Entrepreneur is latest executive to leave 'too bureaucratic' HP as tech giant announces 27,000 job cuts and drop in net profits

British entrepreneur Mike Lynch, whose company Autonomy was bought by the US technology giant Hewlett-Packard for £7bn last year, is leaving the company as part of a worldwide layoff of 27,000 staff.

Lynch's departure is the latest in a stream of resignations by former top executives at the UK software company amid accusations that HP is too bureaucratic, and counterclaims that Lynch and his team failed to deliver on revenue targets.

But it now means that Lynch – a Cambridge graduate whose out-of-hours tastes include koi carp and model railways – could set up a new business in the "big data" sector, where Autonomy and its rivals are competing to process and make sense of huge amounts of information.

"He's not going away," said a source familiar with Lynch's thinking. "He still has entrepreneurial ambitions."

HP announced Lynch's departure as part of its second-quarter results presentation late yesterday. Net profit was down 31.6% year-on-year to $1.98bn on revenue down 3% to $30.7bn.

Even so, the results bettered expectations on Wall Street, where HP is seen as a once-great business trying to transform itself into a rival to IBM and failing because its management can neither execute nor inspire innovation from the ranks. The fact that the company is on its third chief executive in as many years is telling too. The firm said the savings made from staff cuts – around 8% of its global headcount of 340,000 – would be used to "boost investment in innovation".

Lynch is a brilliant mathematician whose initial work exploited a branch of mathematics called Bayes's theorem – essentially, determining how you make choices as data becomes available.

Its simplest exposition is called the "Monty Hall" problem, from the US TV show Let's Make a Deal. You're shown three doors and told that behind one is a car, and behind two others nothing. Choose the one with the car, and you'll win it. So you pick a door. But then the host – who knows what's behind which door – opens one of the other two, with nothing behind, and gives you the chance to change your choice. Should you? (The answer's at the end.)

After founding the company in 1996 with Richard Gaunt, Lynch encouraged risk-taking as part of Autonomy's culture, to stay ahead of the technological curve. As computing power increased exponentially along with the vast amount of information needing to be processed, the company thrived. It has 20,000 clients, with management contracts for giants such as Citigate and Shell. Autonomy also drives the UK police's Holmes 2 system, which can tie together fingerprints, witness statements and police reports.

It was known as a lean ship with few management layers – completely unlike HP. The signs that the takeover was not working became clear quite quickly as the head of financing, marketing and several sales chiefs left after the takeover was completed in October 2011. "It's not just Mike," said a source who knew of the departures at Autonomy.

It is ironic that HP was seen as too bureaucratic. For years it was regarded as a touchstone for innovation – producing, among other things, the inkjet printer, still one of its major income streams.

Sources close to Lynch indicated that he and his former team had been unhappy at the scale of bureaucracy after the merger. "It's not the kind of environment that helps this sort of company," said the source. "It was a clash of cultures. Mike was previously dealing with a small, nimble atmosphere, whereas HP is the size of a small city. It's a hard place to do what you need to do."

HP is trying to shrink that city with the 27,000 job cuts. (That's almost as many people as live in the Australian capital city of Canberra.)

Those cuts will be completed by November 2014, and will be used "to boost investment in innovation around [HP's] three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as in other segments that offer attractive growth potential," the company said.

Autonomy, by contrast, was the size of a village: around 1,800 people, split between the UK and US, with key clients in banks and large enterprises.

Autonomy's software can sift emails, documents and even phone calls and elucidate the meaning inherent in them. "Our technology allows computers to make sense of human conversations," Lynch told Director magazine in May 2011. "That's the unfair advantage that allowed two slightly nerdy people from Cambridge to create a FTSE 100 company."

HP's former chief executive Leo Apotheker led the bid for Autonomy in August 2011. The deal was concluded even after Apotheker was forced out by a boardroom revolt over his leadership in September, when former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman took over.

But it is the failure of HP so far to integrate Autonomy, and to keep its managers happy, that has drawn the focus of investors and analysts. "I think [Lynch] took the money and ran," said one analyst. "If you look at the price HP paid, it was an excellent deal for the Autonomy shareholders. I wonder to what extent he has really put his shoulder to the wheel since."

Even so, HP is still betting its future on Autonomy. "This big data field is as hot as mustard," said an HP source. "The challenge is how you scale that business from being $4bn in revenues to $8bn in revenues, which Meg [Whitman] knows about from eBay."

An HP executive, chief strategy officer and enterprise software executive vice-president Bill Veghte, will take over the running of Autonomy.

HP sources also indicated that the board did not try to persuade Lynch to stay on – a sign that the two cultures, of the entrepreneurial Cambridge mathematician and the Silicon Valley giant, were never going to fit. But everyone will be watching to see which door Lynch next opens.

• The doors problem? You should switch. When you originally chose, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being right. If you switch, you have a 1 in 2 chance of being right. Your overall chance, if you switch, becomes 2 in 3. (Try drawing a grid of the options.) A longer explanation is at Wikipedia.

Schmidt warns about rise of censorship and government cybercrime in speech at London's Science Museum

Nations that carry out cybercrimes and wreak online havoc pose the greatest threat to the future of the internet, the chairman of Google has warned.

In a speech delivered at London's Science Museum on Wednesday, Eric Schmidt said the internet would be vulnerable for at least 10 years, and that every node of the public web needed upgrading to protect against crime. Fixing the problem was a "huge task" as the internet was built "without criminals in mind" he said.

"While threats come from individuals and even groups of people, the biggest problem will be activities stemming from nations that seek to do harm. It is very difficult to identify the source of cyber-criminality and stop it," he said.

The Google chairman raised a series of fears in a speech that announced a new initiative to send teachers into UK schools to teach computer science, and called for more people to enter science and engineering to drive industry.

Speaking at the museum, Schmidt said he worried about the permanence of information on the internet and its impact on individuals in future. "The fact that there is no delete button on the internet forces public policy choices we had never imagined," he said. "A false accusation in your youth used to fade away; now it can remain forever."

Schmidt also used his speech to warn about the rise in governments that censor online material, up from four a decade ago to at least 40 today. Through filtering, governments could build their own "Balkanised web", where people saw different information online depending on who and where they were, without anyone knowing what had been censored.

"Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the web, and there is no room for complacency," he said.

Last year in the annual MacTaggart lecture, Schmidt was highly critical of Britain's failure to teach computer programming in schools. Continuing the theme at the Science Museum, he blamed a lack of exposure to computer science in secondary schools, where only 4,000 students studied the subject in 2011, making up less than half a percent of that year's A-level results.

A January report from the Royal Society agreed there was a shortage of teachers equipped to teach the nuts and bolts of computer science, from computer architecture to the concept of an algorithm and writing software. Since then, the education secretary, Michael Gove, has scrapped the existing ICT curriculum, freeing schools to teach a broader mix of computer science and programming.

Schmidt conceded that "rebooting computer science education" would not be straightforward, and announced plans to fund a training scheme for teachers to help improve Britain's failing computer science education system.

Working with the charity Teach First, Schmidt said the first batch of 100 "first-rate" teachers would be trained this summer and have bursaries to buy teaching aids, such as cheap Raspberry Pi or Arduino computer starter kits. They will receive on-the-job mentoring and training for a further two years. The Google project aims to help around 20,000 pupils from the most disadvantaged communities.

A vocal champion of engineering, in his speech on Wednesday Schmidt also emphasised the need to dispel the "oily rag stereotype" view of engineers. Research by Intel in the US, he said, found that two thirds of teenagers never considered a career in engineering. But simply learning about their roles in making video games and social networking, and in high-profile incidents such as the rescue of the Chilean miners, made half reconsider.

"Put simply, technology breakthroughs can't happen without the scientists and engineers to make them. The challenge society faces is to equip enough people, with the right skills and mindset, and to get them to work on the most important problems.

"This is where education comes in. Great scientists are a rare breed, so the more who study science, the greater chance of finding those for whom it becomes a vocation. Although there are some signs of progress, so long as more kids aspire to win X Factor than win a Nobel Prize, there's room to improve," Schmidt said.

Last year, Google donated more than £1m to the Science Museum to fund a gallery on the history of communications, from telegraphs to tweets. Part of the money has funded an exhibition devoted to the life and legacy of Alan Turing, often described as the "father of the computer", which opens next month. Among the exhibits will be installations that anyone in the world can control over the internet, including one that allows people to make music through remote controlled robotic instruments.

Jury foreman says he was often only holdout as jury sided with Google over infringement questions, as Oracle is left with little to show from expensive lawsuit

Google's Android mobile platform does not infringe Oracle's patents, a California jury decided on Wednesday, putting an indefinite hold on Oracle's quest for damages in a fight between the two Silicon Valley giants over smartphone technology.

In a case that examined whether computer language that connects programs and operating systems can be copyrighted, Oracle had claimed that Google's Android tramples on its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language.

Google argued it did not violate Oracle's patents, and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, an open source software language.

In addition to finding for Google on patents, the jury foreman at the San Francisco federal court told reporters that the final vote on a key copyright issue earlier in the case had heavily favoured Google.

David Sunshine, a New York-based intellectual property lawyer who advises hedge funds, said the outcome of the Google trial was humbling for Oracle. Had it won, it could have gained handsome payouts given the growing market for Android devices.

"It's a huge blow," Sunshine said.

Colleen Chien, a professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley, said the result showed the risks of IP litigation.

"Oracle came in this thinking it was going to win billions. Now it will probably walk away losing millions in legal fees," she said.

Oracle trials

For Oracle and its aggressive chief executive Larry Ellison, the trial against Google over Java was the first of several scheduled this year against large competitors. Another trial is set to begin next week between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard over the Itanium microprocessor.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said the company would continue to defend and uphold Java's unique functionality.

"Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java," she said.

Attorneys for Oracle looked grim after the verdict, while Google lawyers smiled and shook hands. Google general counsel Kent Walker said the company felt it was important to send a message by taking the case to trial.

"We didn't want to back down when we felt the facts were on our side," Walker told Reuters.

Although the jury found earlier that Oracle had proven copyright infringement for parts of Java, it could not unanimously agree on whether Google could fairly use that material.

Without a finding against Google on the fair use question, Oracle cannot recover damages on the bulk of its copyright claims.

And US District Judge William Alsup has not yet decided on several legal issues that could determine how a potential retrial on copyright would unfold, if at all.

Ahead of the trial, some observers had expressed concern that if Oracle succeeded in its copyright claims, it would be equivalent to allowing computer languages themselves to be copyrighted, which would set a dangerous precedent for untrammelled use of products and ideas.

API question

Judge Alsup has yet to rule on one key question: whether language APIs – application programming interfaces, which provide external "hooks" for processes – can be copyrighted.

Alsup has indicated that he will rule on that separately in the next stage of the trial, in which damages will be set. The jury indicated that they did not think APIs could be copyrighted, but Alsup has retained that determination as a matter of law.

Jury foreman Greg Thompson, 52, said that at times he was the only holdout for Oracle on the key "fair use" copyright question. When the jury finally declared itself deadlocked, the final vote count was 9-3 in favor of Google, Thompson said.

According to Thompson, a retirement plan specialist, one of the other jurors used a food analogy to describe Oracle's evidence.

"He said he was waiting for the steak, and all he got was the parsley," Thompson said. He added that in his opinion, Google's arguments in favour of open software collaboration swayed the more tech-savvy jurors.

All the other jurors filed past reporters outside the courtroom and declined to comment.

Walker said he was briefing a group of Google engineers about the company's legal issues when news of the verdict came in. "There was a real round of applause," he said.

The high-profile trial began in mid-April and heard testimony from a number of key staff, including Ellison, Google chief executive Larry Page and Android chief Andy Rubin.

Android revelation

While Google has won a major victory through the jury verdicts, the trial documents revealed more detail about Android's financial position than it might have wished.

During the trial, Judge Alsup revealed that Android generated roughly $97.7m (£62.3m) in revenue during the first quarter of 2010, and other documents fished from Google's archives indicated how profitable it had been.

Android, the documents showed, has been far more successful than Google had expected it to be, with uptake by handset makers and customers running far ahead of predictions in 2010.

While Oracle is seeking about $1bn in copyright damages, the patent damages in play were much lower.

In the event it lost on patent liability, Google offered to pay Oracle roughly $2.8m in damages on the two patents remaining in the case, covering the period through 2011, according to a filing made jointly by the companies before trial.

For future damages, Google proposed paying Oracle 0.5% of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015% on a second patent until it expires in April 2018. Oracle rejected the proposal.

Shares in Oracle closed 1.2% higher at $26.68. Google stock was up 1.4% at $609.46.

