The End of Knowledge

Although the links to the Global Positioning System's satellites may be the system's coolest sounding part, they are not the key to its high accuracy. Wheel sensors and an electronic gyro compass provide most of the precision - making it good to five metres, according to Blaupunkt. After a brief test drive around the tiniest of the tunnels and alleys behind London Bridge, I am inclined to believe them. Try as I might, I could not confuse the system. It effortlessly directed me to Shand Street, a challenge which seems to defeat most London cabbies. And it recognises that there is more to city driving than simply pointing in the right direction.

It knows all about one-way streets; it suggests which lane you should choose well in advance; it knows which routes will be busy at what times; and, should you make a mistake, it will instantly revise your route to get you back on course.

The next release will include the location, opening hours and sample menus of many of London's top restaurants, as well as information on more museums and places of interest than you can shake an A-Z at. There is even a tentative suggestion that the system could be hooked up to a real-time network, allowing shops, pubs and so on to advertise to you as you approach them - and permitting better traffic reports.

The Téléatlas digital maps used with the £3,500 Blaupunkt system currently only cover the area inside the M25, but Blaupunkt promises that the maps will cover the whole country by the end of 1997. In Germany the Blaupunkt system is a DM4,000 (UK£1,700) option for Mercedes-Benz S-Class owners, and over half of the 70,000 S-Class saloons sold in Germany now come fitted with the system. Ralph Robbins, of the AA's Department of Cartography and Routes, reckons that the cost will have to fall below £1,000 before the average British customer will consider it as an optional extra. That may be a difficult price point to hit with the complex electro-mechanical systems Blaupunkt uses, though GPS with extra land-based beacons might reached it.

But though £3,000 may be a lot for most people, it's less than the cost in money and time of learning The Knowledge. And in principle, it makes the training superfluous. London could now go to a straightforward auction-and-trading system for cab licences, as many other cities already do, with The (automated) Knowledge built into the price up front.

That would require the cabbies to embrace the technol-ogy, which might seem unlikely. "Sounds like bloody black magic to me, mate...." But cabbies have embraced computerised dispatching quite happily, and this is the natural follow on: "... although if it works I wouldn't mind having one in the cab. Can you get me one cheap? Just for emergencies, like."

As one apprentice on a moped put it, digesting the news, "I guess we're all just wasting our fucking time, then."

Luckily, they will always have their wit to fall back on.

  The Geek Hall of Fame

It's not in Cooperstown: that's baseball. It's not in Cleveland, either: that's Rock 'n' Roll. But one day it could be in San Jose. That's what the folks behind the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame hope.

The Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC), which created the Engineering Hall of Fame six years ago, claims it has an "agreement in principle" with San Jose's soon-to-be revamped Tech Museum of Innovation to provide a permanent home for the Hall of Fame.

But Peter Giles, president and CEO of the Tech Museum, begs to differ. Giles says the SVEC pitched the idea years ago, although at present "there are no plans to have a Hall of Fame." Still, Giles insists he's "very supportive" of the SVEC, an all-volunteer organisation that is dedicated to increas-ing "awareness of how engineering affects the quality of our life."

Lord knows, engineers could use the boost. Engineers are like the Rodney Dangerfields of the labour force: they don't get no respect. Yet a good case could be made that the pencil-toting slide-rule set has exerted more influence over the shape of the 20th century than has any other profession.

The status deficit faced by engineers was evoked by the chair of the SVEC's mentoring programme, George Crothal, during the Hall of Fame awards ceremony in February. "When was the last time you saw an engineer on the TV news being hailed as a hero?" Crothal asked. "We save lives!"

It's not that hard to sympathise with Crothal's frustration. Consider the talent and influence of a few Hall of Famers: Frederick E. Terman, co-creator of the Stanford Research Park, was inducted in the Hall of Fame's first year. William R. Hewlett and David Packard got in the next year. And Robert Noyce, the Valley entrepreneur who helped develop the integrated circuit, is in there, too.

