Sky Sports today made television history by becoming the first in the world to broadcast a live football match in 3D.

A selection of media, fans and industry execs were treated to Man Utd’s 3-1 win over Arsenal in full 3D at the Emirates Stadium and at nine secret pubs dotted around the UK all of which had been specially fitted with 3D ready TVs.

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The broadcast served as a taster of what’s to come when Sky launches its 3D service in April. The company intends to deliver at least one Premier League match per week via 3D at no extra cost to viewers who already pick up their HD service – provided of course they’re watching on a 3D TV set.

The Arsenal fans among the lucky viewers will clearly have been disappointed at the game’s final outcome as two remarkable goals settled the game in Man Utd’s favour. An exquisite piece of skill from Nani jinking through two Arsenal defenders and a brilliant counter attacking goal finished off with a wonderful first time strike by Rooney put the Champions two up in the first half and all but ended the tie.

But while the Premier League’s top teams ensured there was ample flare on the pitch for such an occasion, the real question on the amassed tech journalists’ minds was whether watching the action in 3D would have enough wow factor to really make the 3D bug spread.

With the big brands all launching 3D ranges over the coming months, the success of content from providers like Sky, will be extremely important in driving the uptake of the new technolgy.

T3 First Look: The early Sky 3D verdict

By Kieran Alger from the Emirates Stadium

"People feel they can now sit in their own homes and view things in a way they could only do if they came to the stadium themselves," said Darren Long, Sky Sports director of Operations.

That’s a bold claim, and one that we went into this match hoping Sky could live up to. There’s been an awful lot of scepticism among the tech media and the general public about the power of 3D. From the anti specs brigade to question over the ability to capture all the angles of a football match, the industry has a big job to do to convince people they need to own a 3D TV to get the ultimate experience.

Avatar has helped demonstrate the value of 3D, banishing green and red paper specs to the past and demonstrating that 3D can wow. It felt like Sky’s historic football experience to do the same. We wanted to literally feel like they could put 3D in your face and make it impossible to ignore. Sadly, on first viewing we don’t think they’ve managed that.

Sat inside at the Emirates for the first half,  the overall the 3D experience wasn’t bad it just wasn’t brilliant. And brilliant is what is needed to make this a word of mouth success.

The early close ups of the teams lining up and Sky’s excellent graphics suggested real promise. But once the game was underway you couldn’t help but feel like the majority of the action was a bit flat, almost like the 3D effect had been toned down.

The really jaw-dropping, in-your-face shots that we’ve been treated to in the promotional footage seemed to be missing. Some of the best 3D moments included the view from behind the goal as Van der Sar and Almunia punted the ball up field but let’s face it, goal kicks aren’t really where the action is in football match and it didn’t really add much value to the viewing experience.

We’d been expecting a lot more in terms of clever camera angles on corners, throw ins and substitutions. Cameras fixed on Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger in ways that really take you close to the dug outs, but that wasn’t there.

Of course we’re being super critical here and for a world first it didn’t make for bad watch, far from it – in general the 3D effect added depth to the picture – but if you’re expecting Rooney’s right foot bullets to be rushing out of the screen towards your head then you’re going to be disappointed.

But it is still early days and with around 20 cameras shooting the match in 2D and less than half that number capturing the 3D action, it’s not surprising there are gaps. We’re staying optimistic at this point. If Sky can build on this starting point then there’s definitely something there but on today’s viewing we’ll be looking to gaming and films to give us a real reason to rush out and buy a 3D TV when they hit our shores.

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The Apple iPad is just days old yet it’s already starting to make trouble for its competitors after Amazon decided to temporarily remove books published by Macmillan from its site, over a disagreement on eBook pricing.
 

Currently Amazon.com users wanting to buy a Macmillan published book in the old fashioned format, will only be able to purchase the product from third party retailers.

Apple iPad hotlinks

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- Can the Apple iPad iBook Store taken on Amazon?