Now they call it Fadebook – shareholders call in lawyers as stock price tumbles and regulators are not far behind

Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone from hero to zero as the stockmarket flotation of the decade flounders amid lawsuits and accusations of greed, hype and deception.

The law firm that won a $7bn settlement for Enron's shareholders is pursuing Zuckerberg, his board and the long list of banks advising the company for making "untrue statements" about its financial performance.

Robbins Geller is bringing the second class action law suit in as many days against Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and a host of Silicon Valley luminaries including PayPal guru Peter Thiel. A separate suit filed in California on Tuesday by investor Darryl Lazar claims that the social network's share prospectus contained "materially false and misleading statements".

The regulators are also closing in. Mary Schapiro, chair of America's main financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, said: "I think there is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and in the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook."

After months of hype about the float of the social networking site, which has nearly a billion users across the globe, the appetite for its shares has collapsed since its launch at $38 per share on Friday. The shares are now trading at $31.78, leaving the company that boasts a user base including half the American population is worth £4bn less than it was six days ago, and earning it a new moniker: Fadebook.

So while the social network's bankers and its wealthy early investors have profited handsomely from the float, the legal profession is set to cash in.

Both lawsuits claim that certain investors had access to information that would have dented confidence in the shares, while others were left in the dark.

The problems began on 9 May, when Facebook amended its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus with a short and, for some, hard-to-interpret reference to the fact that while its usage on mobile phones was growing exponentially, the company was finding it harder to sell advertising on its mobile website than on "desktop" pages.

Analysts promptly began revising their forecasts. Those included Scott Devitt, who covers consumer internet firms for Morgan Stanley. The bank, as lead underwriter for the IPO, was employed as Facebook's cheerleader-in-chief.

According to Reuters – Morgan Stanley has not yet made the date or the content of the forecasts available to the public – Devitt decided that revenues in the second quarter of this year, which runs until the end of June, would be $1.111bn (£705m), down from an earlier estimate of $1.175bn. He shaved full-year forecasts too, from $5bn to $4.85bn. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, the second and third lead underwriters, also downgraded their estimates.

Participating banks cannot publicly issue research or make recommendations until 40 days after an IPO is priced, but their analysts are allowed to communicate estimates orally to customers. The concern is that this information may have filtered through only to a privileged few rather than the wider public.

In a statement, Morgan Stanley said a "significant number" of analysts in the IPO syndicate reduced their estimates after Facebook's disclosure on 9 May, adding: "Morgan Stanley followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs. These procedures are in compliance with all applicable regulations."

The actions of Facebook's underwriters in the days that followed gave no hint of the information they were receiving from their own number-crunchers.

On Tuesday, 15 May, the range at which they estimated the float would be priced was raised from $28–$35 to $34–$38. A day later, the insiders and early investors who had invested in Facebook during private funding rounds increased the number of shares they planned to sell during the IPO by a massive 25%.

Those most likely to have heard the analysts' downgrades may have decided that the shares would not enjoy the widely expected day-one surge, seen when Google and the professional networking site LinkedIn went public. Basically, for those in the know, at $38 a share, Facebook was a "sell".

Smaller retail investors appear to have paid the price. Only 10% to 15% of shares were thought likely to go to small shareholders. Estimates suggest that the bulk of the 84m extra shares released last Wednesday went to investors at the bottom of the tree.

Chad Brand, founder of the investment adviser Peridot Capital, had put in orders at E*Trade, one of the underwriters. Brand wrote on his blog: "I did not really think they would allocate us any shares ... What happened? We got every share we asked for."

Some of the retail clients who called him that day were getting up to 20,000 shares. Jacob Salzmann, named as a plaintiff in the case being brought by Robbins Geller, spent $124,000 buying shares at $41.766 a piece. By close of play on Tuesday, they were worth just $31.

David Joy, an analyst at wealth adviser Ameriprise Financial, wrote in a note to clients: "These developments reinforce the notion that the underwriters did a wonderful job of pricing the offering in order to maximise the profitability to the company's insiders and its private investors but [they] left very little on the table for public investors in the secondary market."

Designer behind iPhone, iPod, iMac and iPad flies from US with family to be knighted by Princess Anne

The Apple designer Sir Jonathan Ive has spoken of the "thrilling" moment when he was knighted by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace.

The 45-year-old, who is senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple, flew to Britain from the US with his wife and eight-year-old twin sons to receive the honour.

"It has been wonderful. It was really thrilling and particularly humbling," he said after being made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to design and enterprise.

Ive, who was born in Chingford, north-east London, is credited withdesigning some of the best-loved gadgets of the modern age, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac and iPad.

He said he and Princess Anne had talked about how often he comes to the UK and about her iPad.

Asked about the impact of his products on the modern world, Ive said: "We don't really spend much time thinking about our impact.

We are fully consumed with trying to make the very best products that we can."

Also being knighted was Sir Peter Bazalgette, 59, the TV programme-maker behind hit series including Big Brother, Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Ground Force.

He said he was particularly pleased to be receiving a knighthood as he is the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the civil engineer who was knighted in the 19th century for his work designing and overseeing the building of an enclosed sewer network for London.

Bazalgette said his knighthood was a "huge honour".

The Porters are moving to Wales and satellite seems to be the only option for broadband. But how does it work, and how do they choose a supplier?

We have decided to leave the big city behind and move to a very remote location in Wales. After extensive research, it appears the only internet option is satellite broadband, but I am getting so confused by all the options such as renting the equipment, data allowances and different speeds etc. It would be greatly appreciated if you can explain the basics for us less technically minded folk. We currently use the internet to stay in contact with relatives, and a world without internet seems a dull one indeed!
Rob Porter

Satellites are used to broadcast radio and TV signals over a wide area. With UK services, this usually stretches from the bottom of Italy to the southern parts of Scandinavia, and as far west as Portugal. This is an efficient and cheap use of bandwidth. People who want to receive these broadcasts need a satellite dish to collect the signals, plus equipment to decode and display them – typically a TV set and a set-top box.

The same satellites also broadcast data to individual recipients. However, bandwidth is expensive and limited, so this is neither cheap nor efficient. It only makes sense because it can reach areas that are not served by landlines or even 3G mobile services. You can get satellite broadband almost anywhere, as long as you have a clear view to the south.

When I used Astra's satellite broadband service a decade or so ago, it was broadcast only: the back-channel for sending emails and requesting web pages was a dial-up modem connected to an ordinary phone line. Today's two-way satellite services use satmodems that can both send and receive data.

Also, today's satellite broadband services use variants of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) technology developed for digital television. This is faster and can work with smaller dishes, typically 75cm rather than 1m to 2m across. Even so, speeds are much slower than you would get with ADSL2. Advertised download speeds range from 1Mbps to 10Mbps, with upload speeds of 128kbps to about 2Mbps.

The main drawbacks with satellite broadband are contention and latency. Contention comes from the fact that thousands of people may be trying to access the satellite "doorway" (perhaps a 4GB channel) at the same time. If there are more requests for data than the satellite can handle, some users have to wait. Against that, some services offer free data use during the night (after 11pm) when demand is low.

Latency comes from the fact that the signal has to travel about 36,000km up to the geostationary satellite, and 36,000km down to the ISP's server, so the round trip is 144,000km. This introduces the slight delay that is noticeable with satellite-connected phone calls. It makes satellite broadband unsuitable for fast-action games, but isn't a problem with most web pages. (Badly written web pages – ones that require dozens of server "hits" – can be a problem, but satellite service providers try to assemble whole pages before sending them.)

A third problem is that satellite connections can be affected by bad weather, though that shouldn't be much of a problem with modern equipment. Much the same technology is, after all, used for Sky television and Freesat.

To use satellite broadband, you will need a dish and a satmodem, but these can vary from service to service, so it's best to get the whole package from one supplier. You can either assemble and install the dish yourself, or have it done for you. I opted to have the whole thing installed and working. It's sufficiently complicated that I'd recommend this approach to anyone who doesn't know much about it. It's very easy to receive a satellite signal, but sending one requires a higher-quality dish and accurate alignment.

Making the purchase is also complicated. The best approach is to set up a spreadsheet of suppliers, check off the functions you need, and enter the prices.

The functions you should consider include upload and download speeds, the monthly data allowance, whether the service supports VoIP for making phone calls (possibly with a UK phone number), whether you get a British IP (internet protocol) address, and whether you can get any TV channels from the same dish. In my case, the IP address came from the Astra server in Luxembourg, so I wouldn't have had direct access to the BBCs iPlayer service, if it had existed at the time.

Check the limitations in the "fair use" policies and find out what happens if you go over your monthly data allowance, which might be anything from 2GB to 10GB per month. You may be able to buy top-ups for £15-£25 per gigabyte, or the service provider may allow you to keep using the service, but throttle the speed. You can usually start with a low-end package and upgrade it if you find you are using too much data.

Either way, bandwidth is expensive. Satellite connections are fine for daily email and web browsing, but a YouTube clip can easily consume 10MB to 50MB. Obviously, it would be foolish to use 2GB to download a single movie. Video chats and internet radio also consume a lot of bandwidth, and file-sharing is silly unless it's restricted to a free overnight service.

When it comes to pricing, you will need spreadsheet entries for the start-up costs – satellite dish, satmodem, installation, activation – and the running costs, ie the speed and bandwidth allowance per month. The startup costs can range from about £300 to more than £1,000, depending on the equipment. Some costs may be bundled into the monthly bills. This is much the same as getting a "free" £600 smartphone: you still pay £600 for it, but the cost is hidden in 24 monthly payments.

If you don't want to do the work, then BeyonDSL appears to be worth a go. Its ValuePlus services start at £14.99 per month for a 2GB allowance with a 2Mbps download speed, and go up to £49.99 per month for 12GB with download speeds of up to 10Mbps. Until 31 May, BeyonDSL is offering the hardware for £99.99 instead of £299.99, but that's for the DIY kit. A professional installation costs "from £89.99" and activation costs £50. Yes, it all adds up.

While you can use Skype and similar services with BeyonDSL, you can also get a dedicated VoIP service for an extra £6.99 per month. This sets up a separate channel so video chats do not come out of your monthly allowance.

The BeyonDSL website also has details of The Welsh Assembly Broadband Support Scheme. "Qualifying Welsh residents, businesses and 3rd sector organisations can apply for up to £1,000 for a satellite broadband installation from BeyonDSL," until the money runs out.

I haven't tried BeyonDSL, but the company is run by Mike Locke, whom I've known in a professional capacity for quite a long time. He worked for Amstrad in the 1990s before moving to Astra, where he supplied the satellite service I reviewed in the Guardian. He knows his stuff.

In any case, BeyonDSL's new "value" broadband service is actually based on the Astra2Connect service (aka SES Broadband) using the 28.2°E Astra 3 satellite. This means that if you want TV as well, you'll need a separate dish and a TV LNB for the 23.5°E Astra 2 satellite, or choose one of BeyonDSL's Broadband/TV packages. These cost from £24.99 to £69.99 per month.

Apogee Internet is an alternative provider of Astra2Connect services using the same satellites as BeyonDSL. Its Max Value home packages cost from £12.99 (2GB at 2Mbps) to £47.99 (10GB at 10Mbps) per month. Services that also include satellite TV cost from £17.99 to £65.99 per month.

A rival offering is the Tooway Direct service offered by Tariam Satellite Communications, which is a division of Satellite Solutions Worldwide Ltd. It sells home packages at prices from £24.99 to £99.99 per month. It also provides UK IP addresses. See the FAQ for more details.

Tooway costs more, but it's fast. It uses Eutelsat's new Ka-Sat (9° East) satellite, which is described as "the first High Throughput Satellite (HTS) in Europe." Business users can get download speeds of 40Mbps. (Ka-band satellites use a much higher frequency than Ku-band satellites and can carry much more data.)

Other companies also sell the Tooway service under their own brand names, if you don't want to go direct.

You may also find established satellite broadband services that use the Avanti Hylas-1 satellite at 33.5° West. Examples include Simply Balanced and Ethnet. You could include them in your spreadsheet, but they don't look particularly attractive compared to Astra2Connect and Tooway-based services.

One last point. When you move to Wales, ask around in the local post office, church, pub etc to find out if anyone already has satellite internet, what they think about it, and whether they would recommend a local installer. If you are lucky, that could be a simple way to solve the problem.

Lawmakers introduced identical bills in the senate and assembly that would require identification of anonymous commenters

Online commenters aren't exactly known for their kind words, but lawmakers in New York want to hold their constituents to a higher standard. A few Empire State lawmakers want to address that problem by doing away with anonymous commenting.

