Depending which day of the week you catch me on, I take a different view of location check-in services. I’m generally disdainful of Facebook check-ins, because I don’t want to tell everyone where I am all of the time. But, for some reason, I will happily check in on Foursquare. Perhaps it’s the fun of winding my friend up when he discovers I’m the mayor in another of his favourite locations… or perhaps it’s some contrary tendency on my part (most likely).

After a while, though, I do start to ask “why am I doing this again?”. Scott Monty, head of Social Media for Ford Motor Company (US) recently posted something on his blog that kind of kickstarted my thinking a little. Head on over and have a read or, if you don’t want to right now, check out this video:

So, the point of Foursquare isn’t just to check in and claim mayorships of venues (although that’s part of the game), it’s also about discovering new locations, creating recommendations for friends, meeting up with them, and earning rewards. Starts to sound a little more interesting now, doesn’t it?

The question I’ve got is, does Foursquare work when you don’t have many local friends on it, or your local businesses are not offering deals? The only function remaining, then, is to discover new venues based on what the general public have been checking in to and, I guess, that works. I’ve found new locations around town based on them showing up in the “Nearby Places” list, and have made decisions on whether to go there based on random people’s tips. It’s obviously a reduced experience, but it still works.

But, still, the biggest thing for me is that lovely moment when my friend turns to me and says, “no way… you’re the mayor here too!?”

What do you think of Foursquare, or of check-in services in general? Do they work for helping people find new venues, and helping businesses find new customers? Do they require critical mass of people and places to work well? Or is the whole thing a bit creepy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. 

I guess when information is your business, you’re going to come under close scrutiny for how you put that information to use. Google‘s business is information – gathering it, packaging it up, and making it available to users. When they were just indexing websites there wasn’t too much controversy, but with the arrival of products like Gmail, StreetView, Buzz and, latterly, Google+, the information they had on hand got much more personal. And people care about their personal information.

Google’s latest update to their privacy policy is designed to do away with the many, many policies they have and create one unified policy instead. Why? Well, imagine you get an email that reminds you to schedule a family get together, or to find that funny video to send to your sister. Google wants to be able to share information across all their products, like Gmail, Calendar, Search and YouTube to allow that sort of multi-system integration.

Or let’s say you constantly talk about Jaguar cars in Google+ and want to find out about the latest model in Google Search… Google hopes to better tailor your search results based on information in their other products – picking up the cars rather than the cats.

This combined policy is proving controversial, though, with various groups and individuals expressing concern. One of the major concerns is that the new policy is compulsory – if you want to keep using Google products you have to accept that your data will be shared between them.

My question is, is that so unusual? If a company updates their privacy policy, isn’t it normal that you should have to accept it to carry on using their services? Obviously this is a very large update, but I don’t see anything controversial about it being compulsory. Where it gets controversial is the potential for trying all those systems together creating situations where your information is unexpectedly exposed and, given Google’s prior form with privacy, I can understand people worrying about that.

What do you think about Google’s updated privacy policy? Should they have consulted with users, or is it fair enough to make the new policy compulsory? Is it a good idea to link all their products together to aid the flow of information? Or is that just too big a risk? I’m falling into the “fair enough” category, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. 

According to water-protection specialists HzO, their water-proofing technology (or something similar) will be a feature of the next season’s top phones. The company demonstrated its tech by immersing phones and tablets in water at CES this year, and it’s impressing some key companies.

According to Pocket-Lint, Samsung and Apple are both keen to include the technology on their next flagship phones, the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SIII, respectively. If these industry leaders add the technology to their phones, it may become an essential box to tick for other handset producers in the market, as much as HD displays, dual core processors and NFC are quickly becoming.

While we’ve seen waterproof phones before, they’ve always been either specialist devices (like the Motorola Defy+) or modifications to existing phones, rather than a feature of a normal handset.

While the news is certainly a PR exercise for HzO, I hope that we do see this technology become more mainstream. As someone who lives in annoyingly-consistent Brizzle (that’s Bristol drizzle, for you outsiders), something like this would make my life rather less worrisome.

This article was written by William Judd. William writes for Mobile Fun, the UK’s leading online retailer of iPhone cases and Jawbone accessories.

It seems that whenever there’s an Apple event on the cards, the rumours fly fast and furious. Even for a smaller do like Apple’s education announcement, the pundits have been weighing in with what they expect to be released.

Ars Technica first reported that the event would be a showcase for Apple to release an eBook creation suite, along similar lines as GarageBand. The tools, which are expected to support the ePub 3 standard, may be partially based on the older iWeb software, which allowed Apple users to easily design and publish websites. Apple is also likely to announce that iBooks will support the standard.

