Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, is set to announce big plans for establishing East London as one of the world’s great technology centers.
Looking to spur the creation of private sector jobs to make up for public sector losses due to state spending cuts, British Prime Minister David Cameron has identified the tech industries as a safe bet for government backing and investment in the UK.
Later today, he is expected to announce that the likes of Facebook and Google are set to invest in the East London Tech City plan. He wants the area, which include Olympic Park, to give Silicon Valley a run for its money over the coming years.
“Right now, Silicon Valley is the leading place in the world for hi-tech growth and innovation,” Cameron will say in a speech to businesses and entrepreneurs. “But there’s no reason why it has to be so predominant. Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make east London one of the world’s great technology centres.”
He will report that the response from international technology firms and venture capitalists to the plan has been overwhelming, and announce several firms that have agreed to invest in the area, including Intel, Cisco and BT.
Result for: creativity
Apple, speaking at their “Rock n’ Roll” live event today, introduced iTunes 9 and with it, a plethora of new features.
The first addition is that of Genius mixes. Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains that the Genius library now has 27 million libraries built from 54 billion analyzed tracks, which will create Genius Mixes, personal radio stations similar to Pandora.
The Genius also works for movies and even applications you have downloaded from the iTunes store.
The second improvement was improved Syncing, as Apple says, for when “you sync to your iPod Touch or iPhone we have made that much better.” Users can now choose select playlists, artists, genres, and photos from certain events, certain albums or even photos that only include certain faces. Movies have been give a “recently added” and you can manually choose favorites.
Additionally, Home Sharing makes it easy for users to sync an iTunes library between up to 5 computers in a house. All authorized computers can share music, movies and TV shows between them, and will be viewed as part of a shared group where users can drag and drop content from one library to another.
The next feature is iTunes LP. All the artist pages have been given more visual material as well photos, liner notes and essays. iTunes Extra allows users to check extra content on DVDs and Blu-rays.
Finally is the App Management page which allows users to virtually arrange all the apps, while seeing a preview of how your iPhone home screen will look. You can also easily search for your applications, good for those that have tens or even hundreds of apps.
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Result for: creativity
ESA CEO Mike Gallagher has spoken out this week about both piracy and DRM in the gaming industry, and GamePolitics has made a nice summary of his remarks.
In regards to piracy:
“Piracy is a scourge. Piracy is theft, plain and simple, of the intellectual property and the creativity and the energy of the investors in this industry and the artists who make the great games. Period. Okay?”
“It’s a problem of such degree that it’s between two and three billion dollars a year that it costs our industry in this country alone. When you look at piracy across all of entertainment, it’s a much bigger number when you put in movies and look what it’s done to the music industry. So, the going-in proposition has to be a recognition that piracy is wrong, it’s illegal and it should be stopped…”
In regards to DRM:
“There are business models that say, ‘You know, we’re going to build our business model around giving it away for free and having the revenue come in in other ways.’ We [in the video game business] do that too. We do that too. But for those companies who go forward, they’re entitled to protect - using DRM - to protect their content. And I realize that it is a subject of some controversy with gamers and consumers because, like other similar types of devices, most often they negatively impact the law-abiding gamer.
“But it’s one of those things that we have to be vigilant about. It’s vitally important to preserve the ecosystem and the jobs in the industry and the next great game. If you don’t make money off of the games that are made now you’re not going to see the ones that come later like you saw at the press briefings already at E3.”
