Games for these devices are often free but once you’re playing you’re offered upgrades or in-game items like currency. Buying them requires just a password. If the kids have the password, they can buy, via the parent’s credit card attached to their iTunes account.

This throws up a number of issues: security, education, responsibility.

Starting with security, is it right that someone should be able to spend money so easily with just a password, especially if they are not otherwise proven to be the card holder?

Contrary to what the objecting parents are suggesting, I’d say the answer has to be ‘yes’. For the most part these purchases are small amounts, no bigger than buying a newspaper or a chocolate bar. They can be larger and they can mount up, but in most cases these purchases will be made by responsible adults from their own cash. Adding layers of security because of the edge cases of unauthorised use would diminish the user experience for the majority. It is this slick user experience that has created the legal market for content that is now displacing illegal downloads that used to be the norm.

For me this is much more an issue of education: the children concerned need to be educated about the value of money, and the parents need to ensure their own understanding of the technology they are placing in their child’s hands. I’d go so far as to say they have a responsibility to do so.

Because although a big bill for virtual currency might be a shock, there are many worse things an unsupervised child could be doing with an internet-connected device. I don’t want to sound preachy but from playing a game kids are only two clicks from the web, social networks, and all manner of content of which I don’t necessarily disapprove but that I wouldn’t want my children viewing.

That for me highlights the crux of this issue. The problem is not the technology providers making it easy to buy things. It is the parents failing to educate their children about what they should and shouldn’t do, and failing to supervise them to make sure they follow those rules.

What reinforces this point for me is an example from real life. I remember a kid from my school running up a bill in the hundreds of pounds on adult chat lines. No-one in that case blamed the telephone company…

300 times stronger than steel and just a single atom thick, with incredible conductive properties, Graphene and other two-dimensional materials are going to revolutionise our world. If you think we’re sophisticated today, we will look like loincloth-sporting grunts in a hundred years time.

As we look back from our super-conducting future we will laugh at our funny old copper wiring like it is steam pipes, and our heavy metal cars like they’re carts. iPads will look like mainframes, mobile phones like telegraphs.

And do you know what? I can’t wait.

The lounge from the original Book of the Future, with thanks to Usborne and http://www.murrayewing.co.uk/

Part of the barrier to my doing effective gadget reviews in the past has been a lack of space. When the only place you have to test gadgets is the living room, shared with wife and two year old, there’s only so much testing you can do. Certainly nothing valuable can be left out, especially when it stops said two year old getting to her toys.

I feel a little nervous talking about it as it could all still fall apart, but if it does go to plan then the new house has space galore. In fact I will have my own decent-sized den, dedicated to geeky pursuits. Suffice to say I am excited.

The current plan is as follows:

• A full room height 19in rack to replace the current Toy Cupboard, with space for a wide range of rack-mounted gear: servers, networking, home automation, and AV gear, all designed to be accessible from the rear so that I don’t need eight foot arms and the ability to see around corners to wire things up
• A project workstation to give me space to play with things like Arduino so that I can finally do some more fun little ‘makes’
• A decent computer desk (with space for gaming paraphernalia)
• A sofa, perhaps with a small beer fridge alongside, and something on which to rest my feet
• A flexible home-cinema system with easily swappable components, TV, and speakers so that I can start to test this stuff more easily
• A variety of games consoles including 8-bit Nintendo, arcade emulator, and X-box Kinect (bring on Kinect StarWars)
• Lots and lots of storage filling all the remaining space

It’s going to be tight getting all that in, even in a space the size that it is. But assuming all goes to plan it will be very exciting and should see a significant expansion of my geek output. Watch this space.

One gadget in particular caught my attention because it is just such a perfect example of what you could call ‘Instant Obsolescence’. It is a gadget designed to transfer MP3s to a MiniDisc player. I have no memory of ever buying this gadget, nor of ever using it, but for a while before I got my first iPod I was indeed a MiniDisc devotee. I still think the MiniDisc has a strange, slightly retro-Sci-Fi cool.

I’ve talked about technologies similar to this before. Transitional devices designed to bridge the gap between different generations of technology. Like the LiveScribe Echo pen, which enables digital capture of paper written notes – a device for which i have recently discovered a group of absolute devotees. This technology smooths the move from writing on paper to writing on digital surfaces – if we continue to use handwriting at all.