Identical bills in the senate and assembly require anonymous posts to be deleted by administrators of New York-based websites, including "social networks, blog forums, message boards, or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages." 

The proposal has the tech and legal communities reeling – if not outright giggling.

"There are lots of good reasons to ban anonymous comments, and also a lot of good reasons to have anonymous comments, and the state assembly weighing on the issue is strange and slightly ridiculous, slightly goofy," Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia law school, told the Guardian.

"It is hard to imagine the value of a law that would, for example, make Columbia's course evaluation illegal. Not to mention it's an obvious first amendment violation."

If the bills pass, website administrators would be required to provide a contact number or email address for people to request anonymous comment removals. Upon receiving a complaint, the website would then be required to contact the original commenter and give them a 48-hour window to identify their posts.

If the anonymous commenter chooses not to identify themselves by providing their IP address, legal name and home address within the 48-hour slot, the website must delete the comment. 

Assemblyman Jim Conte, who co-sponsored the bill, says the bill is meant to combat cyber-bullying. Conte wrote: 

With more and more people relying on social media and the internet to communicate and gather information, it is imperative that the legislature put into place some type of safeguard to prevent people from using the Internet's cloak of anonymity to bully our children and make false accusations against local businesses and elected officials.

A variety of cases prosecuting anonymous commenters have arisen in the past few years, but this seems to be the first piece of statewide legislation. 

In April, a Texas couple won a $13.8m defamation lawsuit against anonymous commenters who accused the couple of being sexual deviants, molesters and drug dealers on Topix, a local forum website. The offending commenters were discovered when Topix disclosed the commenters information, including IP addresses.

Federal prosecutor Sal Perricone resigned after a justice department investigation revealed that he posted over 600 anonymous comments on a New Orleans news site. Perricone was identified after one of his targets hired a linguist to analyze the comments.

Last year, the Indianapolis Star argued that shield laws, used to protect journalists, should also apply to the anonymous commenters on their site. The court rejected this argument, but did say in other cases, commenters could be considered sources, and therefore be protected by shield laws. They also adopted the Dendrite rule, which gives the commenters an opportunity to respond and demand a significant amount of evidence to prove the comments are illegal.

Unlike these cases, New York's legislation places the responsibility on the website owners. Though, as David Kravets of Wired notes, "Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content."

After a flurry of recent Valley IPOs, it's time for a 75% tax and for people to drop the bling

I think I've found a cure for California's financial and cultural deficits. First, the symptoms. Financially, California is close to being bankrupt, it spends more than it makes and runs a huge $361bn debt, as illustrated by the online, live Debt Clock.

Unemployment is high; infrastructure is neglected; the pride of California, its UC Colleges, must raise tuition beyond the reach of the very people it was supposed to bring into higher education; California's state parks, another treasure, are neglected and being closed.

Fortunately, there's a solution – and it's right in our neighbourhood. We've seen the wealth created by a flurry of recent Valley IPOs, and we've watched the rise in share price of more established companies. From Apple to Zynga, Facebook, and LinkedIn, we have a fresh crop of McBillionaires ready to help.

So, here's what we're going to do.

First, let's all agree: $100K in monthly compensation is plenty. Beyond that, a 75% tax rate will help replenish the Golden State's coffers.

Second, millionaires and billionaires won't suffer much from a small yearly tax on their assets: 0.25% from $1.5m to $5m, half a penny on every asset dollar from $5m and up. Simplifying a bit, if you have $10m in assets you'll pay about $50K in asset taxes every year, $100m yields $500K, $1bn (think Facebook IPO) brings in $5m, and so on. A pittance for the great feeling of helping one's fellow Californians.

Then there's culture. Californians are perceived as a bunch of materialists obsessed with bling, cars, tans, IPOs, wineries, private jets, and various types of cosmetic augmentation and reduction. Outsiders deride our materialism, they call us nekulturny, they joke that the difference between yoghurt and California is that yoghurt has a living culture.

We can change all this by adding a simple clause to our asset tax code: works of art are non-taxable. This would result in an explosion of art purchases and patronage. Sculptures, paintings, installations would grace every home and office of substance; artists from all over the world would flock to California, a Villa Medici for the 21st century.

Finally, we have to take care of our abused high-tech workers. Think of the poor Facebook programmers who had to spend yet another night in front of their computers before the IPO. Management profiteers attempt to ennoble this abuse by calling it a hackathon and parading the participants before the media, but we're not buying it.

Let's put an end to these destructive and demoralising practices. Instead of a single 70-hour work week, we'll create two jobs, hire two employees, each working 35 hours per week. And to promote a serene atmosphere, let's agree that companies with 50 employees or more will have a "worker council" to oversee decisions such as staffing changes, compensation levels, group activities, layoffs, and the like.

Of course, as with any bold reform, some unintended, counter-productive side-effects may need to be considered.

Let's start with the asset tax scenario. You work at a successful Valley company, you make good money and decide to help younger entrepreneurs by recycling your gains into their creations. You invest $1m in a startup and get 20% of its shares. As expected, you have to pay the asset tax on that investment, every year. The company attracts new investors at a higher valuation. Great, your initial $1m is now worth, say, $10m … on paper. You will now pay 10 times as much asset tax as before, $50K every year. Unfortunately, after years of valiant struggle, the company shuts down. You lose your investment – and the cumulated asset tax. You would have been better off buying art instead. Less angst, more civic pride (although, admittedly, less investment and innovation, fewer jobs).

You've long figured out I'm not serious. A 75% tax bracket, an asset tax, a 35-hour work week and worker councils – such naive measures would create a massive flight of money and talent out of California and into neighbouring states that would be delighted to benefit from our bone-headed reforms.

And you've also figured out that the measures I've outlined, in a slightly oversimplified form, are or will shortly be in force in France. The asset tax is almost 30 years old and its current rate is likely to increase; the 75% income tax bracket is an election campaign promise and, believe it or not, the works-of-art exception is real.

This has resulted in a number of unfortunate countermeasures: High-tech execs pull up stakes and head to London or Brussels; European headquarters move out of Paris and Lyon or are created elsewhere. All because, to paraphrase François de Closets, French demagogues see no difference between Steve Jobs's fortune and traders' loot.

The 35-hour work week experiment failed to stanch French unemployment. The code that complicates the management of companies employing 50 or more people, as Frédéric noted two weeks ago, has resulted in an abnormally high number of companies with 49 workers or less.

From the outside, this is puzzling: Instead of attracting talent and capital, France creates a combination of fact and perception working against the very interests it purports to protect. In addition to the flight of taxable assets, this will accelerate the Brain Drain French officials often rail against. In the US – and particularly in California – we welcome French entrepreneurs, engineers, business people – and money. Do French politicians understand the real world, or will they continue to closet themselves in the French Exception's virtual reality?

—JLG@mondaynote.com

Twitter closed after it refused to remove tweets promoting a page urging people to post images of prophet Muhammad

Pakistan's rambunctious Twitter users have been briefly silenced after the government closed the site amid fears blasphemous pictures might be circulated.

Muhammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, said the micro-blogging site had been shut down on Sunday after it refused to remove tweets promoting a Facebook page encouraging people to post images of the prophet Muhammad.

He said Facebook agreed to address Pakistan's concerns but officials had failed to persuade Twitter to do the same. "We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it," Yaseen said.

Officials from Facebook and Twitter were not immediately available for comment.

The ban was made largely irrelevant by tech-savvy users. Twitter members, many aided by online articles in the Pakistani media explaining how to circumvent the curbs, installed proxy servers to shield their web browsing. Once back online, many posted angry tweets about the shutdown.

One poster wondered how a known terrorist "can roam and operate freely in Pakistan whilst social media is banned!"

Farieha Aziz, of the Bolo Bhi advocacy group, said the government was repeating the mistake of 2010, when Facebook was blocked for two weeks because of a group page called Everybody Draw Mohammed. Although there had been protests in the runup to the event last year, Aziz said the ban gave the group more publicity, particularly in Islamic countries outside Pakistan.

"This year, however, everyone had been completely oblivious to this," she added. "Shutting down Twitter will just drive more traffic to them."

According to the government, about 20% of Pakistan's 180 million people have access to the internet, while 64% have connections through their mobile phone.

The web is increasingly important among the country's fast-growing urban middle class. A campaign run by Imran Khan, the former cricketer turned politician, who has more than 270,000 followers on Twitter, has been particularly popular.

In addition to blocking Facebook and Twitter, the government has in the past tried to control derogatory text messages insulting government figures and has considered a national firewall to potentially screen all web traffic.

Emrys Schoemaker, director of iMedia, a research organisation that studies social media in Pakistan, said attempts to control the internet reflected a shift from the media freedoms introduced by the former president Pervez Musharraf.

"This is a very defensive, dated response to politics in the digital era," Schoemaker said. "Closing down debate simply makes the voices louder."

Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay $675,000 for 30 songs he downloaded a decade ago after being sued by four labels

The supreme court has refused to hear the appeal of a former Boston University student who was ordered by a lower court to pay $675,000 for 30 songs he downloaded in high school.

Joel Tenenbaum was ordered by a jury in 2009 to pay $675,000 – $22,500 per song – after the Recording Industry Association of America sued him on behalf of four labels.

The trial judge, citing constitutional concerns, reduced the fine by 90%. The companies – Sony BMG, Warner Bros Records, Atlantic Records, Arista Records and UMG Recordings – subsequently appealed to the first circuit, which reinstated the original fine.

Tenebaum petitioned for the US supreme court to review the case, claiming the US Copyright Act, which he claims is unconstitutional. Without comment, the court refused to hear Tenenbaum's challenge.

The case will now return to a federal judge in Boston, who will decide whether the fine against Tenenbaum will stand.

"They're trying to create an urban legend out of me – the kid who downloaded music," he told the Guardian.

Though Tennenbaum is being charged for downloading and distributing 30 songs, including Eminem's My Name Is and Beastie Boys' (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party), Sony gave evidence that Tenenbaum was downloading and distributing thousands of songs over the course of several years. RIAA focused on only 30 songs for efficiency.

"We're pleased with the decision," an RIAA spokesperson said in a statement.

Tenenbaum, now 28, who graduated on Sunday from BU with a doctorate in statistical physics, is one of more than 12,000 people the Recording Industry Association of America sued in the mid-2000s for illegally sharing music. All but two of those cases were either dismissed or settled out of court.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the only other person to go to trial for copyright infringement, has been in and out of court since 2007. A judge last year reduced the penalty imposed on Thomas-Rasset from $1.5m to $54,000, and an appeals court has scheduled arguments next month for her.

(Both Thomas-Rasset and Tenenbaum have Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls on their prosecution playlist.)

RIAA wrote that they offered Tenenbaum to settle for $5,000 at the start, but claim he rejected all their settlement offers. Tenenbaum told the Guardian he offered RIAA $5,250, but the RIAA wanted $12,000.

"That didn't strike me as a negotiation," Tenenbaum told the Guardian. "That struck me as them dictating terms without fair trial or process."

In court documents, the record companies say that Tenenbaum continued downloading for two years after they sent him a letter notifying him that his conduct was illegal and warning him of impending legal action.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit membership organization working to protect the rights of technology users, filed a brief oh behalf of Tenenbaum in the original case.

"One thing that for sure is that it didn't put a dent in the exponential growth of peer to peer file-sharing," Corynee McSherry, intellectual property director at the EFF, told the Guardian.

The 'always-on' connectivity of email on smartphones has become a life-destroying monster. You need help…

One of the great cautionary adages of our culture is: "Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it." And it applies in spades to the kind of instantaneous, always-on connectivity that many of us now enjoy, courtesy of the internet and mobile phones. Except that enjoy is perhaps not quite the right word. Talk to any busy person nowadays about the joys of email, for example, and the most common response is a rueful shrug. A technology that was once a magical tool for communicating has somehow become a millstone round people's necks.

It was bad enough when email was confined to desktop PCs. But, once the smartphone arrived, first with the BlackBerry then via the iPhone and Androids, email had the power to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the day – and night. The result was an inexorable lengthening of the working day, especially for those working in high-pressure jobs, because of an expectation that they could always be reached by email – and a corresponding expectation that any message would receive a speedy response.

Email has become the central communications channel of all modern organisations, to the point where none of them could now function without it. But there's increasing evidence – both anecdotal and empirical – that it has become dysfunctional. It eats into people's working and thinking time, for example, distracts them from doing "real" work and generates guilt feelings that ratchet up stress levels to unsustainable levels.

In the old world of desktop PCs, you could at least leave it behind when you left the office. But the advent of the smartphone changed all that. Email has now infiltrated leisure time, family time – even sleep time. It's become a monster that's destroying our lives.