The Wall Street Journal also published about the event, stating that they expect Apple will unveil new textbooks that are designed for the iPad, as part of a partnership with large American textbook publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson PLC.

The latest word this morning comes from the WSJ again, who report that the initiative will be under the jurisdiction of Apple vice president of productivity applications Roger Rosner.

This is a fairly sensible and not particularly shocking story, but the fact it’s worthy of being published in the Wall Street Journal really speaks volumes about the influence this deal could have on the American education system – and Apple’s power to create media coverage on demand.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what Apple announces.

This post was written by William Judd. Will is a self-facilitating media node for Mobile Fun, the UK’s largest online phone accessories retailer including BlackBerry covers and a Bluetooth speaker.

This is a guest post by Asha Stuttard. Asha is a technology writer with OMR UK.

If the history of technology development teaches us anything – it’s that it won’t happen as quickly as we think – nor in the direction we think most likely.

Remember all those science fiction shows of the 1950s, 60s and 70s? We now look at most of them with a wry “weren’t they crazy back then?” smile. But whilst they may have been tongue in cheek, they were also reasonably thought out projections of our future lives.

By now, we were all supposed to riding in noiseless solar powered cars that didn’t require drivers, merely coordinates. We were also supposed to be flying around easily in small individual flying saucers – or at the very least jetpacks.

And bringing things more up to date proves just how foolish we all continue to be. It’s just a dozen years since a few dotcom boom companies were anticipated to be ruling the world a few years’ hence.

And where are they now?

The same is true for driving. New car offers today pretty much always include things like navigation systems which have become one of life’s essentials – but who really thought the traditional road atlas would become so quickly obsolete? As for the vehicles themselves, conventional wisdom has it that we’ll all be driving tiny lightweight cars around enlarged cityscapes a few years from now, making today’s cutting edge hybrid technology seem antiquated. Except that “driver” will be the wrong term as the cars will automatically be navigating us around.

History has shown us that this either won’t happen in reality – or if and when it does, it will look very different from the way we imagine it now.

So don’t get drawn in too early. Be suspicious and distrustful of new technology – no matter what seems to be superior in actual usage. After all, if it was all about technical superiority, we should have spent the 80s and 90s watching Betamax videos!

What technology predictions make you laugh today? And what are you glad didn’t happen? How about the thought of living on instant food supplements? Tell us your technology-prediction stories and thoughts in the comments.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might remember that I reviewed the Amazon Kindle in February of this year. Since then, Amazon has updated its Kindle lineup, with the effect that the old Kindle is now sold as the Kindle Keyboard. Why? Well, one of the changes in the new Kindle is that it doesn’t have a keyboard…

That might seem like something of a downgrade, and if you did a lot of typing on your Kindle you’re really going to miss that physical keyboard. If, however, you’re like me and only ever typed to find new books to download, the virtual keyboard isn’t too much of a problem. You select the letters using a 5-way controller and, assuming you’re not searching for “The history of the wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians; or, a narrative of their continued perfidy and cruelty, from the 10th of August, 1703, to the peace renewed 13th of July, 1713. And from the 25th of July, 1722, to their submission 15th December, 1725, which was ratified August 5th, 1726”  you won’t be slowed down too much. Fortunately, if you really are desperate for a physical keyboard, you can opt to buy the Kindle that still has one.

Other changes include a smaller overall body size (166 mm x 114 mm x 8.7 mm), but still the same size e-ink screen. That screen seems to have had an upgrade, and now boasts a 10% quicker refresh time to allow you to change pages more speedily. Again, that might seem like a small thing, but anything that increases the immediacy of the page changes is going to make it feel a little more like reading a real book.

In terms of battery life, the keyboardless Kindle will last for one month, and it has space for around 1,400 books. This is against the Kindle Keyboard’s 2 month battery life, and space for up to 3,500 books. So, hang on a second, the new Kindle has a shorter battery life and less space? It doesn’t stop there: it also lacks audio output, which the Kindle Keyboard uses for reading books out to you. So, why would you opt for the new version?

Here’s the rub: the new Kindle costs £89 in the UK, while the Kindle Keyboard costs £149. If you know you don’t need a keyboard, don’t need to carry more than a little over a thousand books around, and actually want to read your books rather than have them read to you, the lower price becomes very tempting. And charging up once a month rather than once every two months? Well, that’s not much of a hardship, is it?

