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Guardian tech has published a story this week about the cost of the BBC website for users and license payers, leading to some very interesting discussions about paywalls. There is some confusion over the exact cost of the site depending on how you calculate things (not all license fee payers use it – while not all users are license fee payers etc), but roughly the figure is either 67p/month for each license fee payer, or £8.04 per year.

It should be noted however that this is based on the BBC’s own figures for how much it spent on its online service – which doesn’t take into account the fact that much of the material is sourced from its news or radio arms…

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Techcrunch has a nice comparison today between the new Kindle DX from Amazon and Apple’s iPad, nicely indicating what most will have already noticed: that the two look rather alike (similar colour options, same screen size etc). The TC post concludes that Amazon are clearly not afraid to mix it up and re-vamp their products to try something new when things aren’t working and, indeed, this seems to be exactly the idea behind the strategy of introducing a significant price cut to avoid attempting to compete with the iPad on price.

This seems pretty smart, since the Kindle could never win that battle (its screen is neither colour, nor touchscreen to name just a couple of inferior qualities compared with the iPad),…

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Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw caused somewhat of a stir yesterday when he posted some highly telling statistics about the company – and its rivals – on the official Microsoft blog. Judging by the sheer volume of comment and debate that it has already attracted, I’d say he’s done a pretty good job of trying to set the various doubters straight – even if some of the stats are a little out-of-context.

As anyone following any sort of technology-orientated media sources in recent years will be aware, the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook tend to get about three to ten headlines (this is a blatant guess from me, let me know if you disagree) for every one Microsoft is…

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With last week’s E3 gaming expo having gone down a treat over in LA, the web is abuzz with plenty of excellent in-depth coverage. Here’s a short summary of the most interesting and comprehensive sources of news, comment and highlights on this world-famous gaming industry expo.

First and foremost, the E3 official website is handy for some general orientation and overviews of what was happening last week. While that site is good for industry insiders who want to know who was there and what was exhibited, E3’s official highlights page contains links to some of the more high-profile events of general interest also for non-industry specialists. There’s press conferences from all the big players (Nintendo, Ubisoft, Xbox360, Sony etc), as well as…

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There’s some interesting new data available from Forrester Research today, predicting the development of the computer market over the next five years, covering pc’s, laptops, netbooks and tablet computers. For those who have been following the tremendous success of Apple’s iPad, Forrester’s forecast that such devices will, in five years’ time, occupy roughly a quarter of the market will come as no surprise.

However, perhaps more intriguing is Forrester’s breakdown of the market by 2015, which suggests that most of the tablet share will actually come at the expense of desktop pc – and not the other two portable devices (notebooks and netbooks) with which one might assume it was in direct competition with.

Whatever happens, I expect web developers will be following…

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