MiniDiscs: Retro Chic

The difference between the LiveScribe Echo and this MiniDisc gadget is that the former is helping people to migrate from a technology embedded in our culture, that has hundreds of years of history behind it. I believe the digital pen is transitional technology but it probably has years of opportunity and use ahead. By contrast the MiniDisc barely achieved any kind of market outside the radio industry where it was used for both capturing audio and playing it back in studios before everything went digital.  In my experience the only place you might still see a MiniDisc deck in use is in a radio studio.

Launching an accessory for such a transitional platform with a small user base is ambitious: you have to get it to market quickly and capture a large proportion of the users if you are to make a profit. If, of course, you realise that the market is transitional. Launching an accessory that explicitly acknowledges the coming supremacy of an alternative platform – in this case digital music – shows either a great degree of confidence in your ability to execute, or a total lack of vision for what is coming.

The former option is the most interesting because it says a lot about where we have got to in our ability to design, manufacture, and bring to market electronic goods. We can translate an idea into a product in a matter of months – maybe less – in order to service a market that only exists for a minimal period. Modern examples might be cases or docks for the latest generations of smartphones, always due to be superseded within a matter of months.

These products are almost instantly obsolescent, or at best move very quickly from being on the shelves of the shop to being in the car boot sale or on eBay. But companies can get them to market so quickly and with such practical margins that creating products of such fleeting value is clearly profitable.

This has consequences. The approach of built-in obsolescence for consumer goods enabled costs to fall for us as consumers but dramatically increased the cost of technology to the planet, increasing the rate at which we burned through our supply of fossil fuels. The chance to profit from instant obsolescence has further increased the rate at which we plough through these limited resources.

I’ve been testing a pair of these headphones for a few weeks now and I can confirm that they work well. What they don’t do is completely block out noise: you are still very aware of the hubbub going on, it’s just quieter. In fact these headphones provide very stark evidence of just how noisy the world around us really is. For example, air conditioning makes a hell of a racket. Normally your brain tunes this out, but pop these headphones in for a while and then turn off the ANC and you hear just how loud a sound you have been competing with, both when talking and listening.

There are alternative products on the market that cut out more sound: very expensive over-ear headphones from Bose for example, or much cheaper but more tight-fitting in-ear sets from the likes of Denon or Sennheiser. Denon or Sennheiser in-ear sets are my usual choice of headphone (I go through a lot) but they do have flaws. For a start you may not hear much from outside but you do hear everything going in inside your own head, which is surprisingly noisy. Being totally cut off from the outside world is problematic to: you can’t hear traffic for example.

Using the DS-321Ds I’ve found it much easier to listen to music or speech while walking around cities and train stations, without having to constantly pop my headphones out when there’s an announcement or I need to cross the road. They do have flaws: the deliberate design that stops them cutting out all external noise means they fit less well than my Denons and hence don’t always stay in the ear. The cable lengths seem a little odd too: too short a run from the electronics to the plug, and too little between the right-hand earphone and the mic/control button. And when the noise cancelling is engaged there is a very quiet but definitely audible hiss. But they are priced competitively for such a high tech rig (£59.99), and the fact that they have become my every day choice beyond the necessary trial period justifies a good four stars for me.

Sadly the reality is some way from this dream. As well as being ugly, electric cars today are utterly impractical, requiring long charging times for very short (circa 100 mile) ranges. No petrolhead lusts after a Nissan Leaf.

The Gorgeous Tesla Model S

They might however, desire a Tesla Model S.The exception to the electric car rule for some years now has been the Tesla Roadster. The Lotus Elise-based two-seater had supercar performance and looks to match. Sadly it didn’t have much in the way of space for passengers or the weekly shop and came in at a tidy £87,000. Not exactly a practical option for most.

This summer though, Tesla brings the Model S to the UK. It’s still expensive, starting at an expected £40,000+ for the base model, but this sleek Aston-esque saloon is a genuine alternative to some of the more upmarket family car options. If you were considering a high-spec BMW, Mercedes, or even Maserati (you lucky thing) then the Tesla is worth a look. With a 300 mile range it is a lot more practical – it would actually get you from Manchester to Reading and back (my usual business round trip) with a bit of a top up during the day – something no other electric car on the market today could achieve.

This is just the start though: advances in battery technology particularly will see electric cars fall rapidly in price and increase dramatically in performance over the next 20 years. Take this week’s announcement from BAE for example. The company has managed to integrate battery chemistry into a carbon fibre-type material, enabling the actual structure of a vehicle to be turned into a giant battery. It’s some way off commercialisation with the requisite level of output but it shows the direction in which things are moving.