The game's not over for the Hall of Fame, but it's definitely the fourth quarter. The new US$59 million (£39 million) Tech Museum is scheduled to open in 1998. Giles insists he is willing to consider providing space for the SVEC. "We'll probably have to reopen the discussion," he says.

- Spencer E. Ante

  The Great Cadensa

Want an atmospheric recording of a rainforest? The National Sound Archive (NSA) at the British Library houses an amazingly thorough and detailed reference collection; sounds ranging from the purely eclectic - an Asante drummer recorded in 1917 - to the bizarre - the sound of a champion gumboot dancer strutting his stuff - to the simply mundane - "traffic drowning street musician". The NSA, which will be one of the first British Library departments to move into the new building at St Pancras, has sounds on everything from 100-year-old wax cylinders and vintage 78s to CDs. At the end of June, the NSA launched CADENSA: Catalogue Access and Data Entry at the NSA.

Costing £800,000 and taking three years to develop, CADENSA is a 24-gigabyte online catalogue database (based on Sirsi Ltd's Unicorn Management System) of the NSA's collection; its size is set to double over the next twelve months. It includes (among other things) drama, spoken word and wildlife sounds and can be searched by name, title, keyword, format, language, category (such as jazz, or comedy), or date. There is also a copyright-cleared transcription service.

Eventually the NSA plans to link the database directly to its sound collection so that researchers can access sounds in real time. It has been testing out the idea of establishing Web access (see mediator.uni-c.kd/paragon/). Thus far, ten European libraries and one in New York have searched CADENSA using Netscape. The Paragon project finishes in July, but the site will continue to operate until the end of the year. The NSA is also participating in an EU-supported IT initiative called Jukebox that aims to improve libraries' access to sound archives, and in Harmonica, a programme developing new music services. So whether yours is the Clash, amphibian noises, or just a little poetry, go and have a listen - virtually or actually - at the NSA.

- Liz Bailey

  Defense of the Door

The Portillo Web-cam hoo-hah didn't amount to much. But it did highlight the confusion over who is responsible for what appears on the Web.

The story goes something like this: Intervid, a London-based Web developer run by Robert Maxwell's nephew, Nick Rosen, decides that training a camera on to Defence Secretary Michael Portillo's Belgravia flat and then relaying the pictures to a Web site is a cunning promotional scam. Predictably enough, the mainstream media delights in portraying Intervid as your typically irresponsible Net cowboys whose questionable antics threaten the security of the defender of the realm, a prime terrorist target. Half the nation applauds. Under pressure from the Ministry of Defence, British Telecom, on whose server the site resides, promptly pulls the plug.

So what was illegal here? Intervid may have been irresponsible - after all, who knows what desperadoes are out there ready to fall on our beloved Mr Portillo like wolves, were it not for fact that they have no smudgy GIFs of his front door? But Intervid broke no law. Nor did BT. Intervid was beta testing BT's forthcoming Webserve service and the Webserve contract contained a rather surprising clause that forbade its clients from using the service to invade the privacy of others. And as for the men from the ministry ... how could a judicious word in the right ear be illegal?

But all this legality does not mean the case has no wider ramifications. With no legal definition of the right to privacy in the UK, the Webserve contract made BT both judge and jury in controlling its customer's online content. And in exercising such control, for good or ill, the company becomes much more than a straightforward conduit for information.

As Trevor Diamond, business development manager at Direct Connection, the UK's third-largest ISP, puts it, "I think BT is shooting itself in the foot by censoring legal content. Our aim is to be viewed as a common carrier, and not as a publisher."

Though Intervid said it would pull the site if anyone objected, BT decided not to take any chances. Future customers be warned. BT may have it within its contractual rights to pull sites without warning, but how many customers will be happy to allow BT to decide what they can, and cannot, put on their Web sites? All the more reason to shop around. And potential litigants may want to take note of the fact that BT is, at least de facto, responsible for some of the content on its servers.