- Apple iPad: Stephen Fry sings its praises

Macmillan, one of the five publishers announced by Apple as part of its new iBooks Store venture is at war with Amazon at its refusal to budge on the $9.99 they currently charge for e-Books.
 

The major international publisher is looking for an e-Book price closer to the $14.99 Apple has agreed to sell e-Books for use with its iPad tablet device.
 

Macmillan books can still be bought from Amazon.co.uk for the time being, but whether this disagreement will impact on Amazon’s UK retail presence when the iPad nears launch, only time will tell.

We can imagine a certain Mr Jobs will be happy to hear of the online retailer’s latest plight as the Kindle faces up to the reality that Apple is bringing something new to the eReader party.
 

Link: LA Times

Firefox has finally moved from desktop to mobile, as Mozilla officially launched its first mobile web browser which is now available only on the Maemo 5 platform.
 

Mozilla Mobile Firefox version 1.0 enables Nokia N900 and N810 internet tablet owners to enjoy the browsing benefits of the world’s most popular browser.
 

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Delivering all your customizable browser extensions, or Firefox Add-ons if you will, Mozilla has also included the desktop-friendly Weave Sync with its mobile arrival. The handy feature lets you “Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience”.
 

There’s also Location-Aware Browsing, which enables you to generate maps from wherever your are browsing. The mobile browser however, does not include full support for Flash in the build, which is yet another blow to Adobe still understandably unhappy over its iPad exclusion.
 

Choosing to launch on Maemo 5 looks a smart move from Mozilla, who will be able to buy some time perfecting the browser on a relatively new platform before entering into more popular Android and Windows Mobile territories.
 

You can download the Mozilla Mobile browser for your N900 or N810 here.
 

Link: Mozilla

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Despite the arrival of social networking phenomenons Twitter and Facebook, UK mobile phone users still manage to rattle out around 11 million text messages an hour according to latest figures from the Mobile Data Association.

The report showed during 2009, the UK collectively sent out an average of 265 million text messages and 1.6 million picture messages daily. That’s 96.8 billion text messages and 600 million picture messages sent in the whole of last year.

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In comparison to previous years, around 56.9 billion and 78.9 billion texts were sent in 2007 and 2008 respectively, which suggests there has been a steady texting growth.

Interestingly, 4.5 million picture messages were sent on Christmas Day, while the recent cold snap is said to have seen an steady upturn in picture messages sent according to Network Operators’ figures.

On the value of texting as a means of a quick chat, Steve Reynolds, chairman of MDA said, "These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity."

Apparently the rise of voting shows such as X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing has helped boost the text rate. Rob Bamforth, a principal analyst of Quocirca said, "Now it is not only a convenient medium for a quick chat with friends, but also a way of participating in television voting and raising funds for needy charities. When a powerful call to action is given, the population of the UK often turn first towards their mobile phones."

Do you still text as much as you did since Facebook and Twitter turned up? Let us know in the comments below. There’s no charge, honestly.

Link: Business Wire

Adobe has voiced its disappointment at Apple’s decision not to include its Flash technology on the Apple iPad announced earlier this week.

Following in the Flash-lacking footsteps of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while it may not have such an impact on the smaller screens of Apple’s more trouser-friendly tech, its absence from the iPad which aims to deliver the full web experience, is a little more surprising.

Apple iPad hotlinks

- Apple iPad spec officially announced

- Apple iPad: 10 Things you need to know

- Apple iPad video: Steve Jobs unveils new tablet

- Apple iPad first pictures from San Francisco

- Apple iPad: T3’s first impressions

- Can the Apple iPad iBook Store taken on Amazon?

- Apple iPad: Stephen Fry sings its praises

Adrian Ludwig, group manager of Adobe quoted via a blog post on Apple’s tablet approach saying, “There’s something important missing from Apple’s approach to connecting consumers to content.”
 

But Ludwig believes there is a little more to the Flash-less iPad and that Apple is concerned with protecting content revenue for games and video available through iTunes.

