Here at PC World Towers, we were always a little dubious about iYomu.com, the New Zealand-developed website that launched with a global ambition to become "the social networking site for grown-ups". Now, an email to members has announced its June 28 closure. Here's where it went wrong.

My first thought at the August 2007 launch was: they've reinvented Facebook, which a year ago was already firmly established as the service of choice for 20, 30 and 40-somethings who found MySpace and Bebo too yoofy.

There were other problems, including the fact iYomu's $US1 million puzzle competition came over like a piece of spam (an impression not helped by a mysterious, extended process of determining the winner. Apparently some guy in Malaysia eventually pocketed the cash. For some reason, iYomu choose not to promote the handover, or document it in any way, to the annoyance of members on its message boards).

Then there were deeper problems. iYomu was smartly designed, but it positioned itself as a site where you could locate strangers with common interests. Facebook has that dimension too, but the genius of founder Mark Zuckerberg was to generate a service that let people map their existing networks, then expand from there at their own comfort level.

iYomu aimed for 10 million users by Christmas 2007. Enough people, it thought, for a commercially-viable number to upgrade to its paid online storage service (itself a dubious proposition when Google, Yahoo and others give you gigs of free file space, if you're game enough to back-up online). In the event, there were 100,000 members, according to a final email from founder David Wolf-Rooney.

Wolf-Rooney had initially promised that the online storage model would pay the bills and there would be no advertisements - quite an appealing feature to those tired of Facebook's blinky, chaotic cacaphony - but ended up breaking that pledge. And in a bizarre corollary, Wolf-Rooney writes in his final message:

"As the founder of iYomu and now the official closer I thought I would send you a movie clip that sums up many of the conversations that have taken place in this online community filled with Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians + 100 other countries."

I clicked on the accompanying link, and was taken to a vodka ad on YouTube.

A dumb way to finish.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

Join a smaller ISP like MaxNet, Actrix, Snap, WorldxChange or Compass if you want faster internet, says Epitiro, a UK company that set up in NZ last year to rate broadband speeds (and now for the Commerce Commission as well as the ISPs themselves. Read how Epitiro does it here).

Epitiro's latest Broadband Index for the March quarter, released by the Commerce Commission today, shows larger ISPs lagging their more nimble competitors in broadband performance.

"One simple reason is that the sheer size and growth of the top five ISPs will have contributed to network congestion, with many users competing for bandwidth at peak periods, in contrast to the many smaller ISPs who have less users," says IDC's Telecommunications Research Manager, Rosalie Nelson (IDC partnered with Epitiro on the report).

Three other results that caught my eye:
1. Of the five main centres, Hamilton had the best results
2. Of the top tier ISPs, Orcon rated highly, along with TelstraClear (but only in Christchurch in Wellington, where TelstraClear has its own fibre network, plus Auckland), with Telecom, Vodafone and Slingshot clocking below-average performance.
3. As a whole, New Zealand ISPs provide a much less consistent broadband product than Australia. Compared to our cousins across the Tasman, our internet speeds are erratic (as well as slower).

Smaller ISPs can definitely be more agile in terms of how they allocate bandwidth between their customers (although there is an absolute limit to their advantage, since they're all buying the same wholesale service from Telecom). And they also typically apply a lighter had to the kind of subscriber who lives their lives on the 'Torrents.

When I recently met with Ralph Brayham - the Ferrit.co.nz boss now pulling double time with his new extra role as head of Telecom Broadband - he admitted as much, saying he is deliberately not targetting the type of customer who downloads gobs of gigs through online gaming or gargantuan video downloads. Instead, he prefers to focus on Telecom's value-adds, such as extended-hours service, and enhanced yahoo!xtra features (such as the pro version of the freebie Flickr, which offers more online storage for your photos).

