To this day, the Guatemalan Mayans remark that outsiders note down things not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them. Today’s world of hyperconnectivity often leads us to wonder whether our reliance on technology for knowledge and time management is beginning to “soften” our brains and make them less sharp. The Mayans might be right after all.

Cutting off from the technology and information highway for three weeks offered a good opportunity to experience full reliance on the cerebellum. It was not just organisational zen but also a break from “information anxiety”. Information anxiety is that feeling that seems to be building up daily as we gain access to more information and begin to choke when we realise that we cannot possibly take it all in at one go.

The feeling begins with a glance at an interesting link or headline on a website. Possibly this comes certified with a hundred “likes” – the modern-day stamp of recommendation. Your mental sieve takes note and the urge to take that particular path on the ether begins to take shape. But there are other links on the page – other bits of news or information that are vying for your attention. What can you possibly do?

There’s different techniques and approaches. You could hoard links on some bookmarking website while convincing yourself that some time in the future a gap in the time-space continuum will allow you to “catch up”. Incidentally the “catch up” business is rather lame. Is it a race? Is there really somebody in the lead who has read tomes upon tomes on all kinds of subjects? Does a modern day walking, talking and web-browsing equivalent of the famed Alexandrian library exist?

You could also skim through summaries or subtitles getting the general gist of the content while being subconsciously painfully aware that you are fast becoming the internet equivalent of a jack of all trades and master of none. That would also mean learning to live with that ghost of a feeling that during your “skimming” you missed out on the really crucial, interesting part that was really worth reading. That’s information anxiety all over again.

Or you could step off the train. Step off and watch the carousel zip before your eyes as statuses are updated in your absence, news items are created, revised and rewritten while you are in a blissful corner of informational oblivion. Peeping in from time to time to assuage the withdrawal symptoms you will connect less and less with the threads and webs that have formed in your absence. You will worry less. Care less even. Anxiety what anxiety?

Before you know it, information gathering might even take its good old familiar linear form. You will have regained your sanity and your calm. It might not last very long and you might soon be wishing to be back sucking at the nipple of information overdose but trust me, the kick you get from that momentary lapse of reason might even get addictive and before you know it you could be stepping off the train.

And this time it will be for good.

While shopping for goods to fill the Christmas stockings you might have gone to some IT product store and had a good look at the prices for hardware goods. If you were shocked at the sudden hike in price for external drives for your PC/Mac or in the price for certain laptops you might be glad to know there is a reason for that. As L’Essentiel reports, we are witnessing the butterfly effect from the floods in Thailand. Companies producing hard drives and laptops have had their production practically halted and the slowdown has caused a lower supply: enter the magic of market forces.

This kind of news is an eye opener for those among us who tend to think that prices of goods and the operation of the market is entirely dependent on some paper-pushing Ministers’ decision. The same applies for those among us who believe that markets and even national economies can ever operate again in isolation.

And if a series of floods in Thailand can effect the purchasing habits in a medium-sized French town I am baffled at how some commentators can still shout hurray at David Cameron’s choice of isolating Britain from the decisions that will be taken from now on to consolidate the European Union’s (and it’s Single Market) position economically and on the world stage.

Cameron thinks he drove a hard deal. A hard drive? Sure, but with expensive consequences.

As Apple launches the iCloud (suspiciously similar to MobileMe) I thought it would be great to share this TED video. What morality should underpin our newly developed technologies? Thought provoking videos on a blog-dry day.

…your iphone of course. I am told by the lesser denizens of this earth that these apps are also available for non-iphone users. Anyway. I thought I’d give you a peep at the apps that have tickled my fancy recently. January 2011 might be a tad bit too late to wax lyrical about the power available at your fingertips but on the other hand that is one of the beauties of the internet powered revolution: it never ceases to impress. The apps listed below are in no particular order but they are all mystically superliciliously snobbishly fantabulastic.

J’accuse has no sponsorship deal with any of the following apps or their creators. Just in case you were wondering of course.

1. Whatsapp

I thought I’d get rid of this one because it is the most down-to-earth and unglamorous of the lot. What it lacks in glam and glitter it wins back in absolute practicality and money-savingness. This nifty app zaps through your telephonic contacts and makes them its own and then proceeds to inform you which among these contacts is already equipped with Whatsapp. The next step is instant messaging at prices that neither Go nor Vodafone nor Melita will give you… it’s free. Bully for the expats… we get to sms people in Rome, London, Rio and Malta for free… and they answer back at the same expense. Now to make some friends around the world who will actually speak to me….