“Apple has eliminated any way to get content on the device that they don’t own,” says Ludwig. “Apple is keeping the device closed to protect their revenue streams.”

Without Flash, iPad users would be restricted from using sites such as iPlayer, YouTube and the US-based Hulu which is scheduled to arrive in the UK this year. The argument it appears from Apple’s perspective is, if you can watch it for free on Hulu, why would you buy it from iTunes?

Adobe is not the only ones being shut out from the iPad, “Flash is what people are focused on but it’s not just Flash that’s not working. They’ve blocked a whole lot more than that… It’s a universal restriction,” Ludwig added.

Ludwig has indicated that Adobe is working with Apple to bring flash to the iPhone, but did not confirm a release date. Whether that means the iPad will follow suit, we are not so sure, but we’d very much like to think so.

Link: IT Pro Portal & Cult of Mac

Martin Courtney, Computing, Friday 29 January 2010 at 17:22:00

Cancer drug research advanced by new supercomputer, says ICR IT chief

Dr Rune Linding, leader of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) cellular and molecular logic team, tells Computing how biology research is rapidly overtaking physics in terms of the sheer volume of data being generated for research purposes. All this puts a massive strain on the underlying IT architecture, one reason why the ICR recently installed an SGI Altix UV supercomputer at its London data centre.

Computing: Why did the ICR need a new supercomputer?
Linding: It is part of an initiative which will enable a completely new approach to biological and cancer research which will eventually lead to network based cancer models used to streamline the process of drug development. The supercomputer supports up to 16TB of shared memory in a single system image, and will run alongside a traditional Linux cluster, with 256 cores and fast interconnects, as well as a couple of other entry level high performance computer (HPC) clusters we are putting into a separate cloud computing environment.

C: What applications will the system support?
L: It handles extreme data generation on top of computational and physics related projects within the ICR. Biology is becoming the new frontier for data generation, with multiple types and quite significant data loads, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), mass-spectrometry, phenotyping, genetics and deep-sequencing across thousands of CPUs. We have around 10-20 instruments at our Sanger centre which generates 2-3TB of data each every week, for example, and imaging equipment that generates another 2TB per week as well.

C: Who uses ICR’s supercomputing facilities?
L: It is primarily designed for internal work conducted by our own researchers. We have around 40 or so using it so far, but there are plans to federate the system meaning up to 200 staff can use it eventually. The nice thing is that the ICR is a broad institute so there are a lot of different groups involved, from imaging and patient data, to physics models for radiotherapy, for example. In the future we might also figure out a way to share our processing capacity with other institutions [via grid computing].

C: How much did it all cost?
L: The computational infrastructure cost millions of pounds over ten years, but another point is the human resource required to generate the data we need – that involves employing hundreds of people over many years, and is a big, expensive project. The money comes from charity funds, but we are now going out to different agencies to ask for ongoing financial support for maintenance. It is often easier to get money for installing large systems than it is to fund the core people you need to run that environment, and supercomputing people are not easy to find.

C: How much data does the ICR have to store and for how long?
L: Storage capacity now is about 50TB and we will scale up that capacity to around 250TB in the near future. Some of that data will be closely involved in product development and clinical trials, and we will have to retain it for twenty to thirty years. Other data will relate to specific research projects and we’ll need to keep it for two to three years during the life of the project, and five to ten years afterwards. Once we have some reasonably accurate growth models, and as more money comes in and more researchers start to use it, we expect to scale to petabytes of information in the next decade or so. As we do spectrum matching and store the data in large SQL databases, that is extremely compute intensive output.

C: What other IT challenges does your team face?
L: Getting all of that data into a computational format as fast as possible – moving away from using Excel spreadsheets and reformatting the data into a database is a waste of human resource. Security is always a concern. We work with sensitive data so put a lot of effort into making sure we have high security on all of our systems. We are also spending a lot of time on federating ideas around cloud computing and the infrastructure needed to support that.

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