This blog’s mostly tech and gaming oriented, not political, but this once I’ll make an exception, so apologies for possibly nonplussing regular readers.

I just heard that PRUPIM and ProLogis won their battle last week to develop near our town what can only be described as an 860,000 sq ft shed of astonishing ugliness. Said shed will be one of the biggest buildings in the country, the core of a 24/7 Tesco distribution centre.

Throughout the process, the developers lied through their teeth to local residents, bent the truth to the relevant inspectors, moved the goalposts regularly, and yet still tried to suggest that the development would be beneficial to the local area. In reality, it’s going to—at best—cause massive noise pollution and traffic congestion (in an area that already has hugely dangerous roads), utterly wreck a local wildlife reserve, and demolish the strategic gap between the towns of Farnborough and Fleet (in Hampshire).

Local residents will, apparently, ‘benefit’ from redesigned road layouts near Farnborough (which will only need redesigning due to the number of HGVs travelling along local roads rising from ‘bugger all’ to ‘two per minute, 24/7’), 1600 jobs (near a constituency with, er, the 625th highest unemployment count in the UK, and whose residents generally won’t be suited to the types of jobs available at the warehouse site), and the site being ‘cleaned up’ (something any development would have done).

What’s worse is this shows how little Labour cares about democratic process. This development had 10,000 local complaints against it (a local record by a huge distance) and the planning inspector, after immersing herself in the local area and seeing the facts, agreed with the opinion of locals and decision of local councils to reject the scheme. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (whose department issued the white paper Communities in control: real people, real power) essentially said “fuck you all” and backed the developers. His reasoning? Jobs.

Never mind local opinion. Never mind the local SPA being ruined. Never mind the fact the increase in traffic will almost lead to deaths on the roads. Never mind that the jobs won’t be relevant to the area, meaning people will commute in (more congestion, more strain on public services). Never mind the fact myriad superior locations exist in the UK for this development. Never mind the development being two nearly miles from the motorway (or, if you’re the developer, “under a mile”), along small, local roads. And never mind that the inspector ruled against the development. This is Labour, and “communities in control” clearly means “we’re in control, fuck the communities”.

As a parting shot, I’m absolutely sure that Hart and Rushmoor councils being Conservative, the local MPs being Conservative and the majority of locals being Conservative supporters (with most of the rest backing the Lib Dems) had absolutely nothing to do with the Labour Secretary of State’s decision to back developers with lots of money over the wants of the community, the decisions of the local council, the wishes of the MPs, and the decision of the inspector.

Spotify is a great service, enabling you to use a desktop client to listen to the music you want to hear. Although the desktop Spotify client is basic, it’s simple to set up playlists that include every album a band’s made, or to import tracks from playlists made by friends. Depending on your musical requirements, you can use the service to trial albums prior to purchase, or to effectively create a fully personalised radio station that’s far more specific than the somewhat random tracks spat out by the likes of last.fm.

Despite the simplicity of Spotify, there are things a lot of people (including, sadly, many journos) still don’t get.

Free isn’t necessarily a good thing

Getting all the music you want for free is great. Spotify’s audio quality of roughly 160kb/s is reasonable and the majority of listeners won’t notice that it’s inferior to CDs. However, money has to come from somewhere, because Spotify must pay IP owners when tracks are played. Spotify makes money from the free desktop client via infrequent advertising that pops up every few tracks, and many ads encourage you to ‘upgrade’ to the ad-free ‘Premium’ service (which also has higher sound quality).

Rumblings from the rumour mill suggest this isn’t Spotify trying to gouge money from consumers, but that it’s increasingly an utterly essential component of its business model. With advertising being hard to come by in the current financial climate and Spotify’s payments rapidly increasing as the service becomes more popular, premium accounts will soon become vital for the company’s very survival. The problem is in convincing users to pay £9.99 per month when the free service is so compelling.

Spotify’s expansion is hugely tactical

With Spotify’s recent appearance on mobile devices, many people in the USA are questioning why the service is European-only (not realising that the service is actually only available in just six countries—not the whole of Europe). This is in part down to Americans not being used to technology moving in that direction—for example, iTunes and Amazon music download services started in the US and months later ventured into other territories.