2. TuneIn Radio App

If, like me, you never swallowed the line “video killed the radio star” then you will love this one. Open up to the world of radios wherever you are. Why be limited to the range of stations on the FM band? Why be a slave to the hissing fadings and shoutings of the AM frequency? Travel back in time and listen to the best radio Italy and the UK have to offer as though you were carrying a tranny in Rome or Sheffield.  It’s simple. Download the app that runs on the radiotime database then just browse the world – literally. Your iphone will be as at home in Mauritius as it is in Mumbai. There’s no limit.

So if you are bored of counting the number of times Maltese rock deejays drool over the cliches of il-Floyd and il-Bono and if you are addicted to the non-stop orgasm that is Classic FM this is your answer. Plug it into a set of JBL on stage speakers (iphone users beware – buy the phone adapted version to make sure you eliminate the intereference from cellular buzzing) and bob’s your uncle. You can leave it plugged in at your bedside overnight and you’ll fall asleep to the sound of your favourite radio (timer enabled) and wake up to it thanks to the programmable wake-up alarm. And while it is in sleep mode your iphone doubles as a wonderful bedside clock. Next time I’ll share some cool radios I’ve discovered… it had been ages since I could hear a crystal clear footie commentary (Radio Rai 1 or BBC 5 live).

Goggles by Google

3. Google Goggles

Save the best for last. Transform your iphone into a Star Trek app. I’d say that the basic principle behind google goggles is “doing things with images”. Google has jumped onto the fact that people now carry cameras everywhere thanks to advanced optics on iphones (and maybe on other non-iphones). The idea is to take a photo of ANYTHING and see what goggles does it with.

Not recognising a landmark? Snap a photo of it and let goggles scan it and browse the web for it. After a few seconds it will tell you what it is. I took a photo of a Gauguin poster in the office. In a few seconds Goggles told me what it was and where to find it. You could try it on people but it is not that good at recognising those yet. Take a photo of a barcode and Goggles will tell you what the product is, where to find it and how to buy it online.

The most jaw-dropping of all was the Sudoku. I took a photo of a Sudoku puzzle straight off the pages of the Daily Mail (difficulty hardest). It took Goggles a few seconds (a) to tell me that  it was a Sudoku image and (b) to ask me if I want it solved. Want it solved? Want it solved? I couldn’t believe my eyes. I pressed solve puzzle and there you were… in what was surely under three seconds the Daily Mail hardest puzzle was solved. Stuff that. For the crossword enthusiasts out there… don’t despair, the day a machine can get through the nuances of a cryptic crossword is still very far off.

There you have it. Three goldmines to tap. There’s much much more but I thought I’d share these three lovely ‘uns for the weekend. It’s frosty in Luxembourg as in all of Europe (I know that because my iphone told me this morning). There we were thinking that summer was round the corner… instead we’re stuck inside, playing with our iphones.

Related articles

• Google Goggles Solves Sudoku (tech.slashdot.org)
• Google Goggles for iPhone recognizes ads, solves Sudoku puzzles (tuaw.com)
• TuneIn Radio iPhone App Review (brighthub.com)
• Top Apps of All Time (chris.pirillo.com)

As we eagerly wait for the next iPad (please make it by April) and listen nonchalantly to ipods on the bus while reading the paper on our iPhone, there’s a whole new generation out there who are absolutely clueless about the technology of yesterday. Thirty? Who you calling old?

2011 has begun in the sign of credit and crunches. As I zap through the news channels with a bile infested head the common thread seems to be the fact that there will be no let up to the effects of the credit crunch in this golden year. While the Con-Dem coalition is under fire for its decision to increase VAT to 20% in the UK, Malta’s opposition and its “social partners” are furious at the rise in prices of anything from petrol to milk. We will speak later about the honoraria debate but for now I’d like to share a conundrum about credit card fraud closer to home.

I was trying to review the damage on the various outlets of credit I possess when I noticed that on the 23rd and 24th December of last year some christian soul had availed himself of nigh €1400 in order to travel around the Philippines (hotel and air travel thank you very much). So I called CETELEM who are surrogates for the devil on this earth and informed them that the only archipelago I had visited at Christmas time was Malta. After a visit to every division in the CETELEM belgian offices I finally got some answers from the man in the fraud division. I would only have to sign some papers and the situation would be repristinated.