I prefer the new Kindle to the Kindle Keyboard, but it’s entirely a matter of personal choice. I like the smaller form factor, and I don’t miss the keyboard much. The lower price makes it more attractive, too, and if you are in the market for an e-reader it’s well worth taking the time to consider which version you actually need.

Once you have your new baby, of course, you’ll want to look into getting a Kindle cover. I’ve been told Kindles are designed to take bumps and knocks on the chin, but I wouldn’t want to risk doing some damage when it’s a simple matter to pick one of the many Kindle Covers out there and add a bit of extra protection.

The new Amazon Kindle is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. You can also read my review of the Kindle Keyboard here.

Back in May, I wrote about the Honda CR-Z MUGEN prototype. I had already been quite taken with the CR-Z, but the MUGENed version was even more impressive. I said at the time that it was a bit of a shame the CR-Z MUGEN was going to be a one-off, but that maybe if there was enough interest we would see a production version too.

Well, here we are at the fat end of the year, and Honda have announced that they will indeed be teaming up with MUGEN to produce a 130+ mph version of the CR-Z, with Civic Type-R levels of performance. It won’t have exactly the same spec as the prototype (that was “a concept car produced in one-off halo form and designed to demonstrate the potential and versatility of the Honda IMA system”) but the CR-Z iCF, as it will be called, is still a huge step up from the standard CR-Z.

According to Honda’s press release, “MUGEN Euro engineers ‘breathed over’ the 1.5-litre power unit, retaining the 3-button IMA modes, adding a centrifugal forced air induction system, charge-air cooler and induction system and importantly, a MUGEN Euro-mapped ECU. The result is outstanding power to weight, and increased torque helping to deliver 0-62mph in 6.1 seconds – over 3 seconds quicker than the standard car.”

Martin Moll, Head of Honda (UK) marketing said, “MUGEN Euro magic has created a super responsive yet eco-conscious model building on our sporting credentials and giving us the ability to compete in the “hot hatch” marketplace as we move into 2012.”

I remember being so impressed with the CR-Z’s economy, but also how it retained the potential to be a sporty and fun car at the push of a button. The CR-Z iCF promises the same but, well, more power.

Production development continues at MUGEN Euro, with cars available for test drive through the eight Honda UK MUGEN dealers in spring 2012. Prices have yet to be confirmed, but are expected to be approximately £24,000.

This is a guest post by Fergal Glynn. Fergal is the Director of Product Marketing at Veracode, an application security company that improves Internet security.

PC users commonly, and unwittingly, place their computers and personal security at risk. Here are ten common PC risks and how to avoid them.

1. Using easy-to-guess passwords and easy-to-guess answers to security questions. In all fairness, it’s impossible for any average person without a photographic memory to remember the dozens of unique usernames and passwords we retain to access credit card accounts, bank accounts, social networks, membership sites and more. One obvious risk that most PC users tend to overlook is that any savvy hacker can easily bypass your password by answering security questions, such as the name of the street you grew up on, your mother’s maiden name and similar questions. Not so easy to guess, you say? A visit to a public profile on a social network could provide easy access to these answers, or at least clues.
2. Turning off automatic Windows updates. Automatic updates can be annoying. Some users elect to turn off Windows’ automatic update programming and manually review and select uploads periodically. Updates are often important for patching known security risks in software,  so not installing updates when they’re available can mean you’re leaving your PC at risk of attack.
3. Expired virus protection software. I’m sure we’ve all had this happen: We start getting notifications from our anti-virus software letting us know it’s time to renew our subscription. We all lead busy lives, and it’s not uncommon for users to put off updating these subscriptions until later, leaving the PC at risk for common malware and Trojans it may have otherwise been protected from.
4. Working on unsecured networks. Users utilizing a wireless home network should secure it with a strong password. An unsecured network allows unauthorized users to access your wireless network, potentially opening the door for other attacks.
5. Posting personal information on social networks. Social network users should avoid posting personal information, especially information that could be used as an answer to a common security question, such as a mother’s maiden name or pet’s name. Many social networks offer privacy options; users should select the highest-level privacy settings possible (reducing the total number of people with easy access to information).
6. Opening unfamiliar emails or links. PC users should avoid opening any email coming from an unidentified source. Even if an email comes from a personal contact, any suspicious links should be avoided and the attached emails deleted unless confirmation can be obtained verifying the legitimacy of a message or link.
7. Installing multiple “freeware” programs. We all love free stuff, especially free computer programs that would ordinarily cost us hundreds or thousands of dollars. If we can get a free program that does the same thing, that’s got to be better, right? Not necessarily. Too many freeware programs can slow down a PC. Further, users must check the validity of any freeware program before installation: Is it coming from a reputable source? What do other users have to say? In some cases, these programs also install spyware on your PC, which is how the programmers make money.
8. Allowing the autorun feature to boot several programs every time you start your machine. Really. Take a moment and make a list of the programs you use immediately, without fail, every time you boot your PC. There aren’t many, are there? It’s not necessary to allow programs to automatically run every time you start your machine; in fact, it can slow down your boot time considerably. If you’re using autorun with those freeware programs addressed in #7, you could be opening a see-through window for hackers every time you turn on your computer.
9. Failing to back up important files. While this point won’t put you at increased risk for attacks, it will put you at risk for losing your data—and your mind—should you happen upon a virus with the capability to wipe out your hard drive. An external hard drive has tons of storage, they’re not that expensive, and you’ll never regret the investment if you ever have this happen to you.
10. Plugging your PC directly into a wall outlet, and failing to unplug during an electrical storm. Your PC should be plugged into an adequate surge protector, along with any relevant components, such as a printer/scanner/fax combo. This won’t leave you more vulnerable to hackers, but it does allow plenty of opportunity for a single bolt of lightning to wipe out your machine—and your hard drive, with all that data you hopefully have backed up in a secure location.