- Tom Loosemore

  Pub Trivia

After the cybercafe comes the cyberpub. According to the Target Group Index's market research, fewer and fewer people in the 18-to-25 age bracket are spending their evenings down the pub. So Allied Domecq, with over 2,000 pubs one of the country's largest brewers, has come up with an imaginatively interactive approach to try and get some of them back - or at least get those who are there to spend more. It commissioned CBHi, a London-based interactive communications agency, to develop Xchange, a trial network of interactive video kiosks installed in eight of its pubs - seven in the UK, and one in Sweden.

When Xchange went live in July, according to Mike Beeston, one of CBHi's directors, "We had over 400 users within a week." Drinkers can record video messages (V-Mail) to send to other users, participate in live video chats, enter video karaoke competitions and even arrange online dates. The fees (50p per V-Mail, £2 per online date, et cetera) are deducted from credit on a smartcard that the barman can recharge. Plans are afoot to allow users to add drinks credits to other users' smartcards, allowing networked rounds, or friendly wagers on online inter-pub quizzes.

The user interface is pacey, compelling and thoroughly slick - as it has to be if it is to suck in a Sega generation that finds the traditional pub unappealing. Forget staring at Netscape in a torpid cybercafe; as an introduction to the joys of online interaction, a boisterous crowd of friends composing a group V-Mail on an Xchange kiosk takes some beating.

- Tom Loosemore

  Going Mobile

Is it mere coincidence that Psion's head office is just around the corner from top London scooter shop R. Agius? Or that Psion director Irwin Joffe used to drive a Lambretta in his student days in South Africa? I think not. Psion is making the scooters of the information superhighway - and hoping that its personal digital assistants will one day be as successful and plentiful as the Vespas of Naples.

Psion's abandoned bid for Amstrad had nothing to do with Amstrad's position in the market for basic computer boxes. Nor was it just nostalgia for the days when Psion made software for Sinclair, which Amstrad absorbed in 1986. It was based on the company's technologies. Psion wanted the know-how of a mobile communications company called Dancall that Amstrad bought out of receivership in 1994. And it was also keen on Viglin, an Amstrad subsidiary that produces PCs to order rather than keeping warehouses full of stock. That sales-and-manufacturing expertise would have transferred well to Psion, which regularly experiences problems with its hardware and software rollouts.

Psion wanted new abilities in double-quick time because it is keen to further its already impressive position in the PDA marketplace, and to stave off increasing international competition as wireless connectivity for PDAs becomes a reality. Wireless PDAs seem a natural for mobile-phone companies that dream of all-in-one communication systems. Nokia already has a combined mobile phone and palmtop computer on the market, and many more will follow.

Psion's response is not to add voice telephony to its PDAs. Although it is happy to license its operating system to those who think there is a market for such all-in-one communicators, Psion is more interested in enhancing the PDA proper. It is concentrating on producing PDAs that use networks efficiently and intelligently - and thus do their basic jobs better. Psion is currently launching new email software for its flagship model, the Series 3a, which will also have a text-based Web browser by the end of the year. Buying Dancall would have made this easier - or at least quicker. Now the company is looking at other options - including, perhaps, a partnership with telecoms giant Ericcson.

Once PDA palmtops add Internet access to the word processing, spreadsheets and address and agenda organisation they already offer, they could become the true personal computer of the future. That, at least, is the company view put forward by Marketing Director Graham O'Keeffe. It might even be true - if the world turns out to be one of mods, not rockers.

Like scooters, PDAs are lightweight, economical and efficient. They may not have the performance of a big, greasy desktop hog - but that's not the point of a scooter. Scooters can get you through traffic as fast as a big bike can; they need less maintenance and they're cheaper. There is something quintessentially European about them, and they are elegant in a way that a PC, even a laptop, is not. And both scooters and PDAs go well with suits. If you look around London you'll see that scooters are making a serious comeback as an answer to the need for something economical, cool and functional.