With the opening of competition, he says he's comfortable with Telecom holding 55% of the market. Faster and more consistent speed will be just as important as Yahoo frills in achieving that. But as Brayham points out, organisational separation means the division of Telecom that builds its network (Chorus) and the division that sell the bandwidth on that network (Telecom Wholesale) are servicing not just Xtra, but Vodafone, Orcon and other ISPs. In a surreal sign of the times, Chorus staff wore Vodafone T-shirts for a day as part of the promotion for the recent launch of Vodafone's Red network.

Posted by Chris Keall at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

I was walking along Auckland's Ponsonby Road midday Thursday when an SUV, queued in traffic, caught fire just a few metres up ahead. Like most onlookers, I immediately scurried about 100m back.

But soon people's cellphones started to appear, and the crowd started edging forward to catch better pics or video. I stopped a semi-stupid 50 metres away (see the crummy 320x320 video from my cellphone below). But a dozen others got as far as the curb immediately adjacent to the vehicle burning in the middle of the road.

In this case, the efforts of these citizen journalists were for naught, as a OneNews car happened to be in the traffic immediately behind the SUV.

But with TV news organisations now openly soliciting viewers' videos - and many sites introducing citizen journalist channels (such as the one recently previewed on YouTube's house blog) - I wonder if, at some point, DIY wannabees are going to start bugging emergency crews.

On a geeky side-note, it took me a little while to get my video online because my cellphone captures pictures in .3GP format, unknown to PCs. I found a good, free utility called Free 3GP Video Converter, which quickly and easily converted my clip above into a Windows-friendly AVI.

It was on a site called DVDVideoSoft, which offers a welter of free tools for converting proprietary video cellphone formats to common PC video formats, and for converting the likes of YouTube videos into cellphone-friendly formats.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Months of mind-numbing discussion about local loop unbundling and number portability is finally starting to yield some cheaper, faster broadband.

Vodafone formally launched its "Red Network" Friday, which provides broadband to your home courtesy of Vodafone DSL2+ gear installed in local Telecom exchanges under the unbundling legislation.

So far, half of Auckland's exchanges have Vodafone's own broadband switches (shown) sitting alongside Telecom's (and joining D-SLAMs already there from state-owned Orcon). The rest are promised to be covered by October (see a coverage map here). Other centres will follow, though with no set time-table. (The pace of change is dictated by Telecom, which is required by the Commerce Commission to unbundle at the stately pace of five exchanges per quarter. "But [it's] beating that considerably. 15 last quarter. So it's driven by Telecom but they're doing OK", says a Vodafone spokesman.)

If you're close enough to your local exchange, you'll be able to get DSL2+; and from around August the super turbo-charged form of copper cable broadband, VDSL2, will be available too, for those who live practically on the door-step of an exchange where Vodafone has installed the requisite gear (more on DSL2+ and VDSL2 here).

Home phone + broadband from $70
There's some keen pricing, too, with home phone line and broadband plans starting from $70 a month (with a 1GB cap) to $90 (with a 20GB cap). Generally they're around $10 cheaper than equivalent Telecom plans. Orcon's cheapest home phone line + broadband plan is $79, albeit with a higher data cap (10GB) than Vodafone's modest entry level.

Legislative changes mean you can now keep your Telecom number if you switch to Vodafone, or another provider (though unfortunately the people who changed the number portability law didn't think as far as email).

Vodafone Chief Marketing Officer Mark Rushworth says a deal with lines company Vector to lay fibre optic cable between exchanges provides beefy backhaul capacity. (Rushworth's name may be familiar to PC World readers as the CEO of Vodafone's ISP acquisition ihug, which is now Vodafone-branded in most contexts).

Naked DSL + cellphone
In an interesting aside, Rushworth was asked whether Vodafone had any plans to bundle in mobile plans with broadband.

He said by Christmas his company would offer one account that combined a naked DSL plan (that is, broadband DSL without a home phone account) with a cellphone plan.

For modern types who've ditched their landline to go cellphone-only, that could prove pretty attractive.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

"Just lick it," said my wife, sitting in the passenger seat, holding up the plastic sucker. But as I eyed passing pedestrians, my mouth went dry. More on this exciting domestic stand-off shortly.