So, there’s plenty of “risky” behaviour that could have an adverse effect on your computer. What do you think of the items listed here? Are there any that you do yourself? Or is there something else you think should be on the list? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Twitter is great, but when you’re trying to hold a private conversation with someone it gets a little clunky. To fire direct messages back and forward, both parties have to be following each other. That’s not too bad on the face of it, except when you want to say something privately to, say, your mobile phone provider, and discover that they have a policy of not following individual accounts.

Another limitation of direct messages is that they are always one-to-one… there’s no option to send them to a wide group of people or hold a conversation that involves more than two participants.

What  to do? Well, how about a chat system that integrates with Twitter and allows you to invite multiple Twitter users to talk? Enter stage left: Blether.

The word Blether is Scottish slang, and means idle chatter, or to engage in conversation. See where this is going?

Blether, the online service, is built on a platform by Zendit, who are based in Dunfermline, Scotland. To find out all about the service, I invited Kevin Bradshaw, CEO of Zendit and Blether, to chat about it in the Blether service itself. Kevin tells me that Zendit has been about two years in the making, between setting the company up and getting the basic platform built. As an indication of how powerful it is, it only took about a month to build Blether on top of Zendit.

So what does Blether actually do? It’s basically a chat room, but it’s triggered from within Twitter. By typing !b and the names of some Twitter users (e.g. “!b @cdhinton @someone_else”) a personal room is generated which only the invited Twitter users have access to. Additional people can be added from within the room, so you don’t have to panic if you forgot to invite someone, but at least you know nobody will be in there without an invite.

One downside of many chat rooms is that once you leave the room you lose any record of the conversations that took place. Some offer a mechanism to export a chat, but Blether just saves it right there. Next time you visit Blether.co your previous Blethers will still be there for you to review at your leisure.

Blether performs a simple function – enabling multi-person chat between Twitter users – but some of the best products out there are a mixture of simplicity and elegance. Blether is easy to use, and does what it does well. I would say it’s sure to be a success. And what else is coming from Zendit in future? Kevin couldn’t (or rather, wouldn’t) tell me, but did say there was more to come. Watch this space…

Have you tried Blether yet? Do you see a use for a Twitter-launched chat function? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Sometimes you just want to do something simple online, and it ends up becoming a real faff. Image editing is one of those areas, with a load of offering on the Internet that, in some cases, rival the capabilities of the almighty Photoshop. That’s great if you are after something comprehensive, but if you just want to much around with your photos it can get a little overwhelming

Picfull is firmly at the “simple” end of the scale. Upload a photo, apply some filters, and that’s it. You can layer the filters on top of each other if you desire, giving you the ability to come up with interesting combined effects, but the overall experience is one of simplicity.

The site’s creators tell us, “While there is a flood image editing sites out there, we are focusing on providing unique, high quality photo filters that are truly easy to use. Our selection ranges from vintage filters to bolder modern ones, each of which has its own set of parameters that can be tweaked by the user in real time. Plus, multiple filters can be applied to the same photo, allowing for almost endless variations.”

Picfull isn’t going to float your boat if you want to do any complex image editing, but if you’re after a quick and easy way to give your photos a different look it might just fit the bill.

…and, yes, it does have the obligatory Obama poster effect ;)