Of course we we still have to generate the electricity in the first place, and if one study this week is to be believed, this process generates more pollution than burning petrol inside a car engine. Researchers in China looked at particulate emissions (rather than CO2) and compared the output from a variety of different vehicles and their power sources, concluding in headline-grabbing fashion that electric cars were more polluting than their petrol counterparts.

This is, of course, not remotely true unless the vast majority of your power happens to come from coal, and you have very low standards for emissions control – as is the case in China. In just about any western country where the power is generated from cleaner sources, and the emissions are filtered, the math looks very, very different – not that you’d know that if you read the Daily Mail story on the subject.

In summary then, electric cars are coming and they will (eventually) be both, cool and practical, appealing and green – whatever the Daily Mail might say. You just need deep pockets if you want one in 2012.

Not in my opinion.

Facebook is a fascinating company with a very successful product, as is clear from its 850 million users worldwide. I use it daily, as do most people I know. Facebook is also believed to be fairly profitable, with estimates ranging from $1bn-$2.5bn for 2011 – we won’t know for sure until it files.

But even if the top end of these estimates is true, it is being valued at 40x its profit. And I’m afraid I just don’t see it growing to justify those valuations.

To give you some context, total global spend on online advertising, the primary source of Facebook’s revenue, has been estimated in the region of $70bn. There are a lot of companies competing for a share of that pie. The valuations discussed put a premium of $100 on every one of Facebook’s users: when did you last pay for something on Facebook?

Most importantly for Facebook as an investment proposition though, is the fast-moving and fickle nature of the tech industry. You only need to look at once-lauded names like Bebo and MySpace (or Nokia and Blackberry) today to see how far and how fast user affections can shift. Innovation in this sector rarely comes from companies encumbered by shareholder expectations. It is the nimble start-ups driven by ideas and enthusiasm that tend to shift the market. Start-ups like Facebook once was.

For me the rot has already set in at Facebook. The platform reminds me of RealPlayer in the 2000s: a once-great product that became bloated and slow as time went by and the drive to extract revenue from its users became ever more imperative. I watched this change closely, as I was doing PR for RealNetworks at the time. Today Facebook has endless features and bolt-ons, and multiple pages of settings to tweak. As sleeker, slicker, less involved options come along I can see users progressively, even without consciously making the decision, slipping away.

For this reason I don’t expect Facebook to justify investment today – certainly not in the long term. It’s just opinion, and I may be proven wrong, but that’s part of the joy in predicting the future.

The concept is simple and pretty compelling. When you use a traditional phone line, your conversation occupies the whole line for 100% of the time that you are making the call. This isn’t a very efficient use of the line: voices aren’t very taxing on the capacity of the line and there are lots of silences in conversations. Imagine a road being closed so that a single car can drive down it and you get the idea.

By contrast, Internet traffic is very efficient. Every job – a download, a request for a web page, a video stream or a voice call – is broken up into lots of little packets. These packets are then packed tightly down the line and reassembled into their respective parts at the other end. Think of normal road traffic – lots of different vehicles carrying different things to their respective locations.

Because it makes more efficient use of capacity, it is much cheaper to carry things like voice calls over the Internet. Hence why services such as Skype can offer free free calls between Skype users – the marginal cost of carrying the calls approaches zero. Of course we don’t always want to be sat at our computers when making phone calls, and that’s where products like the FREETALK Connect Me Skype adaptor come in.

This little black box plugs into your normal (analogue) phone line, your home phone, and your broadband router. It then allows you to make some or all calls over Skype instead of your normal phone line. You can specify classes of call that should be made over Skype (e.g. International) or just hit a key code before dialling to choose which calls should go over Skype and which should be ‘normal’. Finally, you can add speed dial codes to call Skype users from your home phone.

This all works well: setup is straightforward and self-explanatory, with just six steps in the quick start guide and the rest handled with an on-screen wizard. Functionally this product works, and the price is right, starting at £34.99 with 300 minutes of international calls. So why only three stars?

Because I’m not wholly convinced that anyone wants or needs this. For a start, most of us have mobiles now and if you’re on a reasonable tariff you get lots of free minutes. Sure calling abroad can be expensive but if you do it a lot then you’re going to just get an international calling card or pre-pay with your home phone provider (£2.99/month for unlimited calls to international destinations from TalkTalk for example, if it’s not already included in your package). If you do want to use Skype it’s usually for the additional features – presence, video calling, text messaging, screensharing, filesharing, conference calls. All things you can’t get on your old house phone, so why would you choose to use it?