Deep down, most of us know this. But we daren't talk about it out loud, for fear of seeming inadequate. After all, our colleagues seem to be able to cope. So each individual comes to see his or her inability to cope with the email torrent as a personal failing, and therefore as a problem to be solved on a personal level. We make resolutions to be more efficient, to respond immediately (and as succinctly as possible) to each message as it arrives, to archive and file messages at regular intervals, and so on.

These personal strategies appear to work for a week or two, but they're doomed to failure. This is partly because the more efficient you are at responding to email, the more quickly your inbox fills up in return. But it's mainly because the email problem is a systemic one rather than a manifestation of the inadequacies of individuals. If you work in an organisation that is dysfunctionally addicted to email, no action that you take on your own is going to solve that; indeed, it may have serious downsides for you.

Which brings us to some intriguing research by a Harvard academic, Leslie Perlow. Four years ago, Professor Perlow conducted a pilot experiment with a six-person team at the Boston Consulting Group, an elite business consulting firm. The team was a classic example of "always-on" professionals who were caught in what Perlow christened the "cycle of responsiveness".

"The pressure to be on," she writes, "usually stems from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones. People begin adjusting to these demands – adapting the technology they use, altering their daily schedules, the way they work, even the way they live their lives and interact with their families and friends – to be better able to meet the increased demands on their time. Once colleagues experience this increased responsiveness, their own requests expand. Already working long hours, most just accept these additional demands – whether they are urgent or not – and those who don't risk being branded as less committed to their work."

Perlow persuaded the team to try an experiment – collectively to agree to disconnect from their smartphones and computers for a few predetermined hours every week. She called it Predictable Time Off (PTO). The results surprised both her and them. The consultants reported that they felt more motivated, had increased job satisfaction and were more satisfied with their work-life balance. They also reported that they had become more efficient, effective and collaborative as a team. The PTO experiment was then replicated across most of the teams working in the BCG's north-eastern US offices – with results that confirmed the findings of the pilot study.

Perlow has now published an extensive account of her research in a new book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, which should be required reading for any senior executive concerned about the dysfunctionality of "always-on" connectivity. It shows that, while the email monster might be impossible to slay, it can be tamed by collective action. And that's definitely something worth wishing for.

Andrew Barron to tell Lords communications committee that most of £980m government development cash will go to rival

The government is spending "hundreds of millions of pounds of public money" subsidising BT Group, the House of Lords will hear on Tuesday.

A total of £980m has been earmarked for improving Britain's broadband network, including £530m during this parliament to get a basic 2Mbps broadband service to Britain's hardest to reach areas. But rivals fear most of the money will go to BT.

"The noble ambition of locally procured rural broadband networks is protracted and likely to favour the incumbent, freezing out new entrants," the Virgin Media chief operating officer, Andrew Barron, said in a letter to the Guardian the day before giving evidence to the Lords communications committee's inquiry in to the UK's broadband strategy. He claimed true competition with BT existed only in areas where Virgin Media's cables provide an alternative. Cable now reaches half the UK population, but mostly in urban locations.

"The outcome of current government policy," writes Barron, "is likely to be the subsidy of already dominant infrastructure in areas where we are not, to the sum of hundreds of millions of pounds of public money."

Public funds are being awarded via the Broadband development UK (BDUK) process. BT and Fujitsu are the only two bidders left from an original longlist of nine suppliers in the BDUK framework agreement, which covers 35 local authorities.

Cable & Wireless withdrew, as did Geo Networks, claiming BT had an unfair advantage. Rivals had wanted cheaper and more extensive access to BT's ducts and telephone polls, which reach most homes and businesses in the UK.

A further nine areas are running their own procurement outside the BDUK framework, with multiple bidders. BT has won the only two contracts awarded so far, in Lancashire and Rutland, and Fujitsu is only bidding for two, in Cumbria and North Yorkshire.

Barron writes: "If we agree competition is the best way to encourage further sustainable investment, and that embedding dominance in markets is bad for consumers, we must also accept that providing the vast majority of available public funding to an incumbent is not in the UK's best interests."

He criticises the lack of an ambitious national broadband strategy, saying the UK needs an equivalent to the 1984 Cable and Broadcasting Act which effectively created Virgin Media's network by allowing predecessors like Telewest and NTL to build franchises around the UK.

Public money should be used to promote alternative infrastructures to BT, including the use of 4G mobile networks as an alternative to fixed line broadband, and a national framework for Wi-Fi to get better out of home internet coverage.

A BT spokesman said: "BT would be more than happy to compete directly with Virgin for BDUK funds but we doubt that will happen. That is because Virgin have steadfastly refused to provide open wholesale access to their network – a key BDUK requirement – and because they have shown no interest to date in supplying rural areas with broadband.

"This is in contrast to BT who offer broadband services on a wholesale basis to 99% of UK premises. Fujitsu have announced their intention to bid for funds and so there will be a competitive process. We are already seeing this in several part of the UK."

Barron will be giving evidence alongside Labour's communications infrastructure spokesperson Chi Onwurah, and the former chief executive of BT Openreach, Steve Robertson.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 22 May 2012 to include a response from BT.

Popular social network valued at between $1bn and $1.5bn following a $100m round of funding

Move over, Facebook. Pinterest, the social site that lets people "pin" pictures and content to create collections of interest, has become the latest company to be valued at more than $1bn (£630m), following a $100m round of funding.

While estimates of the effective valuation implied by the investment vary between $1bn and $1.5bn, they highlight the fact that Pinterest has already discovered a business model in which it collects an "affiliate" payment on purchases people make via the site.

The new valuation is at least a fivefold leap in value since October 2011, when a previous financing round put it at $200m.

The company has shot to stardom in the past few months to become the 16th most-visited site in the US, according to measurement company Alexa. In April it had more than 20 million users, up from 1 million in July 2011, according to ComScore, another ranking company.

Its traffic soared after August 2011 when it was named one of the 50 best websites of 2011 by Time magazine, and by December it was getting 11m visitors worldwide a week, according to Hitwise.

Now it has received a fresh round of funding led by the Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten, and with particiapants including its existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, and a number of angel investors.

In October 2011 it received a $27m funding round that valued it at $200m. The site only opened for business in March 2010.

Although the company has not disclosed its revenues, they are probably less than $10m according to modelling carried out in March by Rags Srinivasan, a strategic marketing expert. But with user numbers still growing fast, that could be advancing rapidly.

A growing number of brands are using Pinterest to advertise their wares effectively for free, with the aim of driving sales via the displays. That could offer a future means for Pinterest to charge, either for position or visibility.

However, legal experts have queried the site's liability for copyright lawsuits because it effectively allows the copying of images that are often copyrighted. While some brands may not mind if it drives sales, photographers and commercial organisations could be less pleased.

Rakuten has invested in a number of online retailing companies around the world, including the British retailer Play.com.

"While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining," said Rakuten chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.

"We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and Rakuten's model for e-commerce."

In an interview with the FT, Mikitani revealed that he had also become an e-commerce advisor to the site, and said: "Having a good grasp of images is becoming more important for e-commerce. It's more straightforward and appealing to the instinct of human beings than text. That is the strength of Pinterest, I think."

He added that Rakuten had wanted to fund the entire round, but Pinterest's board already had agreements with existing investors.

He was enthusiastic about the prospects because, he said, traffic going to shopping sites from Pinterest would have high conversion rates [to sales] because people would have high interest in products.

Of the copyright risks, he said: "I think, on the whole, they will overcome those issues. Their intention is not to damage any brand."

Mikitani added that Rakuten-owned sites would in future use the Pinterest "Pin it" badge to add content.

"Pinterest is the future – we know we are going to have a more tight integration for all the e-commerce sites we have."

The Newton was two decades ahead of its time, says the former Apple chief executive – and the future of healthcare will be driven by cloud computing

John Sculley – the man who as Apple chief executive gave the world the Newton, which was the first glimpse of the "personal digital assistant" in the 1980s – can see a number of possibilities opening up before us.

A world without work for millions who want it? A world where we can diagnose strokes or heart attacks well before they happen? A world of machines talking to machines? All are possible, even likely, because of cloud computing, which he sees as the next driver of huge social change.

And he also has a clear idea of what the Newton really needed to succeed – and which of Apple's visions from the time really matches what we're seeing now.

"I'm an optimist," declares Sculley, now 73 but still deeply involved in technology. "You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature."

Cloud computing, has says, means that we're shifting from the growth of Moore's Law – a doubling every 18 months – to something even more exponential. "The curve is accelerating upwards, at a level that means that technologies are coming out that can do things that you couldn't even envision even two or three years ago."

Robust data storage costs are falling too, from around $5 (£3.14) per gigabyte a year ago to 25c now. "The speed at which a lot of this technology is commoditising is unprecedented," Sculley says.

Even so, he sees some areas for concern. First, imagine a world where computers have driven humans out of all but the highest-skilled jobs – so that driverless cars, automated factories and similar processes mean that the middle class that has for years been happily thriving on jobs that couldn't be done otherwise suddenly find themselves disenfranchised.

Sculley admits he's not as optimistic about that. "The more we bring in these sophisticated technologies, the higher the skills of the people that are needed to be able to use it, and the fewer people we need in the workforce, so the issue is not about work moving to lower-cost workers, it's about automation replacing many of the jobs that we had counted on, particularly for our middle class in the past."

The political gridlock in the US – caused by the warring demands of the Tea Party, which thinks government and taxation is destroying jobs, and those of the Democratic Party, which has been trying to drive growth by boosting the money supply – is one example. Another is the Eurozone, where the tensions between Spanish, Greek, German and French voters and their leaders is coming into starker focus as unemployment rises.

"Those are the things that technology may not be able to solve, but it certainly is a consequence of technology, that the sophistication of automation is changing how work is done, and is changing the skill requirements of workers," says Sculley. "In many cases jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society."

Even so, he does think that – as has happened previously – technology will throw up a solution. (In the early 1900s, the problems of horse manure in London streets threatened to overwhelm them; the car solved that – but, of course, eventually brought its own set of challenges.)

On a more optimistic note, Sculley – who now works as a venture capitalist, and has investments in companies looking at healthcare – things that cloud computing is going to make a colossal difference to the quality of our lives.

Healthcare in the US is a $2.6tn market, driven by insurers which pay doctors who often carry out procedures and expensive tests in order to avoid lawsuits. The problem is that healthcare costs are rising more quickly than inflation, incomes or tax receipts.

"Politicians are arguing among themselves as to who's going to pay for it," says Sculley. "It's completely unaffordable at its current growth rates, and the more I get a chance to understand health care, the more convinced I am that the problem is very solvable, but it's solvable through innovation, not through just governments trying to work out who pays for what.

"We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes – did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care. So it's not just about taking cloud computing and automating the healthcare system we have today, it literally means innovating and reinventing the health care system to make it it much more patient-centric."

"Big data analytics" – the analysis of colossal amounts of data which could amount to terabytes of information – will change healthcare, he forecasts, from one where doctors are paid to carry out procedures, to one where they're paid based on keeping people well. (In that sense, it sounds like the longstanding Chinese principle where a doctor's quality is measured on how infrequently patients get sick, not how quickly they're cured.)

And helping that will be computing that will analyse everything – even the levels of proteins in our blood. "I'm working with a company right now where we're doing this – you can track in real time peoples' vital signs and take that data, you can imagine that's massive amounts of data when you're tracking each individual in real time, the vital signs – it could be their heart, could be how much they weigh, could be their fluid retention, could be even tracking proteomics, which are protein changes inside the body.

"If you can take that data and then be able to analyse it, it means that the future of medicine is going to be able to make predictions and measure outcomes of patient health improvement at a level of accuracy and a level of personalisation that we've never seen before."

All this, he says, will rely on the computing power brought together by the cloud: "It isn't just the compute power, it's that you can enable the big data analytics, in a specialised way. That's going to give us hope that what looked like insolvable problems like health care can be solved."

Don't expect overnight change, but do expect change: " It may not be done in a few years," Sculley warns. "it may take five or 10 or 15 years to see the impact, but there's no question in my mind that it's going to have as big an impact on things like healthcare as personal computers did in empowering individuals and really created the productivity we've had for 30 years with knowledge workers."

The cloud doesn't just stop with people, though. Imagine too a world where there are around 20bn internet-connected devices – but only around 7 billion people, as there are now. That's the forecast from various research companies for 2020.

"Having 20bn connected devices means that the majority of those connected devices will be machine to machine," Sculley explains. "It means we're just at the beginning era of very powerful sensors that can be built into clothing, that can be used for tracking almost anything that one can conceive and doing that in real time and using cloud computing to manipulate data which is going to be many many orders of magnitude larger and more complex that anything we've ever considered before."