But. And there is always a but. I have to get a procés verbal from the police. That means I would have to go to a Luxembourg police station and declare that the data relating to my creditcard (and not the credit card) had been misappropriated. I would also have to tell them that I am doing this declaration in order to inconvenience some desk clerk at the office who would have to print out my declaration and authenticate it. Do you see? The police cannot do much about retrieving what has been stolen. The card is still sitting comfortaby in my wallet but the data has been virtually spirited and used elsewhere.

I would have thought the police would have better things to do and I will actually sympathise with any luxembourg policeman who will complain about the absolute waste of time in filling this form. CETELEM is actually inconveniencing myself (I’ve got to go to the station) and the police (they have to fill the form – or at least I hope they will). This is where I prefer the Maltese banks who send an SMS when you perform transactions with your VISA.

Bahh. C’est la vie. Time to have another antiflu pill or whatever.

As I stated in the update to the previous post, Claudine Cassar of Alert Communications expressed her wish to make a few clarifications with regards to both the post as well as the stories circulating in the media about the launch of Trolleymania. The following is the full, unedited text of the email sent by Ms Cassar. Here at J’accuse we do not only believe in the freedom of speech but also in the right of reply. The forum is always open to whoever feels he has a point to make about anything said in this blog.

***

Hi Jacques,

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify some issues. There have been many ridiculous stories and ludicrous accusations floating around today and frankly I did not bother to reply to any of them. Your article, on the other hand, is a different story – I respect your opinion so it matters to me that there are several misconceptions that have been reproduced in your piece.

Let us start with this “e-venture capital” issue that apparently is going to send some dosh my company’s way. This is a falsehood that has been spread all over the comment boards and frankly it is getting beyond ridiculous now. The last comment I read put the figure at EUR 300,000 for a recycled project J It would be funny if it were not so sad that some people are willing to resort to spreading bare-faced lies simply because they are suffering from a very bad case of sour grapes.

Let me clarify. The portal was developed by Alert Communications and we are the ones who are bearing 90% of the costs related to development and all the costs related to hosting, maintenance and administration. We are not getting any hand-outs. We bought the servers, we are paying for the bandwidth, and we are paying the salaries for the help desk and all the technical and administrative support that we are giving our eShop operators. At the moment we are not making any dosh – we are just dishing it out!

I would be lying if I did not state clearly that my hope is in fact that in due course my company will get “a boost in custom and sales”. That is why I have invested so much time and money in this venture. I make no claims to being Mother Theresa. However it is going to take a long time to get to the point where we are going to make a profit because the running costs of this portal are very high.

The Ministry is contributing by promoting the eMall – but they are not spending anything remotely close to EUR 300,000. This is a fundamental part of such a portal’s success and there is no doubt that without their contribution, TrolleyMania would probably fail. I know, because I had already invested in the development of an eMall several years ago that failed because I simply did not have the wherewithal to promote it effectively. Is it an excellent arrangement and one that will benefit my company? Of course it is. However it must be said that this is an offer that the Government made to all of industry – it was a public call for tender and guess what, only three companies bothered to bid for it. All these companies that are now spamming the comment boards with lie upon lie did not even bother to bid when the opportunity arose, and yet they are now angry because we did bid and we were successful.

Sour grapes? Yes, definitely.

Now the GRTU issue. This requires some clarification. The GRTU wanted to give us a list of companies to black list from the mall. According to them these competitors, notwithstanding the fact that they are SMEs, are simply too competitive. They wanted us to exclude those companies that could offer Maltese consumers the best prices. Well, with all due respect, this simply does not make sense. We are no longer living in the day when Catch was the sole choccie available for me to satisfy my chocolate cravings. So TrolleyMania remains open to all Maltese SMEs who want to use it.

Is TrolleyMania a necessity for small companies in Malta to get involved in eCommerce. Well, let me put it this way. The government has launched scheme after scheme, giving away thousands of euros to SMEs who wanted to invest in such technologies – and yet the take-up was very low. The main problem is not money, it is time. Most small shop owners simply do not have the time to set up a distribution mechanism and tackle issues such as online stock management. So we did it for them – and that is why TrolleyMania is and will be a success. It is not because of the technology, there is no rocket science there! It is because we have made the whole process really easy for the merchant. Whenever a sale goes through, the merchant receives an email telling him how to pack stuff (Maltapost has weight limits per package) and automatically Maltapost gets notified and they go to the store to collect the item. We are mollycoddling these small shop owners and the result is that they have taken to the web enthusiastically.