It's not impossible that networked PDAs could do the same. And with a third of the world market already in its pocket, a fully mobilised Psion could end up bigger than anything Joffe ever dreamed of as he cruised his Lambretta around Cape Town.

- James Flint

  Stand-Alone Phone

Why is a phonebox like a toilet? For one, we need mobile ones. Portaloos have been servicing the transportable toilet market for years. Now Schlumberger, an international electronics and engineering company, and Alcatel, an international telecommunications company, are taking care of the mobile phonebox.

It looks just like a BT phonecard phone. That's because it's based on Schlumberger's PF08 card payphone, which telephone companies in 60 countries, including BT, already use. The only difference is that it uses a GSM wireless system. So canny telephone operators can now use a wireless payphone to test the commercial viability of a site before installing a land line. Public phones can be set up in rural and remote areas where there is no fixed-link phone service - and in tropical countries solar power can make them completely self-sufficient. And mobile payphones can provide temporary and seasonal service at outdoor concerts or construction projects. Just so long as no one mistakes them for the portaloos.

- Alex Balfour

  Biblioteque of Blag

Don't you wish you were the British Library? Imagine if everyone who had published anything at all of any intellectual significance had been required by law to send you a copy, for at least the last hundred years, and that you had inherited a fairly vast collection of materials dating back to at least a thousand years before that. You would have all the books. You'd be able to get really good at philosophy. You'd be clever enough to know Not To Move To A Dodgy New Building (well, maybe you wouldn't). You might even find a way to answer the question about whether or not a book makes any noise when it falls off a shelf if no one's there to hear it.

But you might also have a nagging feeling that something is escaping you. You're still getting all the books and periodicals, but you're vaguely aware that people are now starting to publish information in a variety of other formats - like CD-ROMs, for instance. Worse still, some of the academic journals, a category of which you are particularly fond, start threatening to publish themselves without using any paper at all.

So what do you do? Easy. You're the British Library, and the law says you have to have a copy of everything that's published. If the legal definition of "publication" only applies to books and periodicals then it needs changing - and it needs constant review. A committee may be in order, to keep abreast of things and to make sure the law continues to require that you get a free copy of absolutely everything, forever.

All of which is, oddly enough, precisely what the British Library is currently doing. It recently submitted to the Department of National Heritage a weighty tome of 100 closely typed pages entitled "Proposal for the Extension of Legal Deposit to Non-Print Publications" - specifically, those in the form of microfilms, CD-ROMs and diskettes ("hand-held electronic publications", a nicely archaic neologism), films and video, and online publications. According to philosopher and academic Sir Anthony Kenny, the current chairman of the British Library Board, "it could be done within the life of the present Parliament. Given the amount of consultation there's already been, it ought not to be a controversial bill."

The first three formats are not too much of a problem; Sir Anthony would expect the extra curating and storage to cost only a million or so a year, small beer for a library with new buildings £200 million over budget. But providing a rigorous legal definition of online publication acceptable to libraries and publishers alike has been beyond even the formidable capacity of the best brains the British Library has to offer. Never mind. Sir Anthony is planning to get the general structure of the legislation into position as soon as possible, and then slot in the details at a later date. How much later? Well, that depends on some of those tricky philosophical questions. Like, "If a page of an online journal is available to the general public at the click of a mouse, but no one has ever clicked on it, has it been published?"

- Wayne Myers

  Fucks Up

A quick survey conducted by Deja News, a Usenet search tool, revealed that as the furor over the once-ominous Communications Decency Act heated up in the beginning of 1996, so did the language on Usenet. Usage of "vulgar" terms increased up to 60% over the "control" terms analysed in the study. Interestingly, the frequency of eat closely irrors that of shit.