Speaking of connected devices, might one of the flaws in the Newton have been it lack of connectivity – something that now exists through mobile broadband? Sculley has, of course, had a long time to reflect on this.

"Well, I think the idea [of Newton] was right, it was just 20 years ahead of its time. So actually, a lot of people were able to see where the industry's going, the hardest part is to figure out when it's going to happen.

"In the case of the PDA, the idea was right – that the content and communication and computing were going to converge – but I think we greatly underestimated that we needed broadband, that we need far more powerful devices, that we needed something a lot more powerful in the background which we now know as 'cloud' to be able to handle the tremendous amount of data, and connecting people up through social networking. So it was a good idea, but it was just several decades too early."

Was it then one of those projects that simply gets out of hand, and acquires a momentum that can't be stopped as it thunders into the market? "We never looked at Newton as being the seminal product. That was just one step along the way, You can get a much better view of the seminal experience if you go back – you can go to YouTube, i think it's 1988 [in fact 1987], a concept video we created called Knowledge Navigator."

Indeed, Knowledge Navigator ) – from the days when Apple made concept videos – has become famous for prefiguring many elements we're now familiar with: tablet computing, internet search, voice control. It shows the internet as a graphical medium – predating the web, which hadn't yet been invented – and suggests effortless interaction with digital "assistants".

Knowledge Navigator, says Sculley, "is really something we couldn't build at the time. But technically we could use special effects and be able to simulate what the experience would be like. That was 24 yeas ago and if you look at that, I think is pretty accurate, almost to the point of being uncanny as to what the experience of tablet computing and mobile devices have turned out to be like."

Which leads to the obvious final question: how does he organise his computing life? Is he, to coin a phrase, post-PC? "I'm clearly post-PC," he replies. "I carry an iPhone, a BlackBerry, a [Samsung] Galaxy Note, and I carry an iPad. When I'm in my home office I use a Mac, so I think I'm more typical than not in using many, many different devices."

The post-PC era doesn't mean the end of devices, he says: "It means you can be on any device that you happen to have, and everything basically is more and more connectible through the cloud."

• John Sculley is giving the keynote address at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London on 12-13 June

Bank to adjust thousands of share trades from last week's IPO to ensure no investor pays more than $43 a share

Facebook banker Morgan Stanley is preparing to adjust thousands of share trades from last Friday's messy initial public offering to ensure no investor pays more than $43 a share, according to reports.

The bank faces intense criticism of its handling of Facebook's IPO. Regulators are investigating whether the bank, and others, warned their top clients about analysts' fears that Facebook's growth was slipping while they pushed for investors to pay the highest price for the company's shares.

Morgan Stanley held a conference call with brokers on Thursday afternoon as it tried to mend relations. Andy Saperstein, head of the firm's Smith Barney unit, said the adjustments will likely be made on Friday.

Saperstein took no questions during the call, which lasted about 10 minutes, and made no apology, telling brokers to follow procedure and go directly to their service manager if they had any outstanding issues, two advisers told Reuters.

The shares were priced at $38 apiece, but briefly soared to $45 before losing all those gains and more. Shortly before the IPO Facebook moved the target range for its IPO from $25-35 to $35-38 before settling to launch the share sale at the top end of that range.

According to Reuters, the bank has now told brokers that no one will pay more than $43 for the shares that are now trading for $33.

The news comes as tension builds between Facebook, its bankers and Nasdaq, the stock market that is currently home to Facebook's shares.

Facebook management is reportedly unhappy with the IPO process and how it was handled by Nasdaq. The sale was delayed as the stock exchange struggled to cope with the volume of buyers and sellers. More than 571m Facebook shares were bought and sold last Friday, a record for Nasdaq, which now faced law suits and it's own regulatory inquiry.

Knight Capital Group, a broker, has estimated it lost $30-35m because of Nasdaq's delays.

So far Facebook has not commented on the IPO debacle. Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg spoke to Harvard University students in her first public appearance since the IPO. But she refrained from addressing the controversy and told media she would not comment on the IPO.

Sandberg spoke about inequality in the workplace, a recurring theme for the COO.

"We need to acknowledge openly that gender remains at issue at the highest levels," she told students at Harvard Business School and their families.

After urging the graduates to use Facebook to stay in touch, she said: "We're public now, so could you please click on an ad or two while you're there."

Robot allies, invisibility cloaks and lots of guns. Now, that's pretty cool

I challenge anyone to play this game for the first time and not use the words "That's cool." I have now spent three hours with Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (PC / PS3 / Xbox 360) and have lost count of the number of times I've said it. This is a game that doesn't so much quietly ooze style as fire it at 50 rounds per second: an ear-shattering Gatling gun of cool, if you will.

You play as a Ghost, a special forces operative armed to the teeth with gadgets, guns and gizmos, and sent around the world in a four-man team to go where other, mere mortal men cannot, and then kill someone. Or, more often, kill quite a few people with one hand and defuse a bomb, capture a dictator and/or liberate a bunch of bullied citizens with the other. That's cool, right?

Cooler still are the gadgets. As the title suggests, the setting is a few years into the future so much of the technology is based on current research and prototypes. And, on this evidence, the future does not look pretty for the enemies of American special forces.

There are three remote-controlled machine allies in the game, each cooler and dafter than the last. The spycam-equipped Crawler, which resembles a cross between a toy tank and a lunar exploration module, is fairly limited: useful for scouting where conventional stealth is not an option, and not much else. Its flying cousin, the UAV, will be familiar to players of the Modern Warfare games, but has been re-imagined in Future Soldier as a low-flying hover-drone, able to put a bullet in the back of an unsuspecting enemy's head all on its own.

By far the coolest, most futuristic, and most ridiculous of the remote controlled allies is the 8ft, four-legged clanking metal elephant called the Warhound. Armed with both mortars and guided missiles, it turns up for missions where stealth has gone out of the window and takes roughly six seconds to wipe out tanks, trucks and anything else within range. At a guess, I'd say it would have ended the battle of the Somme in four minutes.

For all the fun to be had blowing things up left, right and centre, the biggest thrills are the stealth missions. Here another familiar piece of future kit has been re-imagined: the optical camouflage suit from Metal Gear Solid, which functions in Future Soldier as a limited invisibility cloak for you and your team. The suit makes it easy to pass guards undetected, but deactivates if you run, make too much noise or stand in front of an enemy rustling about going "Hahaha, you can't see me!" for more than a couple of seconds. Which you will feel compelled to try at least once.

Vital to your team's hopes of staying undetected is the intelligent use of the Sync Shot, probably the game's freshest innovation. To set one up, you mark four enemy soldiers for your team-mates, who then fan out to get a clear shot on one each. When you take out yours, your allies take out theirs, allowing you to cut down groups of foes before any of them have a chance to sound the alarm. Which is also pretty cool, although you will eventually find yourself shouting at the endless groups of exactly four enemies :"Come on, guys! Just stand in a group of five! For once!"

Another nice touch is the game's ludicrous number of guns – more than 50 – which can be customised in Gunsmith mode more than 600 attachments, for a total of approximately eight kabillion combinations. Xbox Kinect players can even use the game's Gunsmith mode hands-free, standing in their living room gesturing with their fingers to attach a muzzle, recalibrate a sight or test out their bespoke weapon of choice on a firing range, which is probably the closest most of us will ever come to having one of those walls that flips round to reveal a firearms collection. Once again: cool.

With a 30-hour single player campaign, and a host of online multiplayer modes, it also looks likely to have the substance to back up its style. So, in a nutshell, it's a customisable Gatling gun of style mounted on the back of a substantial metal elephant of gameplay. With an invisibility cloak. That fires rockets. Don't tell me that's not at least a little bit cool.

Figures from Google's transparency report reveal huge increase on 2009 as growth comes from rise in 'enforcement vendors'

Google is receiving more than a million requests a month from copyright owners seeking to pull their content from the company's search results, the web giant has revealed. The number requests has grown so fast that it now often tops 250,000 a week, more than Google received for all of 2009.

The figures, disclosed in Google's transparency report, reveal that in the past month alone Google received 1.2m requests on behalf of 1,000 copyright owners targeting 23,000 websites.

Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, said copyright infringement was the main reason Google had removed links from search terms. He said company had received a total of 3.3m requests for removals on copyright grounds last year, and was on course to quadruple that number this year. The company complies with 97% of requests.

The dramatic increase follows controversial and unsuccessful attempts to tighten up online copyright law earlier this year. The Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) was backed by many of the world's biggest media companies and had cross party political support. But it was brought down by a global backlash from online activists.

Lohmann said the dramatic rise had come with the growth of "enforcement vendors", which police the internet looking for copyright violations. The largest submitter of requests for removals was Marketly, which serves the software industry, followed by Degban, which works with pornographers.

Filestube.com, a search site dedicated to finding downloadable files such as audio, video and documents, was the most targeted website. It was followed by torrentz.eu, a file sharing site. Marketly was by far the largest reporting organisation, making close to 2.2m requests since June 2011. It was followed by NBC Universal, which made 985,905 requests over the same period.

In a blogpost, von Lohmann wrote: "Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don't want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we've always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why."

Lohmann also suggested that copyright holders were abusing their powers. "For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper's review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We've also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results."

Holmes Wlison, co-founder of digital rights lobbyist Fight for the Future, said the figures were a prime example of what was wrong with current copyright law. "The state of copyright law is out of control. It just can't cope with the way we live out lives today," he said.

Wilson pointed to the case of Stephanie Lenz, a woman locked in a legal battle with Universal after publishing a video of her baby dancing to Prince's Let's Go Crazy, and to more recent news that the Beastie Boys were being sued over a sample allegedly in their 1989 hit Paul's Boutique. The suit was filed a day after founder member Adam Yauch (MCA) died of cancer.

"The suit was filed decades after the album came out and the sample was so unrecognizable it had to be identified using software. It's just crazy," said Holmes.

Facebook's IPO was the most-hyped tech offering since Google went public, but the sale is proving a disaster for the firm

Facebook's stock market debut was supposed to be the sale of the century. The social network phenomenon had teased investors about an initial public offering for over a year. Now the sale is proving a disaster for the firm and the banks that backed it. A week on, and with the share price settling at around $32, down 15% from the $38 opening, what went wrong?

Too high

The most hyped tech IPO since Google went public was always going to be a whopper, but was Facebook really worth $100bn? The company and its bankers thought so, investors thought not.

As critics pointed out, Facebook was being valued at close to 100 times last year's profits, far higher than tech rivals including Apple and Google that make far, far, more money.

But critics be damned. Just before Facebook went public, the company upped the range for its share price from the $28-35 to $35-38 a share. Then Facebook set the price at $38, the top end of the range, and "priced for perfection" as brokers kept saying. As had been expected by many, Facebook's shares enjoyed a "pop" – rising 11% in early trading. But the shares soon proved less than perfectly priced and lost all their gains.

Too many

In part, say stock market experts, the fault was because Facebook had too many shares to sell. This was supposed to be the hottest IPO in a generation, frustration was mounting as investors worldwide clamored for shares, the sale was 25 times oversubscribed in Asia. Then, just before the IPO, Facebook increased the number of shares for sale by 25% to 421m.

In a common move with hot IPOs, many investors had deliberately asked for more shares than they wanted in the hope of getting the desired amount if they were scaled back. Be careful what you wish for.

Too much

Investors who were expecting to get less than they asked for suddenly found they had got more than they bargained for. Effectively they became forced sellers. Early indications on the morning of the IPO were that Facebook would sell for $40 plus a share, meaning a quick profit was on the table. Investors seized the opportunity and Facebook's shares fell so far its bankers had to step in and stop the price falling below the $38 starting mark.

Too rich

Sentiment also ran against the sale after it was revealed that Facebook's early backers were increasing the size of their selloffs. Some 57% of the shares sold came from Facebook insiders. Typically the percentage of insider sales is under 10%. In other recent tech IPOs including Groupon, Zynga and Yelp the percentage was less than 1%.

When Facebook announced it was increasing its share sale, insiders revealed they were substantially increasing the number of shares they were selling. Among them was Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley's smartest investors and a Facebook board member. He said he would now be selling 16.8m shares, up from 7.7m shares. What did he know that others didn't? Not a lot if you look at Facebook's public filing.

Too late

The social network is on track to reach one billion users this year, a seventh of the planet. But increasingly those users are now mobile and earlier this month the company warned it does "not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue" from mobile. The number of users was rising faster than its revenues, said the company. If Facebook had been a public company, that news would probably have sent its shares falling.