I will not quibble with you regarding the name – some like it, some don’t. I happen to like it, so we are going to have to agree to disagree on that one J

I will however comment regarding the speed and the downtime that we experienced today. You are right, we were caught with our pants down. Not in a million years did we expect the response that we got. I am an optimistic person who really believes in this project and I came nowhere close to predicting the traffic that surged to the site!

To give you an idea, between 8pm and midnight yesterday we had 3671 unique visitors, who viewed a grand total of 115,600 pages – that means an average of 917 visits an hour, with each visitor viewing 31.5 pages per visit i.e. a total of 28885 page views per hour. This morning the figures were even higher than that.

Were we prepared for this onslaught? No, we were not. It was like the crazy rush at Lidl when chainsaws are for sale for €5.00 J In our case, however, the stampede did not calm down after half an hour, it just kept going on, hour after hour after hour, as people searched and registered and purchased stuff – until finally the server konked out.

So this morning we had no choice but to switch off the server, regroup and upgrade. It took us a few hours to sort the matter out because we changed hardware, upgraded bandwidth levels, etc. However the site was online again by around 4pm. Incredibly the stampede started again and is still ongoing! However now we are prepared and the site can take it.

Bring it on say I J

Claudine Cassar
Managing Director

Minutes after publishing this post I received a message from Alert Managing Director Claudine Cassar in which she expressed her desire to give her company’s point of view and highlight a few inaccuracies that were expressed in the post. I have invited Claudine Cassar to send me a write up that will be posted as an unedited post on J’accuse in the interests of clarity and fairness.

Malta, 2010. No, I do not have another “medieval” sin/fire and brimstone/backward society story to tell. The reason I had to double-check the year on my calendar this time round was the resounding flop that the government’s latest IT baby seems to be. It’s called Trolleymania and its launching was in the news (or should I say in the Government Gazette?) yesterday.

In one of its latest attempts in what it believes to be its own crusade to drag Maltese society kicking and screaming into the century of e-commerce, the IT Ministry headed by IT supremo Austin “e-powers” Gatt took the initiative of creating an e-mall. I’ll leave the official description to the Government mouthpiece:

TrolleyMania.com, as the venture is called, is aimed at all local businesses which want to venture into the world of e-commerce and start selling their products online, the ministry said. The project is a public-private partnership between Government and Alert Communications.

So there you are. Let’s start by looking at the idea. Essentially insofar as governmental initiatives go this is a laudable one. Admittedly it does come 7-10 years too late (amazon & ebay went online in 1995 – you’d expect  a knee-jerk reaction to set after six years of the e-success story) but hey it IS the government we are talking about. What with all Smart talk you’d have expected some bright spark to open his mouth and say – how about some e-venture capital to put our little businesses on the map?

Let me put it this way. 5 years ago when the saudade was beginning to set in I could buy Kinnie online from a Dutch website (mall if you like, but I’m guessing you rarely use the word) but there were few e-shops in Malta. If my memory serves me well I first used an e-service to buy a bouquet of flowers from Zammit Nurseries (and that still had to be followed up by a phone call to ensure the hazy online transaction was ok).

So. It’s the year of the lord 2010 and the government wants to help small businesses. Well, originally the MITA wanted to rope in medium enterprises but the GRTU was not exactly thrilled by the proposal. This sort of blew up the IT ministry’s plans since, by its own admission, without the products of larger enterprises the site would in all probability fail to attract a “critical mass”. Darn.

Which left the Ministry with what exactly? Well it left the ministry with a “public-private partnership” with Alert Communications Ltd. Which is another way of saying that Alert Communications will get some dosh to set up a venture that is normally the kind of investment entered into by entrepreneurial risk-taking individuals. With the excuse of stimulating the e-economy Alert gets a boost in custom and sales – because you pay to enter the scheme and you pay for maintenance.

Which is alright if you’re Alert. And Ok for a quickie PR exercise for Minister Gatt and PS whatsisname and MITA Chairman Claudio Grech and the sandwich caterers engaged for the launch. BUt is it ok for a real boost of the Maltese e-commerce industry?

