The best tech April fools stories

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

It’s that time of year again when the incredulous cower behind their couches as the normally sombre tech industry unleashes its inner sarcasm and goes hunting for the naive. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the best April fool’s japes doing the rounds and collecting them here, but if you’ve noticed any drop us a line and we’ll add them to the list.

Opera facial control

First up is this humdinger from Opera, eulogising the latest development in Opera 10 – facial control. From the press release: “Opera Face Gestures enable anyone with a Webcam to control their browser moving only their face. Based on the same architecture as Opera’s Mouse Gestures, Face Gestures makes surfing the Web as easy as smiling, batting an eye lash or flaring a nostril.”

Click here for the utterly brilliant demonstration

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Gordon Brown in sense of humour shocker!

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

Gordon Brown is a very intelligent man. Unfortunately, this is tempered by the fact that he has the charisma of a bag of cabbage.  However, somebody in Downing Street clearly saw an opportunity to rectify this when they responded to little England’s petition to make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister with a video posted on YouTube.

If you’ve not seen it, watch it here. Otherwise, bear with me for a thirty-second summary: The video opens with the words: “Thanks to the 49,447 people who signed the petition to make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister. You make a compelling case… ”

We then see the doors to number 10, which open and we pan up the staircase, which is lined with photographs of past prime ministers before we arrive at the top, and a picture of Clarkson. This is then followed by by the words: “But on second thoughts… maybe not.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not barrelful of monkeys, farts in the bath, Arrested Development funny, but it’s worth a wry smile and a blog post. It’s a sign that this Government does have some charisma about it, and, perhaps more importantly, imagination.

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Google will rue the day it bought YouTube

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Google’s motto may be “do no evil”, but the company can do no wrong in the eyes of tech investors and the mainsteam media. However, I suspect the day it decided to lavish some of its pocket money on YouTube may prove to be one of the biggest mistakes the company ever makes.

The $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube may be small beans to the search monolith, but Google has publicly admitted that it can’t find a way to turn a profit from the millions of eyeballs that are watching video on its site every day. Hosting terabyte upon terabyte of video doesn’t come cheaply. Charging users to watch videos is a non-starter, so either Google finds a way to make YouTube more attractive to advertisers, or it’s going to continue to bleed money.

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