- Mike Serfas

  Mile High Club

The prospect of British Airways building a vast millennial Big Wheel opposite the Houses of Parliament might seem a little odd. But by the year 2000, BA will be operating almost 100 funfairs all over the world - and considerably higher above the ground than Mr George Washington Gale Ferris (1859-1896) would ever have dreamed possible. Richard Branson moved from entertainment into airlines. So who is to say that his fiercest competitor can't go the other way?

Certainly not those who, this July, flew in a specially converted British Airways 747 to Greenland and back. Most of the passengers were members of the team that has developed BA's forthcoming in-flight entertainment (IFE) system. The flight - the system's shakedown - was quite a success.

Forget dodgy Richard Gere movies over crappy headsets. This plane has serious entertainment: pay-per-play video-on-demand; inter-passenger video gaming; shopping; and gambling. BA plans to invest something like £1 million per plane on this system, transforming its entire 85-strong fleet of long-haul aircraft into flying entertainment palaces. As BA's CEO, Bob Ayling, recently put it, "Long-haul airlines will increasingly be seen not only as transport systems but as entertainment systems."

Gambling is particularly enticing. The BA system offers passengers throughout the aircraft networked games of blackjack and roulette using credit-card swipe systems and touch-screen seat-back displays. The house limits depend on the seat's class. On flights to South Africa and the Far East, this looks like a big winner; on flights to the US it's banned. But there might yet be exceptions - cruise ship operators have got them, thus setting a precedent. Gambling with air miles might be a sort of half-way house.

Gamblers who study form might bet against any of this ever really happening. For years the manufacturers of in-flight entertainment systems have been delivering far less than they have promised. United Airlines is currently suing GEC-Marconi In Flight Systems (GMIS) over the IFE system that GMIS fitted to United's Boeing 777s. (The 777 was designed to allow extra cabling to the seats with enhanced IFE systems in mind.) Airlines with quite good IFE systems don't boast about them, fearing their unreliability. It's not surprising. Installing a high-bandwidth 400-plus node network on the ground is a non-trivial exercise; installing one in an aircraft with intermittent power supplies, vibrations, temperature changes and so on is really hard.

The system announced by BA is far more interactive - and thus far more complex - than anything yet operational, yet it has some winning simplicities. A different server handles each application, so the network is rather more robust than most. And the prize is thought to be worth the technical risk. Airports get rich treating passengers as consumers. An airline that could manage the same trick could look more sanguinely on the industry's continuous cut-throat price wars. BA may just be feeling lucky.

- Tom Loosemore 

  Breaking the Banks

It's been a long four years for John Munden. In October 1992 the Cambridgeshire policeman returned from Greece to find £460 missing from his building-society account. Bad enough - but when he complained, the Halifax wouldn't believe him. Munden ended up on fraud charges, of which he was acquitted only this July - on grounds that have big implications for anyone involved in the electronic transfer of any sort of money.

When Munden, having been arrested at his own station and convicted in a magistrates' court, appealed in 1994, the appeals judge ordered the Halifax to give the defence team access to its computers and network security systems. The idea was that the lawyers and their experts could evaluate the chances of error or fraud. The Halifax was having none of it, and instead commissioned a report from consultants KPMG. The judge was not satisfied, and overturned the conviction this July.

It's an enormously significant decision. As barrister Alistair Kelman, a leading specialist in computer law, puts it, "There is a presumption [in court] that mechanical devices work correctly, which is what the banks have relied upon. This case has thrown into question whether that presumption applies to electronic devices."

The judgement at Bury St Edmunds court does not bind other judges. But as Ross Anderson, the Cambridge University security researcher who acted as John Munden's expert witness, says, "A fundamental of justice is that people are allowed to examine in the open court the evidence against them." Which implies that, in any future case where an electronic transaction was challenged, a judge could well issue the same order. If the bank - or whatever money handler was involved - agreed, the evidence would stand on the merits of the bank's computer security, as revealed by open examination. If it refused, the evidence would fall.