The timing of the update, so close to the IPO, is unfortunate to say the least and has led some to ask what Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman was doing. Analysts at the banks drafting the IPO, legally obliged to act independently of their investment banking colleagues, cut their forecasts for the firm after the update. At the same time the IPO bankers at the same banks and Facebook execs were pushing for a sale at the very top end of their price range.

Who said what and when and to whom is now the subject of regulatory inquiries and shareholder law suits. But perhaps the larger point is that no one disagrees that Facebook's phenomenal growth is slowing and it has a huge problem in mobile. If Facebook had gone for its IPO last year, perhaps they would have had a pop that lasted. At least until the mobile problem came calling.

… but one thing that's not Facebook's fault

The Nasdaq, the stock market that now counts Facebook as one of its top companies, is also getting a share of the blame. The tech-heavy stock market had virtually begged to take Facebook to the prom, scrapping its rule on stock ticker symbols to give the social network FB, among other concessions to win Zuckerberg over.

On the day of the IPO, Nasdaq appeared overwhelmed by the size of the deal. Its systems went into lockdown, delaying the start of trading and – according to some – contributed to a feeling there was something wrong with Facebook.

Brokers are now suing the market, regulators are investigating and Facebook has even reportedly considered ditching Nasdaq for its older rival downtown, the New York Stock Exchange.

But even if the cock-ups had continued its seems unlikely Nasdaq would be catching this much heat if Facebook had been selling something at a price that people wanted to pay.

If Apple had delayed opening the doors for another hour ahead of selling its latest set of iPads, would the customers have fled, or would the lines just have got longer?

Joe Simpson engages in online spat with 'vile' GCSE students after they rubbished his book Touching the Void

Even the most successful authors have to suffer the occasional fit of spite from critics and readers. Few, however, have to contend with the twin indignities of being branded a "crevasse wanker" and having their accounts of preternatural mountain endurance rubbished by sulky teens.

Fortunately, as befits a man who has outshuffled the Grim Reaper in both the Andes and the Himalayas – and who chose an automated alcohol dispenser as his luxury on Desert Island Discs so that he could drink himself to death rather than endure a protracted insular exile – Joe Simpson is not the sort to sulk.

When a gaggle of GCSE students used Twitter to fume at being made to study Simpson's account of how he spent days crawling off a Peruvian mountain with a broken leg, he decided to engage with his adolescent critics.

Asked by one why he had chosen to call the book Touching the Void, he tweeted back: "I wanted to piss kids off having to do exams on it!"

His response did not impress his questioner, who replied: "Bet I know more about how you put tension in the first chapter than you do."

"I just write the shit," came the response.

Not all the tweets he received were so polite.

"Your book is shit and you should feel bad," wrote one. "Three chapters of crawling didn't inspire me to write about your book in my exam," confessed another. "It was rather boring really."

Other correspondents were even more blunt: "YOUR BOOK IS THE REASON MY ENTIRE YEAR WILL FAIL OUR ENGLISH EXAM!!," screeched one. "LEARN TO WRITE ILLITERATE FOOL!"

By far the most lively was Simpson's exchange with a young Turk studying English.

"I wrote you a few months ago. I said I had an exam about your book," ran his plaintive tweet. "I failed because of you. You owe to me!"

Oddly, Simpson's reply – "Nope, you're just crap at English" – failed to smooth things over.

"I am a student who learn English," he shot back. "But you are a stupid who fell down on the mountain. We are waiting you in Turkey!"

By Wednesday night, however, the author appeared to be tiring of the abuse and tweeted: "A lovely day of children writhing in their hellish hormonal middens … good night vile innocents may you all seethe in bilious acid pus ... "

Despite the tone of the tweets, Simpson told the Guardian he had actually found them quite funny. "If I'm brutally frank about it," he said, "I really don't give a toss what people think about what they think I went through. Nobody has the first idea, really.

"The book and the film were as accurate as they could be and they don't come anywhere near describing what it was like. [But] a bunch of spotty schoolkids who can't read and can't pass their exams – and who start calling me a 'crevasse wanker' – I find really quite amusing actually."

Although he dismissed most of his correspondents as "kids who are stamping their feet and displaying their hormones", he pointed out that he had received more than a few tweets from students praising the book.

Simpson also said the Twitter abuse was not a new phenomenon, and seemed to follow the pattern of exams.

"It's been happening for ages," he said. "At one point I thought it was a great honour to have your book slated for the GCSE and now I'm beginning to think it's a pain in the arse, frankly."

If the worst came to the worst he said, he might "block the little fuckers" or stop tweeting altogether.

Still, he mused, there was an odd irony to the situation – albeit one that was probably lost on his critics. "I've never had children; I made it specifically impossible to have children – and I'm being hassled by children," he said. "Maybe it serves me right."

On the 25th anniversary of the genesis of his game series Metal Gear, creator Hideo Kojima reflects on a career spent battling the stigma of working in video games in the second of a two part interview feature, exclusive to the Guardian

Despite finding like-minded individuals at Konami, Kojima's first couple of years at the studio were far from easy. For one, his directorial ambition was fiercely at odds with its orthodox Japanese institutional hierarchy.

"Lost World was the first project I was assigned to and the game was cancelled after six months," he says. "It was a serious blow to all of us on the team. I couldn't believe it. After that I began to work on Metal Gear. Konami wanted a war game, because they were incredibly popular at that time. But I didn't want to make the same as everyone else so I started thinking of ways in which I could subvert the genre."

It was at this point that Kojima's love for film came into play. "I remembered the film The Great Escape and thought this would be a good approach for something distinct. My first concept was for a game in which you were a prisoner of war and simply had to escape. If you were caught you'd be brought back to the prison. The idea was for a non-combat game.

"But I had such a hard time convincing people. I had so many things going against me at that time. For one, my first game had been cancelled, so I hadn't released anything yet. Then I was working in quite a large creative group, and I was the youngest. Finally, the type of game I wanted to make didn't exist at that time. The odds were stacked against me and it was very hard to earn the trust of the team."

After a few months of failing to make his voice heard, Kojima managed to convince the most senior member of the team to meet with him. "He listened to my frustrations," Kojima says, "and then approached one of the higher-ups in the company who must have seen something in me as he invited me to pitch my ideas for Metal Gear in front of everyone. Everyone in the team saw that it was a revolutionary idea, I think, and from then on, I had their support."

The first Metal Gear was developed for the MSX, a home computer format that enjoyed a fraction of the market share of Nintendo's inaugural games console, the Famicom. While many would have seen being told to make a game for underdog technology as a drawback, Kojima turned it to his advantage. "The MSX audience was more technologically savvy than the Famicom audience and as such the game had a much wider influence than it perhaps might have if it had just released on Nintendo's hardware.

"We spent a long time working on animations that wouldn't have been possible on the Famicom. I would go so far to say that, had I been working in the Famicom department from the beginning I probably wouldn't have come up with the idea for Metal Gear. The features of the systems are so different. And the game concept wouldn't have passed Konami's internal processing, which required more mainstream, family-friendly titles for the Famicom."

Following the success of the game Konami commissioned a sequel, this time for the Nintendo hardware. As Kojima had been hired to work in the MSX division, he was kept separate from the Famicom team, only hearing about the project second hand. "I heard about Snake's Revenge through rumours, initially," he says. "I was quite new at the company and had no influence on the other departments.

"Then one day I met someone on the train who worked in the Famicom department. He used to work for me and was now working on the sequel. He said: 'I don't think this is a true sequel. I think you should make the true sequel.' So on my way home I began to think about what that might look like. Without that encounter I probably wouldn't have pursued a proper sequel, and there might never have been a Metal Gear Solid."

Kojima was merely a game designer at that time, and had no detailed knowledge of the budgets involved, but the trust he had gained from the first game caused Konami to pour more money into his sequel. "Because we were making a war game, Konami wanted the experience to be authentic, so every week they paid for us to visit a forest in the mountains nearby. We would dress up in military uniform and play games there. It was a good time."

Even at this early point in his career, Kojima's directorial flair was irrepressible, and, without programming knowledge, he found himself frustrated by having to rely on programmers to bring his vision to life. "I would tell the programmers what I wanted to show on screen, when I wanted the dialogue to display, or a music cue to sound," he says. "But they wouldn't do it how I wanted. They would change it slightly to what they thought was best.

"It was hugely frustrating making games at that time for me. I wanted to control everything. So, after the second Metal Gear launched, I developed my own scripting engine and decided to work on adventure games so that I could have complete control over when the animation played or when the music triggered. That's when I developed Snatcher and Policenauts. It was a way to take creative control back from the programmers."

But by 1998, Kojima had been promoted to a managerial role at Konami, and enjoyed autonomy to choose the people he wanted on the team – staff who would complement his vision. One such hire was Yoji Shinkawa, an artist that Kojima hired straight out of college in 1994. "Shinkawa was born to be a video game artist," says Kojima. "As soon as I knew I was to be making Metal Gear Solid, I asked Shinkawa to join the team and his work, as much as anything, defined the series from there on."

Metal Gear Solid's development coincided with a technological shift in the medium, that brought with it creative challenges: the move from 2D graphics (and the accompanying gameplay) to the third dimension. Kojima's team developed a 3D engine from scratch for the game and Shinkawa would work from home for months at a time creating the 3D models that would populate the game.

"Yoji created real life 3D plastic models of all of the game's vehicles and as he used so many chemicals, he had to work from home as the fumes were harmful to the rest of the team," Kojima says. "I would visit his apartment every day to check that he was OK. The first time I went there the floor was covered in plastic parts."

The game launched to critical acclaim and commercial success. Its brilliance was in the packaging of the idea, couching the hide-and-seek act of creeping through the shadows in a tight, carefully orchestrated scenario in which one man must infiltrate a radioactive waste facility armed with little more than a radio, a bandana and a packet of cigarettes.

Despite the one-man army set-up, Metal Gear Solid's narrative offers more layers of complexity than a Rambo or a Bond movie, Kojima shying away from a chance for a character to soliloquise on the nature of warfare, or the role of solider pawn, those very same figures controlled by the player, on the battlefield.

I ask whether the reaction to the game surprised him, or whether he knew he had created something special.

"We worked so hard on that game that there wasn't even time to think about how it might be received," he says. "We were just making the game that we wanted to play and I don't think I had any expectations that it was going to be a big game. So when I heard it was selling well in America it didn't feel real.

"I think the first time the game's success struck me was when I came to London in 1999. We visited Forbidden Planet to promote the game. I walked in and the shopkeepers knew about me. I couldn't believe it. It was the most surprising moment in my life."

Despite this success, Kojima was most interested in impressing the woman who had supported him from the very beginning: his mother. "About that time I heard that my mother had stopped telling her friends what I did for a living," he tells me. "She was hugely supportive in the beginning. But after a decade or so her friends' sons and daughters all had high positions in big companies. I think she felt a little awkward about what I did by this point."

But Metal Gear Solid's success convinced Konami to plough a huge amount of money into its sequel, developed for Sony's PlayStation 2. "We had so much more budget so we were able to go to Hollywood and hire a composer [Harry Gregson-Williams]," he says. "That was a huge moment for me, made all the better because Harry had heard of my games."

Following Metal Gear Solid 2's release, Kojima was listed by Newsweek as one of the 'Top 10 People To Watch In 2003'. "After that, my mother began to tell all of her friends about what I did," says Kojima, laughing. "It was sweet. By that time she was 70 years old. But she decided that she was going to play through my games.

"It took her an entire year to complete Metal Gear Solid 3. She would get her friends to help her. When she defeated The End [a character the player faces off against in one of the game's final missions] she called me up and said: 'It is finished'."

Today, there is little that Kojima would change about his career, and he has no regrets: "Looking back, I am thankful that I didn't go into the film industry," he says. "If I had joined that industry I wouldn't have been able to make the kind of films I wanted to, and I really enjoy the games I make now."

Indeed, Kojima has lost none of his infectious energy and drive to create. He arrives to work at 6.30am each day, and spends an hour meditating on his life before heading into the business of the day, which is split equally between managerial responsibilities and creative ones. "I wouldn't have taken the managerial role if I wasn't heavily involved in the creative process too," he says. "I have to have a creative role otherwise I simply wouldn't come into work. I try to always have a game design role as part of my responsibilities at any one time. If I didn't have this, I wouldn't be able to do what I do."

One part of his daily ritual stems from even earlier than his formative days working as a game designer for the MSX. Now 48, Kojima's father's influence on him is still very apparent in his routine. Every day, no matter how busy his schedule, the designer takes 90-odd minutes to watch a film at his desk. "It's part of my ritual to watch a new film every day, no matter what," he says. "It's important to me."

