter petition, and the new law would be immune from a referendum.

Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, apparently was blindsided by the maneuver. It would not comment.

"I don't know what Amazon will do, but I hope it will decide it's going to pay the sales tax," said state Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), one of the authors of the original sales tax collection bill.

Internet merchants may be coming to the end of an era in selling products without collecting sales taxes, said analyst Ray Valdes at the research firm Gartner Inc. in San Jose.

"Online retailers have to deal with the messy and very real world of politics and tight budgets and economic realities," Valdes said.

Amazon has said that it would refuse to collect taxes, as it has in almost every state, and that it expected to collect enough signatures on its referendum petition. The Seattle company has contributed $5.25 million to the More Jobs Not Taxes referendum campaign.

The bill's sponsors already have wooed away a key Amazon ally: EBay Inc.

The online auction and sales site agreed to withdraw its opposition after lawmakers raised the threshold for requiring an Internet seller to collect sales taxes for California.

The existing law states that sites selling more than $500,000 worth of merchandise a year to Californians have to collect sales taxes. The new bill raises the limit to $1 million, an effort to give smaller merchants an exemption from the requirement.

"Creating a more robust small-business threshold … will provide adequate protections for most small-business retail entrepreneurs that use the Internet and will help to foster economic growth and competition in California," Tod Cohen, an EBay vice president and deputy general counsel, said in a statement.

EBay's change reflects, in part, the efforts of Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Assn., which is coordinating the fight to force out-of-state Internet sellers to collect taxes. "We found a way to broaden support for the bill significantly," he said.

California retailers complain that they are victims of unfair competition from Amazon, Overstock.com — now calling itself O.co — and other Internet sellers that don't operate physical stores or warehouses in the state.

As a result Amazon can undercut their prices by not collecting the state's 7.25% sales tax and additional local government levies. With its razor-thin profit margins, Amazon relies on the no-tax allure to customers for much of its sales.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its allies in the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, a group that includes big-box stores and independent businesses, still face a major challenge in getting their legislative maneuver to work.

It's unclear whether sponsors of the measure have the two-thirds vote needed to adopt an urgency bill; the existing law picked up one Republican vote.

But heavyweight Republican-leaning lobbying groups, including the California retailers group and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, are pushing GOP legislators to support the plan.

 

Google could be bringing Google TV to the good ol' U of K within the next six months

Google TV is built on Google's own Android operating system, and will basically put the Chrome Web browser inside your TV, letting you search the Web and stream video from TV providers, or watch your own videos.

Google TV lets you run Android apps on your TV, something we suspect has huge potential. Imagine a spot of Angry Birds on a massive screen, for example, or having Spotify streaming over your telly during a crazy party.

The service runs through a set-top box, but in the US Sony sells TVs with Google TV built-in. We'd love to see some of these heading to the UK in the near future, so we'll be keeping a close eye during IFA, the big tech conference in Germany that kicks off next week.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt is giving a lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival this evening, so we could hear more then.

Previously we thought Google TV would never find a home among our dark, satanic mills -- the Big G said it had "no plans beyond the US" in May last year. But maybe, just maybe, Google has seen fit to spread the love around. We suspect we'll be hearing more shortly.

The concept of streaming video through your telly is nothing new -- loads of set-top boxes and TVs already offer services such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer. But we'd hope one from Google would be easier to use than most, and would feature more delicious video content.