The availability of Spotify is down to three things: the company’s origins, licensing issues and the size of the market. Spotify originated in Sweden, hence local knowledge led to it being available in a trio of Scandinavian countries. The other three countries where Spotify is available—the United Kingdom, France and Spain—were almost certainly targeted due to the size of their markets and existing interest in digital downloads. In other words, Spotify went where the money was likely to be.

There’s no doubt that the USA is the next major target. In fact, the company’s survival—or at the very least any further expansion—will likely hinge on it getting a foothold in the US, and while smaller European countries may eventually get the service, I doubt they’re a current priority (with the probable exception of Germany).

The mobile apps are carrots, not extensions of the existing service

Spotify arrived recently for iPhone/iPod touch and Android. Plenty of people are already complaining that the mobile clients work very differently to the desktop client, and are twinned with a premium account. This isn’t accidental, nor should anyone expect this to change any time soon. As already mentioned, Spotify needs revenue, and so the mobile applications are specifically there to drive more users to subscribe, not merely as a mobile extension of the existing service. (That said, Spotify would do well to provide a limited demo or ‘lite’ version, because that would almost certainly encourage more users with Apple and Android handhelds to upgrade.)

Apple didn’t care about Spotify because it’s not competition

The more I learned about Spotify’s plans in the mobile space, the less I thought Apple would reject the app during App Store review. Fundamentally, Spotify isn’t competition for iTunes. Apple’s store is based around a seriously mass-market download model, largely concentrating on impulse-oriented single-track downloads. Spotify is currently a mobile service that is hugely limited, only usable by a tiny fraction of people with Apple devices.

If Apple had rejected the application, I suspect it would have been in ‘accidental’ fashion (like Tweetie, C64 and Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery) and it would have subsequently been rush-approved via expedited review. And even if Spotify goes crazy and releases a free version to mobile (thereby screwing up its revenue model), the app is still effectively a radio (albeit a very personalised one) versus a storefront.

Before this mini-rant, I should point out that I like Slide To Play. It’s one of the few iPod gaming websites that’s got things largely right, and it offers reviews that don’t make me want to claw out my own eyes with a spoon—something of a rarity online these days.

Sometimes, though, a whopper of a clanger slips through the net, and such that it is with the site’s review of Snood. “Who can resist a game filled with disembodied cartoon heads? Certainly not us,” it begins, which we rather liked and had a little chuckle about. And then it all goes horribly wrong at the start of the next paragraph: “Snood has been around for over ten years, and has been available on PC, Mac and Game Boy Advance. A game this good is always in danger of being copied, and Snood has definitely had its share of knockoffs made, including South Park Snood for Mac.” (My emphasis.)

Yes, you did read that right. In a review of Snood, a reviewer said: “A game this good is always in danger of being copied.” I’m sure the Pazuru Boburu (Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move) guys think much the same, what with Snood being a blatant and massive rip-off of Taito’s game. I can only hope the writer was being ironic, but I somehow doubt it.

What this likely shows is how short people’s memories are when it comes to videogames, and also how a younger generation of writers is seemingly unaware of anything that happened before 1995. If I had 2p for every time I’ve read about some iPod shooter being a rip-off of Chillingo’s iDracula, despite iDracula being a straight update to Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron (from 1982), I’d… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d be able to nip over to the garage and buy myself a couple of Double Deckers, and let the chocolately goodness take away the pain.

O2’s been criticised for treating iPhone users with contracts like everyone else and forcing them to honour said contracts or buy them out. With O2 having set a precedent on the move from the original iPhone to 3G, I have some sympathy with user expectations not being met, but understand O2’s reasoning. However, my experience over the last week in the Pay & Go space (and, frankly, O2’s now very regular network outages) has removed any lingering doubt that the company needs a slap.

My story begins last year, and ends with some ‘O2 stupid’. Last year, I bought a 3G iPhone on Pay & Go, because I make few calls via mobile and figured it’d be cheaper in the long run. Prior to the Pay & Go pricing becoming official, I noted how it went up by £60, but O2 added an extra six months of internet bolt-on. Essentially, O2 got more money up front and presumably hoped you’d not use the bolt-on that much, thereby generating more profits per Pay & Go device. As a consumer, this made no odds to me, since I’d be buying the bolt-on anyway. However, I had, as far as I was concerned, paid up front for 12 months of usage.