This doesn't just apply to cash cards (over which there are hundreds of complaints every year). Ross Anderson invites us to consider CREST, the London Stock Exchange's all-electronic share-dealing system, which was switched on a week after John Munden's acquittal. Anderson and other academic cryptographers have offered CrestCo a "hostile review", tackling the system's encryption keys and what have you. CrestCo's Chris Piper says this "was a rather meaningless challenge - [the cryptographers'] claim was that it would take 900 computers nine years" to break CREST's public-key encryption, which currently uses keys "more than 33 decimal digits long". Piper says they could get longer if need be. A harsh review by cryptographers would be one such need. Losing lots of money would be another.

Much thought has gone into CREST. Chris Piper says it has "audit trails and message dispute procedures; we have two independent systems which we can use to audit and verify the authenticity of messages, one taking data from the communications system and one from the central system." In the case of a dispute, the parties can nominate "up to three world-renowned experts".

But what if, I ask, some alleged money-launderer denied that certain share dealings had ever taken place and demanded to see the evidence, nominating Dorothy Denning and a pair of top cypherpunks as his world-renowned experts and asking for them to be given a chance to poke into all CREST's crevices? Next day, Piper replies, "On reflection, I can't see why it shouldn't happen, but it would depend on the case and the time."

Systems that are out in the open for people to pull at and question tend to get tougher. Systems hidden away never have their flaws exposed until too late. Obscurity, as the experts say, is not the same as security. And if the Munden case does turn out to set a precedent, then the price of obscurity may rise even higher in terms of lost court cases.

- Mike Holderness

  Punctured Walloons

In that seething hotbed of multi-culturalism men call Belgium, bad-tempered divisions of the spoils are a time-honoured custom. Some things (like the country itself) are split more or less equally between the French-speaking Walloons and the Flemings. Other things are shared out less evenly. The Walloons get the pretty hills and the fading steel industries in the south, the Flemings get the coast and the economic growth in the north. And the Flemings also get the Web pages. According to French magazine Planéte Internet, of the 1,700 Belgian Internet sites, only a pitiful 223 are francophone.

Trying to redress that linguistic lopsidedness is a site called Netomium , a "shop window" for Belgian francophones "reflecting their life, their joys, their anger and their sadness." It offers the definitive guide to the workings of the Walloon parliament, a novel set to shake up the (bijou) Walloon publishing market and the chance to correspond - in French - with a criminal on death row in the US. It contains no mention whatsoever of chocolate, chips, or life-threateningly strong fruit beers.

- Steve Shipside

Tired	Wired
Web design	Database interface
www.pepsi.com	www.pepsi.co.uk
-isms	Schisms
Motion capture	Synthespians
Air Jordans	Nike Air Rifts
Diamanda Galas	Tuvan throat-singing
Jane Campion	Anna Campion
Pandas	Seahorses
"New Labour, new danger"	A general election
Recordings of whale songs	Recordings of the Aurora Borealis
Diesel	Vexed Generation
Jolt Cola	Water Joe caffeine-enhanced water
ATM	Gigabit ethernet

  French National Front

"The French National Front," says the French National Front, "suffers profound injustice from the press, something we have always attempted to counteract by means of direct communication between us and the citizenry." Hence its Web site, complete with an English translation, where we learn that "In a word [sic] full of danger ... the Front National [sicetty sic], an assembly of patriotic, lucid and courageous men and women, embodies the fight against decadence."

One of the first political parties in Europe to get on the Web (in April 1995), the French National Front (FN) is gearing up to transform its site into a 24-hour worldwide party-political broadcast by the end of the year. "All the facets of the National Front" will be there, we are assured, from a "phototeque" of images that show the party's "warmer, more human" face, to reports on its "militant action in towns". This will presumably be nothing like the traditional press coverage of militant actions, with its regrettable, profoundly unjust focus on racist violence, or the media's puerile habit of noting Monsieur Le Pen's penchant for jokes about death-camp gas ovens.