Sensing that the habit is as much a tribute to his father's demand that the family watch a film a day as it is a way to draw creative inspiration from another medium, I venture the question: "Do you think your father would have been proud of what you do?"

"I don't think..." he says, quietly. "I mean. If he was still alive… Well, I don't think he would be unhappy about my choice."

Single-seater aircraft with 207ft wingspan aims to reach Morocco via Madrid and is being seen as a trial for a round-the-world flight

An experimental solar-powered airplane took off from Switzerland on its first transcontinental flight on Thursday, aiming to reach North Africa next week.

Pilot Andre Borschberg will fly the jumbo jet-size Solar Impulse plane on its first leg to Madrid, Spain, by Friday. His colleague Bertrand Piccard will take the helm of the aircraft for the second stretch of its 1,554mile journey to the Moroccan capital Rabat.

Fog on the runaway at its home base in Payerne, Switzerland, delayed the take off by two hours, demonstrating how susceptible the prototype single-seater aircraft is to adverse weather.

"We can't fly into clouds because it was not designed for that," Borschberg said as he piloted the plane with its 63meter (207ft) wingspan towards the French city of Lyon at a cruising speed of just 43.5mph.

Before landing in Madrid in the early hours of Friday, Borschberg will face other challenges, including having to fly over the Pyrenees mountains that separate France and Spain. He has a parachute inside his tiny cabin that he hopes never to use.

Piccard – the son of an undersea explorer Jacques Piccard and grandson of balloonist Auguste Piccard – will have to cross the windy Straits of Gibraltar from Europe to Africa.

The team has been invited to Morocco by the country's King Mohammed VI to showcase the cutting edge of solar technology.

Morocco is about to start construction on a massive solar energy plant at Ouarzazate, part of a country-wide solar energy grid with a capacity of 2000MW by 2020.

The solar flight is described as a trial for a round-the-world flight with a new aircraft in 2014. That trip will include stops in the US, said Borschberg.

In 2010, the Swiss flew non-stop for 26-hour to demonstrate that the 12,000 solar cells attached to the aircraft can soak up enough sunlight to keep the plane airborne through the night. A year later, he took Solar Impulse on its first international flight to Belgium and France. The project began in 2003 and is estimated to cost about $100m (£67m) over 10 years.

Can anyone be a data journalist? Simon Rogers on what we can learn from a 1977 diagram

This is a chord… this is another… this is a third. NOW FORM A BAND

So went the first issue of British punk fanzine Sideburns in 1977 in the "first and last part in a series".

It might be 35 years old, but this will do nicely as a theory of data journalism in 2012.

Why? Arguably punk was most important in its influence, encouraging kids in the suburbs to take up instruments, with little or no musical training. It represented a DIY ethos and a shake-up of the old established order. It was a change.

Crucial to it was the idea: anyone can do it.

Is the same true of data journalism? Do you need to be part of a major news operation, working for a big media company to be a data journalist?

Now is the time to examine this - in May 2010, we published this piece on how reporters would soon be flooded with a "tsunami of data". Two years on and data journalism is part of the fabric of what we, and many other news organisations do. What is it? I would say data journalism is such a wide range now of styles - from visualisation to long form articles. The key thing they have in common is that they're based on numbers and statistics - and that they should aim to get a 'story' from that data. The ultimate display of that story, be it words or graphics, is irrelevant, I think - it's more about the process.

There are even different streams now - short-form, quick-and-dirty data visualisations of the kind we do every day on the Datablog, right through to complex investigations and visualisations - such as our riots data analysis or the kind of projects which made the shortlist of the Data Journalism Awards, from around the world.

So, can we still say that anyone can do data journalism; in the first and last part in a series. Would this work?

1) This is a dataset

2) Here's another

3) Here are some free tools

NOW BE A DATA JOURNALIST

OK, it lacks a certain 1976 grittiness, but the theory is there. You don't have to be a developer or a coder to be a data journalist.

We asked our Twitter followers what they thought (and you can see a storify of the discussion below). A couple stand out to me:

Maybe everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. Like so many other things, done well is a mix of art and science

Mutual disregard for shared constructs of authority? Shared overarching aim of revealing reality away from the facade?

But is that enough? The thing about data journalism is that there are so very many 'chords' - just the free ones could fill several training manuals: Google fusion tables, Tableau, Gephi, OutWit Hub, Google Refine… Can anyone really do it?

Dan Sinker knows about both data and punk: he heads up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership and is a former editor of Punk Planet.

He says there are some parallels - with a crucial difference.

While I agree with the premise - it's never been easier to do this stuff than it is right now - I think there are a few steps beyond just learning three chords when doing data journalism. For one, Legs [McNeil, who coined the word 'punk'] didn't really say a band needed to be *good* but I'd like to think we'd require that for data journalism

The theory goes that the punk bands we remember best are the ones that were good - but there needed to be a whole lot of kids experimenting and sounding awful before they got there.

For what it's worth, I like the fact that there are many just trying stuff out, even if it is forgettable - because some of it will be amazing.

In fact, data journalism is a great leveller. Many media groups are starting with as much prior knowledge and expertise as someone hacking away from their bedroom. Many have, until very recently, no idea where to start and great groups of journalists are still nervous of the spreadsheets they are increasingly confronted with.

It's rare for the news site reader to find themselves as powerful as the news site editor, but that's where we are right now - and that power is only increasing as journalists come to rely more and more on their communities for engagement and stories.

Says Sinker:

Where I think there are more parallels are in the fact that this is a young community (in years if not always age), and one that's actively teaching itself new tricks every day. That same vitality and excitement that motivated punk, it's motivating news hackers right now

Meanwhile, more and more news teams are discovering that data equals stories and bulking up their teams. Some would say it's just an extension of work they've always done, but that's to ignore the huge shift in power the web has created.

"Some people think that this stuff is instant," says Sinker. "Even though there are incredible tools now, there is still a learning curve." Out there in the world, there are lots of people who have just formed a band and got on with it - despite the obstacles.

Take the data team at LaNacion, recently shortlisted for the Data Journalism awards for their work on transport subsidies.

When the team started, it was sparse, to say the least, says Florencia Coelho.

We had no web programmer or CAR [computer assisted reporting] people in our newsroom. We gathered an interactive designer and we self taught Tableau with their free training videos in what we called our Tableau days, in a Starbucks at a shopping mall in Buenos Aires.

The team is still not exactly huge - but it is easily the best data journalism site in South America and one of the most innovative around. You can read more about it on NiemanLab.

It's not all about investigative reporting. First, all reporting probably counts as investigative journalism, but if you want to play semantics, then I will see your "investigative" and raise you "analytical". Not all data journalism has to bring down the government - it's often enough for it to shine a light in corners that are less understood, to help us see the world a little clearer. And if that's not investigative, what is?

There's a great democratisation of data going on. Rather than the numbers belonging to the experts, they belong to all of us - and data journalism is part of that reclaiming of the facts. Even at the OECD, users' voices are part of the process, making up the core analysis that lies at the heart of the Better Life Index on wellbeing.

And, just to be clear - data journalism doesn't have to mean data visualisation. It is not about producing charts or intricate graphics - the results of data journalism just happen to lend themselves to that. Sometimes a story is best told in images and infographics, other times it works as words and stories. It's the ultimate in flexible formats.

But, when it comes to visualisations, what really comes across from this analysis of Visual.lys most viral infographics is how sometimes the simplest things can flood the web.

Single charts are likely successful because they are easy to consume; the viewer only needs to learn how to read one "chunk" of visualization to get the whole story. Simplicity lends itself to quick understanding and sharing, whereas complexity can prevent a viewer from reaching those points. Curiously, mixed charts, which is what we commonly think of as the typical form of an infographic, is the least successful here, perhaps because they take more mental work to consume completely, again pointing to simplicity and brevity as strengths in visual communication.

As the post points out, however, sometimes things done messily can still be hits - it's the information that's vital. People are willing to forgive a lack of perfection; they are much less forgiving for those who get the facts wrong.

Data visualisation experts will always say: allow the data to choose the visualisation, that it's crucial for the visualisation to fit the numbers - and not the other way around. That question equally applies itself to whether something needs a visualisation in the first place.

Of course, for some people, this will never be journalism. But then, who cares? While they're worrying about the definitions, the rest of us can just get on with it.

Punk eventually turned into new wave, new wave into everyday pop and bands that just aren't as exciting. But what it did do is change the climate and the daily weather. Data journalism is doing that too.

In the words of Joe Strummer:

People can do anything

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The biggest problem with 3D is its disrespect towards viewers' intelligence. People know when they're being ripped off

There was a time – let's call it "2009" – when 3D looked like it could be the future of cinema. At that point, it was a technology long thought of as the last refuge of theme park gimmickry. James Cameron's Avatar, despite having a script written by Ralph Wiggum, changed all of that. It used 3D as a cinematographic tool – specifically built into the production and integral to its execution. It was impressive. What's followed since, isn't.

For Avatar made money – a lot of it. And what started as a risky revival of a 1950s 3D craze has now become the saturated embodiment of Hollywood laziness and cynicism – a "we'll stick any old shit in 3D" attitude that shows nothing but contempt towards its audience. And it's safe to assume, they agree: despite initial interest (mainly due to Avatar and Toy Story 3), 3D audience figures are falling, with ticket sales down 4% last year despite a record number of 47 films released in the format. Not only that, but with a YouGov poll last year showing interest waning, complaints mounting about headaches and, with the release of Men In Black 3 this week, a row between studios and cinemas over just who pays for 3D glasses, the cracks are beginning to grow larger.

You may have guessed, but I am not a fan of 3D cinema. I've tried. Honestly, I have. I've put in the time. I've spent the money. I even thought, at one point, there might be a future for us. But no. The main problem, beyond the expense, is that cinema is an immersive medium – one that stands or falls on the suspension of belief and its ability to rip you out of your surroundings. Some berk talking, another eating popcorn too loud, an Adam Sandler film – those are things that snap that suspension to remind you that, yes, you are sitting in a room gawping at a screen. 3D has the same effect: it's a distraction from what is actually on show; a vandalism of vibrant imagery.

The greatest uses of 3D – Martin Scorsese's Hugo being a prime example, and the recently released Hara-Kari: Death Of A Samurai being another – have been those with a sense of purpose behind it. Technology has been woven into the film process as an actual story-telling device, rather than just slapped on top for the sake of it. And there lies its biggest problem: a disrespect towards the audience's intelligence. Did The Avengers (or "Avengers Assemble", if you want to be an arse about it) really need to be converted to 3D? Does Baz Luhrmann's take on The Great Gatsby, out later this year, really need to be in 3D? People are not stupid. And they know when they're being ripped off.

With general cinema attendance falling and the film industry in flux, focus has shifted towards the "cinema experience" in order to get people away from their TV. It's happened before. In 1951, US film attendance fell to 46 million from 90 million in 1948. The very first 3D film, Bwana Devil, tried to fix that in 1952 to modest success. In 1953, widescreen colour images and stereo sound did considerably better. But what now? No matter how much James Cameron pushes it (with, as this blog interestingly points out, dubious reasons), 3D is dying a slow, painful death.

An obvious, reactionary answer would be: "Make better films." After all, it was the character-led stuff such as The King's Speech and Bridesmaids that did well last year – not 3D. Yet in terms of the cinema experience itself, quality over quantity seems to be the key. For instance, in a recent interview, Christopher Nolan revealed that he refused Warner Bros' request to film The Dark Knight Rises in 3D ("films are 3D. The whole point of photography is that it's three-dimensional… if you're looking for an audience experience, [3D] is hard to embrace"), opting to shoot nearly an hour of it on Imax cameras instead – the operatic, larger-than-life "gold standard" of cinema, as Nolan dubbed it.

Even on a smaller scale, cinemas such as the Prince Charles in London – with its sing-along showings and Labyrinth balls – are showing that you can do a lot more with the cinema experience than simply whacking some 3D glasses on it. That's not to say Hollywood should adapt that approach directly, of course, but it could certainly do with learning a thing or two about fun, thought and imagination. Or else, they'll just release, re-release and re-package until film eats itself. And no one wants that – especially if it's in 3D.

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Plant-monitoring app and hardware sensor aims to keep your foliage alive

Fourth up in our Apps Pitch series is Koubachi, one of the latest apps designed to work with a hardware accessory.

What does your app do?

Koubachi gives your plant a voice and yourself a green thumb! For every plant in our plant library, we have developed an individual care model that considers the species (a ficus has different needs than an orchid), the annual season and your location (climate zone).

You only need to calibrate your plant once and Koubachi will provide you with detailed care instructions in regards to when and how to care for your plant. Koubachi tells you when you need to water, fertilize or mist your beloved plants.

