Ian Fogg, blogging for Jupiter Research:

“The iPhone is a really astonishing phone. How Apple differentiates from the competition is not through a long list of features as loved by other handset makers, but instead through the way in which the iPhone does the things it can do. It's not what the iPhone does but how it does them that is revolutionary.

“Other handset makers must learn that ‘the end’ feature cannot justify an ugly arcane interface ‘means’ to get there.”

Via Technovia / What the iPhone means to the mobile phone industry

Journalist, author and one-time Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly once described the National Lottery - as Lotto was known then - as a stupidity tax. It seems he wasn’t wrong.

“A lottery scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

“The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

“To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

“But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.”

Manchester Evening / ‘Cool Cash’ card confusion

A good day for legitimate music and video downloading:

Baseball blogger's pitch wins DRM reprieve
eMusic sees 20% increase in subscriber numbers
Classics and Jazz label embraces MP3

...sound like the sort of people who would complain about the price of bananas because they’re being charged for the skin.

And, said Gareth Bourne (via IM), “and they know a shop where they are cheaper, and come skin free, they just can’t actually tell you where it is, or what it’s called, but their mate went there once, and got a cracking deal on some apples.”

So Google thinks that it’s possible to innovate by committee.

Not according to Steven Franks:

“A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite. It’s going to be some half-baked turd undoubtedly based on GPE since that’s, you know, better than starting from scratch, right? (Wrong.)

“For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something.

“You have NO CLUE why the iPhone is successful and highly sought after, do you? You think it’s all some sort of weird fluke.”

It’s hard to disagree with that. Fake Steve doesn’t and suggests that Google is running out of ideas:

“Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being ‘open’, it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Want evidence that Google is drying up? Just take a look at the once busy Google Labs page.

New Undertones album.

Also available from the iTunes Store and in shops.

I’d like to think that this will stimulate an intelligent debate. Somehow I doubt it. As ever, it is children who suffer from the selfishness of their parents.

The Guardian / Jehovah's Witness mother dies after refusing blood transfusion