The FN site is something of a contradiction. By and large the FN dislikes the Internet; it embodies a worldwide cosmopolitanism that the party finds less than congenial. But the Front also wants to show that even blinkered bigots approve of some "cultural exchange". So if there is anything non-corporeal you want to exchange with Le Pen and his friends, the site's email box is your chance.

- Steve Shipside

  Cyborg Legions

Who do you want developing your games? If your answer is "hardcore gamers", then Steel Legions, the forthcoming game from Scots developers Digital Animations, could be the one for you. It's a labour of love, a by-gamers-for-gamers project that just might break out into something big.

Steven Doyle and Jamie Reid are, in most ways, classic techies - Star Trek-lovin', metal-listenin', role-playin' game fiends. They also happen to have met each other in the classified bowels of the National Defence Laboratory in Glasgow. It was during the downtime from fighting the cold war that Steel Legions was conceived. Doyle was a hardware engineer ("yeah, some of my components went up on the shuttle"), while Reid, who knows things about Windows that no sane person should know, hints at coding involvement with some kind of classified data-retrieval scheme that sounds kind of like Kafka with a serial port.

How many other game designers can you think of who've worked on real spaceships before thinking up fantasy ones? And how many have a devastating secret weapon as impressive as Jim Robertson's 15-odd years' experience in defence-related artificial intelligence (AI)? Outlining the neural-net architecture that makes Steel Legions a candidate for Next Big Thing, he seems like a kid in a toy shop - despite the fact that Digital Animations had to lure him out of retirement.

The game is set in a world of battling mercenary groups fighting in giant "Goliath" robots. Yeah, what isn't - but what sets Steel Legions apart is its use of neural-net-based mini-AIs to "play" the various characters in the game's complex command structure. The game was designed from the ground up to be networkable, with teams of humans and AIs playing together or against one another. Much of the philosophy - detailed background, space-operatic scope, concentration on character and motivation - stems from its designers' background in pen-and-paper role-playing games. This, applied to a fast-moving networked combat environment, promises the fulfilment of every gamer's dream - fast twitch action with depth and motivation. And with neural nets allowing the AI players to respond in human-like ways to game events, you won't know whether you're up against a human, a machine, or a sinister combination of both. If they can pull that one off, then the appeal should spread a long way beyond the confines of the hardcore role players. Mass cyborg war, anyone?

- Hari Kunzru

  Thai in the Sky

Sondhi Limthongkul likes to ponder the big picture. How big? Think 200 channels of local and foreign programmes beamed direct to homes across Asia. Late next year, the 48-year-old Thai media mogul will launch the first of two satellites to beam digital TV programmes to the world's most populous region.

Sondhi, an ethnic Chinese, first dreamed of running a region-wide publication during his days at the University of California at Los Angeles, in the 1960s. After masterminding a string of successful publishing ventures in Thailand, he expanded to fulfil his ambitions; he compares himself to Genghis Khan: "I march, I seize the fort, I get somebody who is able to run it, then I keep moving on," he says.International media and entertainment, Sondhi says, "is one of the very, very few trades that Asians don't have enough guts to enter."

His decision to dive into the fray is motivated as much by local pride as "the need to tell the world what we think". Hence his Asia Times, a daily with an "Asian point of view" not found in The Asian Wall Street Journal.

His ventures do not always succeed. The main publishing business of his holding company, the M. Group, suffered losses last year because of rising newsprint costs and, Sondhi says, mis-management by a subordinate. Sondhi claims the satellites and the paper are different. They are personal projects, funded out of his own pocket.

A devout Buddhist, he says life is short. "Whatever you're doing, you have to keep on doing it, without postponing it for tomorrow." So what's the next fort to conquer? The M. Group is reportedly negotiating for a stake in a Hong Kong-based online service. Sondhi is also thinking about starting an Asian CNN, although he admits that for the time being the idea is just a dream. Still, he adds, "What I have dreamed in the past has always become a reality."

