Barker Bites Back

A team from Hull University beat out nine others to win the UK prize in the fifth annual Imagine Cup Software Design Challenge. ‘The Seedlings’, as they call themselves, will now head for Seoul to represent the UK in the international competition sponsored by BT, Capgemini and HP.
The team’s winning application is called First Programme Language (FPL) and is designed to develop young children’s problem solving skills through the teaching of simple programming concepts.
According to the competition's main sponsors, Microsoft, FPL can be adapted to suit different kinds of application.
Good luck to the team in its efforts to help young minds tun to programming early.

IBM is trying to be hip. It is an almost frightening prospect, but hip is a definite feature of the IBM agenda and it aspires to be not just ordinary hip, but suited and button-down hip. A difficult procedure, to say the least,
At Lotusphere 2007 this week in Orlando, the company came up with a raft of new products all falling roughly into under the social networking, collaboration, groupware label. Three of the hottest, hippest buttons.
Everybody is trying to get there with tools that free up the user to collaborate, talk, chat and work with people not just in their company, not just at home, but everywhere. The new users, the world of Web 2.0 and all. The land where the new game is all about enabling people to get free access, to use software in ways that are not just new and imaginative but genuinely enabling. It is a world full of buzz words and buzz concepts but also ways that organizations, large and small, are struggling to come to terms with. Ways in which they can genuinely make people fully enabled – ways in which they can get the most out of the potential of the greatest unopened store of resources in any organization, the people who work there,
It is early days in IBM’s walks down this particular road, but the company is ready and willing, if the keynotes that peppered today’s session of Lotusphere are anything to go by. And certainly if the volume-level is any guide. Lotusphere today was a noisy, quite exciting place to be. The delegates were noisy and up for it. So noisy, it sounded at times like a Microsoft conference when Foghorn Ballmer is on-stage. (Well almost.)
While delegates ponder the full details of the weighty store of information that was unloaded on them today, it will be interesting to see how they digest it. Will they think that Lotus is now the hip corner of IBM? Well, perhaps not. But for those who thought that Lotusphere 2007 was going to be like any previous Lotusphere, they at least have had some five good reasons for thinking it was a little different and when they head back to their companies will have a little more to tell folks back home about it.

Some lucky children will have a very merry Christmas indeed this year, thanks to the website HotUKDeals and a glitch on the Hamleys site that saw it doling out cumulative discount of 60 percent on its festive goods.
You don't have to be a five year old mathematical genius to work out that 60 percent off means two train sets instead of one and some nifty extra track thrown in. (My personal preference would be some bits to add to my Scalextric, if Santa is listening - but that is neither here nor there......)
Anyway, it fell to The Guardian to spread the happy news about the bonus for children and the chagrin for the kids' favourite toy story, where the ever watchful HotUKDeals consumer site had picked up the good news and spread it as fast as it could. And that was very fast indeed, according to The Guardian, which reported that Hamleys shelves were "pillaged" after the error.
"It's like the Vikings have been to Hamleys" was the comment of one surfer, the paper reported. "If you get on to their site, it's been emptied and pillaged."
But, as Hamleys admitted that it had "fallen foul of the loophole, " it promised "to honour any orders made as a result of the blunder". Well done to the Royal Family's favourite toy shop. I am off down there immediately to buy something in support in its hour of need.
That's if there is anything left of course.

Matrix Chambers, the legal home of Cherie Booth and, according to the Legal 500, "arguably the finest concentration of talent at the Bar", finds itself the victim of cloning. The web site of these finely attuned legal minds has allegedly been commandeered by another outfit of possible lawyers, or possibly plain shysters.
At least that is according to The Observer newspaper, which reported on Sunday that the fine legal minds of Matrix Chambers have resorted to legal action over the activities of Lando Attorneys who have allegedly cloned the entire look and feel of the Matrix Chambers website and a lot of he content too.
As any legal advisor will tell you, taking legal action is last resort for any lawyer, but this has been prompted by the damage to Matrix Chambers' considerable reputation that could follow from any action.
'Matrix is very annoyed,' Lindsay Scott, Matrix's chief executive, told The Observer. 'They have cloned part of our website. Matrix is taking all appropriate action to ensure that the cloned site is taken down as soon as possible.'

The British born designer of both the iMac and the iPod picked up a CBE from the Queen on Friday.
Jonathan Ive, who was born in the UK in February 1967 and studied industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic, became a Commander of the British Empire in the Queen's New Year Honours.
He started his career with Apple in 1992 and rose to fame in 1998 when Steve Jobs decided to adopt his bubble-shaped design for the iMac. His success continued and while he has undertaken many designs for Apple but his best known will undoubtedly be the iPod.
Just last month he was named as the senior vice president of Industrial Design at Apple, reporting directly to Jobs. In 2003 he was named Designer of the Year by the Design Museum London and has also been awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry by The Royal Society of Arts.