Clearly, though, I’m a total idiot. I assumed I’d be able to retain remaining bolt-on time in some manner when transferring the phone. I’m in the market for a Pay & Go 3GS and plan to give the 3G to my wife. Surely, I thought, I’d get to keep my remaining time or transfer it?

My first email to O2 revealed that bolt-ons are tied directly to SIM cards. I was told that I could buy a 3GS and my wife would have my remaining internet time on the 3G. Something in the curt nature of the email started alarm bells ringing, and so I asked for further clarification regarding transferring numbers, and a rather large snag became apparent:

“If you buy a new iPhone and transfer your existing number on the new SIM card your current SIM card will be permanently disconnected,” said O2. “If this happens we won’t be able to transfer the free Bolt On to your new SIM card. Also you wife won’t be able to transfer her number to this SIM card.”

O2’s wonderful suggestion to me is this:

“I would suggest that you wait until the free Bolt On gets ended and then buy the new iPhone.”

It seems O2 is treating the bolt-on as a freebie that the company gives you when you buy an iPhone because O2 is made of fluffy bunnies, and not because it’s bundled into the device’s price, and not because you’ve actually paid real cash money for it. My assumption is also that I’ll have to—for no good reason—buy a new SIM for the 3G so that my wife can use it, or just jailbreak the phone (which I don’t want to do).

I’ve got three months left on my bolt-on. I’m now hoping the rumours are true and the announcement of the end of O2’s iPhone monopoly comes around that point, because its Pay & Go attitude strikes me as unbelievably dumb and has really rubbed me up the wrong way.

Stuart Dredge’s iPhone Games Bulletin just ran a story on Edge magazine once again placing itself firmly in bizarre-o-land. Despite its constant claims at being at the forefront of gaming, it’s made a bunch of stunning screw-ups over the years, the most obvious perhaps being an off-hand dismissal of WarioWare (which got 7/10, a rating Edge has tried ever since to remove from the history books, both by arguing that the review was written by a poor widdle overworked freelancer, and by running 46-page articles on why Made in Wario—the Japanese name for the game that Edge insists on using over the localised one—is so good).

Gosh, that was a long sentence, wasn’t it? Almost as long as one from Edge. Anyway, anyone who’s been keeping tabs on my work will know that I’ve become a total iPod gaming fan-boy of late. The reason isn’t some insane, misguided love for Apple, but the simple fact that iPod (as in touch, or the iPhone) is the only gaming platform that matters.

Ignoring for a second the problems surrounding the App Store (most of which don’t concern the general public), not least the rush to 59p/99 cents that every publisher seems to be taking part in, the simple fact is that since I got an iPhone, I’ve barely used any other games console. The App Store offers thousands of games, most of which are by independent developers, offering highly individual takes on gaming. Because of the nature of Apple handhelds—touchscreen; accelerometer; no tactile buttons—you can’t easily port stuff over from other platforms, and the best games therefore take direct advantage of the system.

To a great extent, iPod gaming is like a return to the 1980s, but with modern technology. Independent developers can make and sell a game, without pandering to the needs of focus groups. These games are then easily accessible (simply download from the App Store), affordable (even ‘expensive’ iPod games are about six quid) and often innovative. Games like Eliss are genuinely doing something new, and I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a videogames system.

This is why it’s so galling—so hugely irritating—that Future’s supposedly forward-thinking industry bible has once again got it wrong. In its Edge Award For Interactive Innovation 2009 Shortlist, you’d think at least one iPod game would make the cut. You’d think that the magazine, despite its inexplicably tiny amount of iPod gaming coverage, would notice one of the genuine futures of gaming, and champion it, shouting from the rooftops.

But no. Instead, the publication specifically singles out iPod gaming, stating “the games made for these environments are still nascent” (And why is that a bad thing? I seem to recall arcade games development was once ‘nascent’, but we still hail Defender, Robotron and Missile Command as classics) and “It’s difficult to think of an iPhone game that truly exemplifies the singular abilities of its host”. Really? I can think of at least a dozen, but perhaps this merely shows how Edge is stuck in the past rather than the future, if it’d rather showcase the likes of Far Cry 2—an impressive but incremental update on the FPS genre—over products that genuinely innovate.

Many gaming platforms are suddenly finding themselves becoming increasingly irrelevant as new formats take hold. It seems Edge is going the same way.