Samsung stops imagining improbable advertising slogans?

We're used to seeing some weird slogans in the tech world. Most of these are most easily explained by the vagaries of international language translation. That's certainly the only explanation we can come up with for Asus's immortal "Rock Solid. Heart Touching."

One of our favourites of the last few years has been Samsung's "imagine…" campaign. This started somewhat rationally as "With Samsung, it's not that hard to imagine" back in 2005. Since then, though, consumers have been invited to "imagine your digital playground" (for the YP-T10 MP3 player), "imagine freedom from wires" (MP3 players again, this time with Bluetooth capabilities) and, our favourite, "imagine the pride". That one's about a laser printer. No, really. We have pictures to prove it.

However, this summer's releases from Samsung have asked us to put our minds to things other than imagining the whatever. For instance "WiFi and Bluetooth makes it easy" when it comes to transferring files from Samsung's new digital cameras, while a Blu-Ray player invites us to "Escape to a better world." A quick browse through Samsung's website shows us that business IT users are still being invited to "imagine rising to every challenge". That's a relief, then.

I don't know how effective the "imagine" slogans were when it came to capturing the hearts and minds of the electronics-buying public, but we kind of looked forward to finding out what preposterous thing we'd be asked to imagine next.

Keeping up with the Joneses 2.0

Another day, another survey telling us how useful and important social networking media are in our lives. This time it's "leading" email training training and consultancy company Mesmo, which has released a survey claiming that three quarters of UK companies use "Web 2.0" as alternatives to email for sharing information in their business environment.

We have a number of problems with this and similar surveys. First of all, as with any survey, methodology is important, and a sample size of 315 respondents seems a bit low to start making bold claims about UK businesses in general. It's important to know which types of business were included in the survey, a fact curiously missing from the press release: a high proportion of media and marketing firms would skew the results towards a higher adoption of internet technologies.

Secondly, the use of "Web 2.0" to describe social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook is misleading. Web 2.0 refers to the underlying way in which web sites are developed to promote separation of data and design, which enables easier information sharing and collaboration. While many social networking sites may use Web 2.0 technologies, the businesses or individuals that use these sites aren't necessarily using Web 2.0 themselves.

This leads to our third complaint. While many people find social networking sites useful, we get the impression that many users are bullied into adopting them. Apart from the obvious need to use the sites that all your peers are using, promoting buzzwords such as Web 2.0 seems to be a way of making less technically-inclined users feel left behind if they don't jump on the bandwagon. Maybe this is the reason why so many Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and blogs are left unattended by users who signed up but found they didn't actually help them in the real world?

Let's not give the impression we're Luddites, or against the rise of new web technologies. Facebook is a remarkable tool for keeping in touch and re-kindling old friendships, and business networking sites such as LinkedIn are a great way to sell yourself to prospective employers. Web 2.0 technologies are indeed useful, and adopting them *within* a business – for example, using a wiki as an intranet – is a great idea.

Twitter's utility to business is less obvious however: while being able to post SMS-length messages to the world may seem to be a cool idea, in reality Twitter seems to be turning into just another medium for celebrities to satisfy their need for exposure. There are nuggets of wisdom to be had, but you'll need to trawl through mountains of inanity to find anything useful.

The idea that companies can learn more about their customers by keeping an eye out for complaints about their products or services on the Web is an obvious one – so obvious in fact that it's a wonder why companies haven't been doing this for years. There are plenty of forums and other web communities where users vent their frustrations – Twitter is just another medium, just the most obvious one.

Maybe Twitter's utility lies in the fact that it can wake companies up to the amount of customer opinion waiting for them on the Web – if they know where to find it. A 100-word rant on Twitter may not be the best material to work with, however. If your business hasn't got a forum for its users already, then searching for forums and websites related to your industry may bring up thoughtful and constructive criticism – or even praise – for your company's products.

However, simply creating a Twitter account and a Facebook page will simply add to the noise and won't instantly encourage discussion or communication with customers. That's something companies have to work hard on, whatever technologies they're using.

eBooks are brilliant

I'm a big fan of books. Real, old-fashioned paper books. They don't require any power, you can take them everywhere and paper's incredibly easy to read under any lighting conditions. I also love the smell and feel of paper. So, when I first heard about epaper, I thought it sounded interesting and then paid it no more attention.

That was, at least, until I went on holiday to Vegas and was sitting around the pool in bright sunlight. There I saw loads of people reading their Kindle eBook readers and I was surprised to find how good they looked. Walking past people, wearing my sunglasses, I found that I could read the Kindle's screen; something that you can't do with a traditional laptop or smartphone, as the polarising lenses in sunglasses block some of the light from the screen and make them hard to read.

After that point, I thought differently about eBooks and decided I wanted one. After weighing up the possibilities, I decided that I wasn't going to wait for Amazon to release the Kindle over here. Its wireless delivery system is nice, but I rarely travel for long periods without a computer, so I don't need that. I'm also not a big fan of the content protection system used and want to have full control over what I put onto my eBook.

So, I decided on the Sony Reader PRS-505 (it got a Best Buy in Computer Shopper), as I can manually select which titles I want to put on it and it supports PDF files and the ePub format. In fact, as of the end of this year, Sony will only use ePub and will be ditching its proprietary format for good.

I have to say that I'm stunningly impressed with this product. The screen is unbelievably good. Reading from it seems a little strange at first as it looks like print, but your brain's telling you that it's a computer screen and there should be light coming from it and, after prolonged use, a bit of eye-strain. Once you settle down, it's incredible and every-bit as readable as a normal book.