Bah. The website takes ages to load, gets confused easily with the cookie system and once you choose a category of products you seem to be unable to switch to any other. The range of products presented – bar some paintings which should be emarrassed by the company with which they are plonked  – gives the impression of a glorified tal-Lira shop. The marketability of the name “TROLLEYMANIA” is highly dubious and is the obvious result of a guaranteed government backing where the pr team does not have to really worry that much of attracting new clients – the gov will hand out the dosh ANYWAY.

Trolley? Trolley? Mania? And then since when do we speak of “Malls” in Malta? Or Europe? The half-hearted approach is evident all over the slow loading website. Whatsmore a quick look around the Maltese corner of the web would have shown Minister Gatt the results of Maltese entrepreneurial spirit. Take the book sector: you could sprint over to the garish but effective Malta Online Bookstore or the amazon lookalike at Agenda, lest I be beaten with an encyclopaedia I rush to mention Merlin (website coming soon).

There’s more in other departments. The ebay style websites have flourished, restaurant delivery sites have improved and it is possible to browse some perfectly reasonable individual retailer sites without being put off e-commerce for life. The contribution of the IT ministry-Alert public-private initiative to the e-commerce world will barely register in the future.

So if you have 250€ to spare you’re best advised to invest it in some sound online advertising. Alternatively open an account on ebay and become a recognised e-vendor. Barrier to trade? Highly unlikely.

P.S. The site in question is www.trolleymania.com – “Scheduled Maintenance” is underway as I type.

A slowdown in sales of iPads has led to the slip of apple shares by 6% in after-hours trading. Apple has stated that it has sold 4.2m units by the end of September – 0.8m short of the predicted 5m target. Is this the beginning of the end of the apple i-revolution. Is Jobs taking his battles one step too far? Will the i-pad/pod/phone vs android war have the same disastrous consequences on Apple as the original Apple vs PC war?

It’s early days yet but the alternatives to the ipad are still new to the market and the test will be the forthcoming Christmas sales. Will Jobs be right about the unsuitability of the new tablets to the general idea embodied by the ipad? An interesting battle ahead as app-makers and consumers alike, not to mention the investors look closely at the most recent developments. I still think the ipad rocks …. and I have not even got one yet!

Related articles

• Apple Shares Drop On Weak iPad Sales (webguild.org)
• Apple iPad sales fail to hit forecasts (cnn.com)
• Steve Jobs blasts rivals as iPad sales disappoint (independent.co.uk)
• Jobs blasts rivals as iPad sales disappoint (independent.co.uk)

More on the world of copyright infringement and threats to consumers. On January 26th 2010 Hansard records show a lively debate in the House of Lords concerning the Digital Economy Bill amendments. One of the hot issues in that was the bullying methods of copyright holders vis-à-vis internet consumers. Here is what Lord Lucas had to say about the practice of sending threatening letters to consumers asking them to cough up a payment in lieu of facing exorbitant charges in court defending themselves:

I had a very helpful letter this morning from ACS:Law Solicitors which, combined with what the Ministers were saying on the last occasion we discussed this, leads me to a greater understanding of their reluctance to deal with the practices that ACS:Law Solicitors is pursuing. They expect these practices to become standard. They expect this to be the way that our citizens will be treated. If people fall foul of this Bill, they will have a couple of warning letters, but after that they will get a typical ACS:Law Solicitors standard letter saying, “Pay us £500 or we will take you to court”. If they do not pay the £500, they will end up in court, there will be technical evidence against them, and they will have no ability to provide a technical defence. That is the difficulty that people faced with ACS:Law Solicitors have at the moment. There is this inequality of arms. They are in a civil court, with a 50:50 balance-of-probability judgment, and must contemplate risking thousands of pounds in mounting a defence when it is not easy to do that.

The problem in the UK was, for a long time that law firms like ACS:Law would offer their services to rightsholders who believed that they were victims of internet piracy and then would proceed to send letters to persons identified by their IP in which they threatened to take them to court unless they paid a sum of money up front.

You can read more about the “legal blackmail” here in Ars Tecnica. The constant pressure in Malta on dreambox owners is not far from this kind of reality. In this case private companies are building up the pressure on law enforcers to turn practically one third of the tv viewing public into instant criminals. They hope to get most of the satellite viewers to desist from their “illegal activity” by creating an atmosphere of worry and terror.  We look forward to see how far up the path they are willing to go.

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