- José Manuel Tesoro

  Round Two

Never trust a mogul. Having looked set to be on opposite sides of the battle for control of digital television in Germany (see "Murdoch's Big Fight", Wired 2.05), Rupert Murdoch and Leo Kirch have ended up the best of friends, at least for now. As a result, European satellites have turned into something less gladiatorial and more like a team sport - moguls against conglomerates.

Back in spring, Murdoch joined French satellite company Canal Plus, Luxembourg-based group CLT, Deutsche Telecom, German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and others in a consortium to provide digital satellite service to Germany. The one party-pooper was Leo Kirch, the Bavarian media magnate who has built his empire on the basis of an exclusive film library. He was originally slated to join this grand alliance, but decided to go it alone after a isagreement with Bertelsmann about which set-top box the system should use.

The alliance first showed signs of strain when Murdoch released details of an imminent share deal involving strategically positioned German pay-TV station Premiere (whose 1.1 million subscriber base was thought necessary to underpin any German digital satellite venture) without telling any of his future partners. Bertelsmann said that Murdoch was over-eager; Murdoch said the Germans were moving too slowly. Canal Plus, it turned out, felt much the same way as Murdoch, and on June 5th all three partners fell out. Just one month later Kirch and Murdoch announced that they were to join forces, with Murdoch's company getting 49% of Kirch's DF1 service (which went on air at the end of July) without any cash up front.

If you get in to a satellite TV market first and make a mark, your venture eventually becomes a licence to print money; it is very difficult for any competitor to dislodge you. According to Mark Beilby, media analyst at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell (DMG), successful satellite TV means having no more than one service provider per territory.

But starting up a satellite system costs a lot. It's not just the hardware in orbit. DF1's 17 channels need a lot of advertising support; the set top "d-boxes" need subsidising; events need covering in a grand new style. So DF1 needs cash before the subscriber base starts generating it. The handsome profits BSkyB makes by providing Britain's service mean that it can afford to offer £200 million over the next few years. (By late 1997, the DF1 cashflow might start to go the other way, thus helping BSkyB roll out its own 200-channel digital service.)

So if this is the shape things stay, Europe will have the moguls lined up on one side and the corporates on the other - even more so once you remember that Kirch has various reciprocal agreements with Sylvio Berlusconi.

Bertlesmann appears now to be coming round to Kirch's set-top standard. That may help the consortium catch up. But the moguls' team has the lead in content, subscription management, set-top boxes, retail and marketing experience and first-mover advantage. DF1's chief executive, Gottfried Zmeck, impresses analysts; "very clued in", says one. Between the two of them the Moguls have a lot of capacity: 16 satellite transponders, each of which can handle at least 10 television channels. And Bertelsmann may find it very difficult to piggyback a digital TV service on the much-touted Premiere Pay-TV subscriber base - Kirch and Canal Plus hold 62% of the stock.

- James Flint

  Jargon Watch

To Nike (vb)

To doom by means of excessive hype "Charles and Di were Niked from the start by that fairy-tale wedding."

Print Miles

The distance covered between your desk and the printer from the time you click on the print icon and the time you remember you have to press enter to clear the print dialogue box. As in "I think I've covered enough print miles this quarter to qualify for a weekend trip to Paris!"

Beigeware

Bland high-end multimedia premised on values like "quality" and "sophistication", but that are dull as fuck: ScruTiny in the Great Round, Peter Gabriel's Eve, anything by Notting Hill...

Extranet

An intranet to which suppliers, strategic partners and other associates are also given access.

Domain Dipping

Typing in random words between "www." and ".com" just to find out what's there.

Stalker Site

A Web site created by an obviously obsessed fan. "Have you seen that Gillian Anderson stalker site? The guy's got like 200 pictures of her!"

Thanks to Roger James, Matt Fuller and the Wired US and Wired UK Jargon Watch teams.