I can think of just two applications for this device and they are both predicated on a lack of understanding from the ultimate user. If someone wanted to Skype a technically illiterate relative regularly, they might choose to add this to their relative’s phone rather than try to teach them to use a PC. And if a company was using Skype, it might want to have some standard handsets for certain applications where PCs and headsets weren’t practical.

Beyond these the only reason I can think of to buy this is the sheer geeky fun of it, and that I’m afraid, is just not enough.

First thing to catch my attention was Android @ Home. Just watch this video from May 2011 and see if you’re as excited as I am – the good bit starts at 6:12.

It’s not so much the Android aspects that excite me here, though clearly that has cool potential. It is the large company throwing R&D and brand weight behind the little things that make home automation work – like the controllable lightbulbs. Without someone doing these in volume the price will always remain high – circa £10-15 at the moment for a cheap controllable socket and more if you want to add something like a dimmer or tuck the tech away behind the wall. This isn’t  wildly expensive but it is a little too much to convince people to do their whole house. If this could be brought down to £5-7 I think people would be much more inclined to get their homes wired up. Hopefully we’ll see some products on the market soon.

Secondly I checked out the Aldebaran NAO. Sadly I don’t have the £15k I’d need to buy one, but it would certainly be high on my list post lottery win. Would it be much use at home? Probably not – it can’t lift a can of beer. But it would be very, very cool.

On a more down to earth robotics note, I finally posted my review of the Neato Robotics XV-15 robot vacuum cleaner. It’s a great piece of kit and though I had my reservations I’d very much like one long term. Fortunately the same day my trial was collected, the latest iRobot Roomba was delivered. I’ll be reviewing this soon but so far, I like it a lot.

Following the announcements from this year’s CES I noticed the new Samsung TVs with gesture interfaces – imagine changing channel with the wave of your hand. These are just the latest generation of internet-connected TVs, devices that are less and less about watching broadcast content and more and more about providing a window on the world of media: music, videos, news and games from your own home and the wider web. Adding the gesture interface makes these TVs suddenly seem like something very much less prosaic.

Finally, I’ve started mucking around with LinuxMCE again. LinuxMCE is an open source option for a home operating system – a centralised computer system to manage your heating, lights, security, media and phones. I like it for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that it is free and it will run on old PC hardware, so it’s great for tinkering. It also interfaces with all sorts of different kit for the alarm, lighting control etc, all of which I’m looking forward to getting up and running when I have time and space. At the moment I just have the latest version running on an old laptop just to re-familiarise myself, but I’m planning a dive into the garage at some point to see if I can find an old PC onto which I can pop a more permanent install. I see plenty of time being enjoyably wasted there…

The Neato XV-15 is one of a number of robot vacuums on the market, with iRobot’s Roomba series being the most notable competition. Both come with their own charging stations (which the robot seeks out whenever it needs juice) and programmable timers, so that you can just plug in the charger somewhere out of the way (under a cupboard for example – both are very short), set the timer, and then forget about hoovering ever again…

OK, it’s not quite that simple. If it were, for £350-400 we would all have Neatos instead of Dysons. For a start, even the latest generations of domestic robot are not that smart, or that agile. A number of times I had to rescue the XV-15 from having got stuck somewhere having apparently run out of power before finding its way back to the charging station, or having got stuck on some object. This will happen a fair bit unless your house is always tidy. With a two year old in the house that is a tall order.

I could have set the robot to clean at night after we’d all gone to bed, just making sure I picked up any major obstacles before I went. But this presents a second problem: the Neato is pretty loud. It’s not as loud as an upright vacuum but you probably wouldn’t want it running around a flat or small house while you were trying to sleep.

The major selling points of the Neato are increased power over the competition, a larger bin, and laser mapping technology. Unfortunately the last one clearly doesn’t help it avoid the smaller obstacles, and I’m afraid I didn’t find the first that impressive. The Neato didn’t seem to collect any more dirt than other robots I’ve tried, even missing some fairly chunky biscuit crumbs laid in its path.

But, there’s no doubting that if I had it set up and running on a regular schedule my house would be a lot cleaner than it is otherwise – a fact of which I am acutely aware having just discovered the horrors under the sofa while spring cleaning. The Neato could have cleaned under here happily, and done so two or three times a week, not once a year.

For that reason I would be happy to overcome any minor issues and keep a little domestic robot vacuum running year round. The only question is whether it would be a Neato or one of the competitors, and I’m still undecided on that front. Watch this space…