The PRS-5050 is quick to turn a page, unlike some other devices we've seen, so you can plough your way through an un-put-downable novel as fast as you can read without ever getting frustrated or having to wait.

A lot of things that you can do with a book exist on the Reader, too. So, you can 'fold' down a page with something interesting on it and jump to that bookmark later on. You can even type in page numbers if you know which page you want to look at. The menu system lets you quickly find a book, too, no matter how many titles are stored on the device.

Most of all, though, the Reader lets me carry a holiday's worth of books in a device smaller and lighter than one paperback. With an SD card inserted, I could even carry around a few years' worth of reading. This is incredible and means that I'll never be in the situation where travelling where I finish one book and haven't got another one handy.

Battery life's nothing to worry about, either. The screen requires no power to keep the image, it only draws power when you turn a page. Even then, at around 7,500 page turns on a full charge, you're unlikely to run out of juice on even the longest flight.

Thanks to Sony's support for eBook formats, I can stock up on all of the classics at Project Gutenberg, where a large portion of the 30,000 books are available in ePub format for free. It's not quite perfect and some titles I've tried, such as Tom Brown's Schooldays, have parts of the chapter titles disappearing off the screen, although the main text is always readable.

Of course, eBooks are available to buy from most leading book stores, including Waterstones. The only problem is that they're the same price, or more expensive as you don't get the three-for-two paper deals, as real books. As time goes on, this is bound to change.

Paper still has its place. There's nothing like getting one of your favourite books out and flicking through its pages, and houses would look a little strange if there were empty shelves where books once stood, but there's room for both. I for one have been converted: eBooks and readers are incredible devices that mean I can enjoy the books I want, where and when I want. Try it yourself; I'm sure you'll be impressed.

The cutest sites on the web

There's a lot of bile, hate and stupidity on the internet. Fortunately, the resulting stress, irritation and existential angst caused by this can be overcome with the power of cute. (It's a bit like the Power of Love, only without Frankie Goes To Hollywood.)

Cute Overload
While some sites, despite their high percentage of cute content, still feel the need to include elements of humour, Cute Overload is exactly as described - a massive four-year archive of videos and pictures of kittens, puppies, pandas, gerbils, chipmunks and anything else small and fluffy, all doing very cute things. Simple, innocent fun.

Kittenify
Recently publicised in the Metro newspaper, Kittenify is a JavaScript bookmark that will replace all the images and most of the adverts on any page with pictures of fluffy kittens posted to Flickr. Everything's better with kittens.

It's amazing how much serious news is improved by the addition of kittens.
The most convenient way to use it is to drag the active JavaScript link from the Kittenify site up to your quick bookmarks toolbar. This means that whenever you feel the need for kittens, you can just click on the link and add them to whatever page you're reading.

The Daily Puppy
Cute puppy pictures, every day. There's not much more to it than that. It's enough to make even hard-line cat-lovers make alarming cooing noises.

Icanhascheezburger
The site that bought LOLcats - pictures of cats with amusing captions - off the messageboards and into the public eye, Icanhascheezburger lets users create, rate and comment on LOLcat (and sometimes LOLotherspecies) images. It's become a firm fixture in the internet's collective consciouness and has spawned books, t-shirts and plenty of other sites.

Visit Icanhascheezburger for your regular fix of LOLcats

Canine lovers may prefer Ihasahotdog. Overconsumption can cause fans of all species to inadvertently use LOLspeak in daily life. Fortunately, someone made a translator.

MyLifeIsG
Not so much cute as moving, heartwarming and sometimes genuinely inspiring, MyLifeIsG describes itself as "a place to share your everyday successes". People post about everying from passing exams to surviving cancer or coming out of the closet to accepting parents. There's a lot of teenage love but the site's overall tone is refreshingly positive.

What the car industry can teach us about processors

While cycling to work the other day I saw an advert, on the side of a bus, for a car. As I live and work in central London I don't have much use for a car – driving to work could take hours and would cost a fortune. However, this ad caught my attention for its simplicity. In large letters it stated that 1.4 = 2.0, in reference to how a Volkswagen's 1.4 litre engine can produce as many horsepower as some of its competitor's 2.0 litre engines.

I have no idea if this is true, but it reminded me of how processor manufacturers have moved away from using clock speeds as the main selling point of their products. Once upon a time, Intel and AMD competed on making the fastest processor in MHz (and then GHz), but in recent years both have shied away from such figures, as the upper limits of silicon were approached, and more efficient multi-core processors became prevalent. Essentially the raw speed figure, like a car engine's capacity, had becomes more of a hindrance to marketers than a boon.

Now a consumer buying a new PC has to puzzle out whether an Intel Core i7-920 processor is more or less powerful than an AMD Phenom X2 920, with the actual numbers being entirely arbitrary. Even if the number of processing cores and clock speed are listed, you're still no closer to working out which is the more powerful chip.

What processors need is a figure like the BHP of cars – a standardised test that gives some indication of the raw processing power of the chip. Yes, some processors are better-designed for certain tasks than others, but surely this would be better than the current situation. I'm not talking about a real-world benchmark here, but something that gives a maximum theoretical performance figure in processes per second.

Given that both cars and processors are looking to be more efficient, the processor industry could also be more upfront about power consumption. Cars have to list their emissions for different types of driving. Wouldn't it be useful if processor manufacturers had to list their processor's power consumption for different kinds of tasks? Obviously this would have to include a motherboard and memory, and the manufacturers (like car makers) would tweak the figure as much as possible, but we'd end up with a more useful figure than the TDPs they currently list.

With us buying and using more computers, such information would be very handy for consumers. They could even come with ratings stickers like washing machines do. You could then get some idea of whether you're new PC is a Humvee or a Prius.