What platform(s) is it on, and what plans do you have for any others?

Koubachi is currently available as an iPhone app and as a web app (my.koubachi.com). A native Android version is currently in development and will be released in late summer. You can also use Koubachi in Facebook as a Facebook app. We started with iOS because it had a big momentum when we started with the app.

What's the business model and why did you choose it?

Great news - the app is actually free - and no ads or in-app purchases to bother users at the moment either. We are a startup active in the field of Internet of Things/Smart Objects and just launched the complementary Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor that seamlessly integrates into the system.

With the sensor, you will get even more precise care instructions and specific alerts measuring soil moisture, light intensity and temperature. Unfortunately, we can not give away the sensor for free - it retails for £99.

But don't get us wrong, you can still use the app without a sensor – but only with the sensor do you get real time information on the plant's vitality, the most precise water instructions, light and temperature alerts.

Why is the app innovative - what are the key features that you think set it apart and/or make best use of the platform?

Koubachi really makes plant care easy and fun. If you don't have green fingers, just rely on Koubachi for your plants and enjoy healthy and blossoming plants in no time.

The plant care models were developed and verified in cooperation with plant physiologists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - drawing on this model, our Plant Care Engine will calculate a care model tailored to your individual plant and tell you how and when to care for it.

At the moment, we have more than 400 plants in the library and we are upgrading it on a continuous basis – the goal being 800-1,000 plants by the end of the year.

We also put a lot of emphasis on a nice and clean user interface. Device-wise, we will further experiment with our ultra-low power Wi-Fi model (runs over 1 year with 2x AA batteries) and may think of a satellite version.

What's the competition like - what else is out there in this area?

There are very few plant care apps out there. However, most of them are based on a simple calendar and made in quite a technical way, which might work if you are already a garden aficionado. We want to give green fingers to everybody and make plant care a simpler, yet more powerful and a fun user experience.

What are your future plans?

We'd like to integrate a plant doctor into the app as well, so that we can also provide the users with alerts and information on possible diseases of your plant.

We also learnt that quite a few people don't know the name of the plant as they may have received it as a gift. So we work on building a easy and fun game into the app that provides you with the name of the plant, drawing on vast community knowledge.

Tell me about yourself and your company

We are a startup company based in Switzerland and the team consists of 10 dedicated people. Koubachi was founded during the dissertation project of the two founders. They furnished their office with a nice plant but did not have an idea how to take care of it or forgot to care for it.

As the founders were studying computer science, they thought there must be a better solution for this problem and voila: Koubachi was born.

Koubachi started out in 2009 and the app was then launched in Fall 2010. Our newest baby, the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor was only born, i.e. launched recently.

An iPhone, ice bucket and an Observer columnist all featured in Campbell's first tweeted dream – what can it all mean?

In a world where psychoanalysis is largely out of favour, it's nice to hear that some people are still inclined to ascribe significance to dreams. Alastair Campbell has tweeted what he rather quaintly refers to as his "first iPhone dream".

My first iPhone dream. Was teaching Bill Keegan of Observer to use one and the keys all fell into an ice bucket as I touched them

— Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) May 23, 2012

I don't know how many iPhone dreams the average user can expect to have, but I'm glad he's over the initial hurdle.

As anyone who has ever attempted to jot down a dream knows, it can be extremely difficult to put your chimerical sleep ideas into words. What makes sense as a warpy dream image often evaporates the minute you try to shoehorn it into a readable sentence. To compress a dream into 140 characters is a cunning feat in itself. Campbell's description is admirably succinct: "My first iPhone dream. Was teaching Bill Keegan of Observer to use one and the keys all fell into an ice bucket as I touched them".

While I'd normally be reluctant to attempt to analyse the dream of someone I know little more about than, "likes the Labour party, writes, swears a lot", he did put it on Twitter so he may very well have expected people to say something back …

It's tempting to see this as a technologised version of the classic teeth-falling-out dream. The standard reading of the teeth dream would be that it's a metaphor for castration. (This, of course, is confusing because castration here is a metaphor in itself. It doesn't mean your nanny threatening to chop your bits off if you touch them; it may simply refer to a general sense that things don't quite hang together.) It wouldn't be at all strange for an iPhone user to conflate their phone with a body part. An iPhone is, after all, basically a prosthetic brain. When I left my iPhone in a hotel bed last summer I had to spend the rest of my holiday barred from access to both useful and useless facts (ferry times, names of Jefferson Starship songs) outraged by the limits of the pathetic piece of meat inside my skull.

In this dream, what's particular about the falling teeth/keys is that they tumble into an ice bucket, in the company of the Observer's senior economist. I wouldn't want to leap to any conclusions about the ice bucket beyond noting that it would generally be for white wine, while the Burnley fan's Twitter name is @campbellclaret, and that he famously doesn't drink. But it can't be an accident that the dream features an economist watching something falling apart. Like most of us, perhaps, Campbell's sleep may be less easy in the face of the fact that global finances are not exactly hanging together.

Whether you consider dreams to be random clusters of recently encountered ideas, deeply meaningful formulations concerning the interface between the external world and our unconscious, or even prophesies of things to come, let's hope Alastair Campbell's next iPhone dream is a little less chilling.

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Japanese giant hopes to take its domestic success to the West

With revenues of around £348m in the first quarter of 2012 alone, GREE may be the biggest social games company in the world. What about Zynga? Its revenues were around £204m for the same period.

All of GREE's revenues came from mobile games, and the vast majority of them were made in its native Japan. Yet the company is making a major global push in 2012, acquiring companies and striking deals with Western developers and publishers to put their games on its social mobile gaming platform.

This week (23 May) GREE launched the latest software development kit for its community, based on merging its Japanese platform with that of OpenFeint, the US mobile social games community it bought in April 2011. The company says it will have more than 60 games available globally by September 2012.

Earlier in May, I sat down with GREE's chief executive Yoshikazu Tanaka for an interview in London. One of the reasons it's taken this long to write it up is a succession of news since then.

Hours after the interview, GREE announced that it was buying US mobile games firm Funzio for $210m. Then its shares plummeted due to (accurate) rumours that the 'Kompu Gacha' mechanic used in a number of its Japanese games was about to be outlawed. And then came the company's financial results.

So, Tanaka didn't talk about any of those things, focusing instead on GREE's broader strategy both at home and abroad.

Pre-Funzio acquisition, GREE had 250 staff in its San Francisco office, 50 in each of Seoul and Beijing, and 15 in the UK. The company has launched a couple of games in the US – Zombie Jombie and Alien Family – with more to come.

"The plan is to take the titles that we've released in Asia and America and get them into the European market, but at the same time, I would like to think we can develop products in Europe as well," said Tanaka, speaking through an interpreter.

"In America, those involved in the mobile arena seem to have a pretty good idea of what we're aiming for, but in Europe we have quite a way to go in terms of people being aware of GREE and what we're doing."

A lot of independent mobile games developers are well aware of what GREE is doing – it's one of the companies they hope might acquire them, alongside Zynga and fellow Japanese firm DeNA.

Asked about his company's acquisition strategy, Tanaka played an admirably straight bat considering the Funzio deal was on the verge of being announced. "It's not the case that our strategy is just 'let's buy as many games companies as we can'," he says.

"The best path for us is to basically make the best products ourselves. Having said that, in various regions there will be companies that have really good intellectual property, or maybe there are companies that have a lot to offer in terms of what we can learn from them. Maybe in those cases, we will be looking to acquire."

Or maybe not: Tanaka says GREE has an alternative method, which is to invest in developers rather than buy them outright. The company is looking to make around 10 such investments globally.

Mobile overhauling console

He is bullish about the potential for mobile social games in the West, based on GREE's experiences in Japan.

"Three years ago, mobile social gaming wasn't that popular in Japan, but now in terms of the size of the market, it is larger than the console market," says Tanaka.

"That's a pattern you will see: you will see a similar sort of change occuring in countries other than Japan going forward. The next period will be people moving away from the console and towards mobile gaming."

Tanaka also notes that PC-based social gaming never really took off in Japan – social gaming has always been mobile there. "We're in the post-PC era already in Japan," he says, in a nod to the soundbite adopted by successive Apple CEOs.

GREE's global challenge is an interesting one. It's trying to get a foothold on iOS, but Apple has its own Game Center community there which – although it could do with plenty of improvement – will be the default first choice for developers.

Windows Phone has Xbox Live, and BlackBerry is getting its own games platform courtesy of RIM's acquisition of former OpenFeint rival Scoreloop.

Android is currently more of an open goal, albeit one with lots of competition (DeNA's Mobage and Papaya being two of the more high-profile social platforms scrapping for developer and player mindshare). Google may yet opt to launch its own Game Center-style platform, though.

Tanaka says GREE's advantage is that it can sit across all of these platforms, although Facebook would be its key rival in that ambition. And then there's Zynga, which isn't just launching mobile games, but is working on its own social games platform that it will open out to indie developers.

"Our experience in the mobile arena far exceeds Zynga's," says Tanaka when asked about this rivalry. "We've only really done mobile ourselves, and also our platform business has been extremely successful. Everybody wants to be involved in the platform business, but very few succeed."

Game on. The fascinating thing about mobile social gaming in 2012 is that all bets are off. Zynga isn't guaranteed to repeat its dominance of Facebook gaming. Facebook has to dance around the likes of Apple when trying to bring its applications platform to mobile.

And GREE and DeNA can't – and won't – assume that what's worked so lucratively in Japan will translate seamlessly to the rest of the world. Tanaka certainly seems determined to get the formula right, but the proof will come as GREE's community rolls out globally this summer.

Chris Michael: The London transport network has inspired a dazzling array of posters, designs and cartographic artwork for more than 100 years. Explore some of the best examples

We don't have to share everything

Nesta shares tips from the Reboot Britain project, which explores how the web can be applied to the biggest social challenges local government faces

Collaborative technologies are everywhere. Through a bewildering array of online platforms we can connect with our friends or people we may not even know; share news, photos and videos; post comments or reviews; shop online; form groups and collaborate with others.

These technologies are cheap, easy to use and their global reach has brought about a fundamental shift in public behaviour that has changed the way services are delivered and social needs are met. We are no longer passive recipients of a service that has been created for us, because we now have the opportunity to shape the services we receive.

Yet the public sector has proved strangely resistant to this trend. You can pay your council tax bill online, use social media tools to communicate with service users and open data makes services more transparent.

But little has been done to apply new technologies to high cost, high anxiety service areas such as vulnerable children, families in chronic crisis, criminal rehabilitation, training and employment; mental health or community policing.

Through Reboot Britain we have sought to understand how to support a new approaches to the most important public service, and how these technologies will change the way public services are delivered.

There are some good expamples already: Future You uses a peer to peer model to support young people looking to access employment, education or training opportunities; Buddi uses GPS tracking to support rehabilitation and help offenders break free from the cycle of crime and custody; Person to Person uses text messaging and email to make it easier for people to volunteer their free time to help others.

These projects and the others we have supported show that collaborative technologies can be used to support and enhance our public services. They make it easier for people to do more for themselves. Staff time is used more productively, and new kinds of information improve the effectiveness of our services.

But what should people look out for if their innovation is to prove successful and sustainable? Here's a summary of what we have discovered so far:

1. Focus: be clear about what you are trying to achieve.

2. Understand the technology: be clear about why a technology offers a solution to the problem you have identified.

3. Keep it simple: make sure benefits are tangible and that solutions are easy for people to integrate into their everyday lives.

4. Make it happen: don't leave things to chance and plan what you need to do to make your innovation happen.

5. Wider social networks matter: you will need other people to make this work. They will come in all shapes and sizes and you need to be able to work effectively together.

6. Participation is key: if you ignore your users you will ignore the very people you say you want to help and often they are best placed to come up with solutions.

7. Be prepared to adapt your ideas: although the core idea may not change, you have to be open to suggestions to do things differently.

8. Don't shy away from the nitty gritty: it's not glamorous or sexy, but working through issues around risk, privacy and data protection is necessary and will be worth the effort.

9. Remember to pat yourself on the back: it will be hard work but there will be successes and these need to be celebrated.

10. Don't fear the future: this means doing things differently, but that does not need to be a bad thing.

Don't just take my word for it. A number of Reboot projects who have done this show the benefits.

Public services now face a choice, not about whether this is an environment they want to operate in, because this is already here and the number of people wanting to participate is going to grow. Instead it is about how they can make the best use of the new tools that are available to them to improve the way services are delivered.

• To read more about Reboot Britain, visit nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/public_services_lab/reboot_britain

Ed Wallace is programme lead for Reboot Britain at Nesta

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