First, some background on why I wouldn't buy a GPS system for my car. There are two reasons.

Neither has anything to do with GPS products' navigation talents. I know a couple of confused tourists have bagged them on Fair Go, but I've found systems from Navman, Garmin and TomTom are usually very good at guiding me to where I want to go. Their 3D scrolling maps are a technological marvel, as is the voice coming out of their speakers telling you when to turn (I'm also enjoying the fact that my current test system, TomTom's $749 Go 720, comes with an optional widget that lets you play your iPod through its modest speakers, or route it through your car stereo via an FM transmitter).

Occasionally they do get confused. Say, by the New Zealand quirk that sees some major road names arbitrarily change after an intersection (Balmoral Road turning into St Lukes Rd in central Auckland is a classic for catching out GPS). But all the major brands are also very good, and fast, at recalibrating an alternative route to get you on track. The only duff brand we've encountered is Goldfinger (also bagged in Consumer tests). On the whole, I'm constantly impressed by the technology. (Read PC World's latest GPS group test here, and Scott Barltey's review of the TomTom Go 720 here).

Smash and grab
My first problem is that I'm just too scared. I'm completely serious here.

At TomTom's NZ launch back in September, I related how my sister-in-law just had her Navman GPS stolen from her hatchback - for the second time in months. This on top of one of Navman's new 'n' series systems being snatched out of our Reviews Editor's car while on loan for a PC World test. Scott had taken the trouble to always remove the GPS system from his car at night - and in fact it wasn't on its stalk when he ducked into a shop for 10 minutes - but when he got out a theft had smashed his window and grabbed the hidden Navman.

None of my lunch companions were surprised. The editor of another tech publication said he'd had a Navman stolen out of his car too. And a guy from Geosmart (the AA-owned company that sells maps to both Navman and TomTom ) said while his GPS system was not stolen, a wannabe thief had seen the stalk (the sucker thing that holds it to the window) and smashed his car window on a fishing expedition.

Wow. Admittedly my sample of people who use in-car GPS systems is not huge. But every single one of them has been targetted by a thief.

(Incidentally, only commercial systems used by truckers etc have a transmitter as well as a receiver, which would allow a stolen system to be traced).

With GPS systems priced between at $500 and beyond, it's not good to get one knicked. There at any ickky may-it's-worth-the-excess point for many insurance policies, and of course you've got to report the theft to the police to start the insurance process, and you'll likely have a smashed window to deal with too.

Suckers
GPS makers are quite aware of the theft problem. When I turn off my Tom Tom Go 720, a little graphic appears reminding you to take your GPS unit off its stalk and take it with you.

But the plastic stalk is my second problem. It looks ugly and intrusive in the middle of your windscreen (where it must sit to pick up GPS satellite signals). And for power, a chord dangles down to my car's cigarette lighter. It's a messy set-up, and my knee constantly knocks the charger (which you can dispense with once the Tom Tom's battery is charged).

Worse, to prevent a smash-and-grab fishing expedition like the one described above, you've got to pull off the stalk each time you de-car as well.

There are two stalk scenarios. One, it's plastic sucker falls off your windscreen, sending your GPS falling into your lap. This has happened to me numerous times. Or, two, you like the plastic sucker before attaching it to your windscreen. If you can get over the embarrassmentthis entails - or the self-esteem issues inherent in crouching below your steering wheel as you do it (which is where we came in) - then your GPS will stick fast. So fast that it's a pain trying to pull it off every time you park.

You can mount a GPS on your dashboard, but there's extra cost involved, and you're also likely to want to upgrade your GPS system at some point, for New Zealand lacks many associated services common in other countries, such as voice recognition - so you can speak the address of where you want to go, rather than type it onto your GPS's touchscreen - and GSM alerts about traffic jams.

Maybe my two issues are fussy and paranoid, but they're genuine, real-life roadstops that stop me buying one of these high-tech wonders

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )