Scotland Yard detectives tell high court hearing that number of victims may be bigger than previously thought Scotland Yard’s renewed investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World has identified that the number of victims is in excess of 91 people – far higher than previously estimated by detectives, the high court heard today. The publisher of the newspaper has also offered Sienna Miller £100,000 in compensation and offered to pay the actor her costs – an offer she has neither accepted nor rejected. Detectives are trawling through 9,200 pages of material seized from a private investigator used by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid to hack into voicemails, a case management hearing to decide how best to handle the flood of lawsuits against the paper heard. At the hearing in the high court, Jason Beer QC, representing the Metropolitan police, gave an idea of the scale of the scandal. Beer said that the number of potential victims is “substantially” higher than 91 people. The figure of 91 is significant. Previously police had said they had recorded a total of 91 pin numbers – necessary to access a mobile phone’s voicemail – in the possession of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the News of the World. The police counsel told the hearing: “It is wrong to say that 91 is the answer, that that is the maximum [number of victims], it may be on a bigger scale.” The court hearing also heard of the offer to Miller, which was designed to reflect the number of times her phone had been targeted. Her case is one of the most advanced of the phone-hacking lawsuits, and arguably the highest profile because of her celebrity. Mulcaire was convicted of intercepting voicemail messages in January 2007, along with the News of the World journalist Colin Goodman. During the course of the original investigation, police seized paperwork and records from Mulcaire, who was employed by the tabloid. Subsequently, John Yates, the Met’s acting deputy assistant commissioner, who handled a previous phone-hacking investigation, said that the police had only identified 10 to 12 victims. That figure is far lower than the level identified by the fresh investigation team, which is under the leadership of deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers. Yates said earlier this month that he had quoted the figure on at least four occasions because prosecutors had told police they needed to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but also that this had been done before the messages had been heard by the intended recipient. So far, 24 public figures who believe their voicemail messages were intercepted by journalists at the tabloid are suing News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp. Many more are expected to come forward after News International apologised to eight victims last week and said it would set up a compensation scheme. Law firm Mishcon de Reya, which is acting for several of the claimants, says it has received an unprecedented number of inquiries since News International published its statement, and estimates there could be more than 6,000 potential claimants. Judge Justice Vos said that four test cases – those of Sky Andrew, Kelly Hoppen, Sienna Miller and Andy Gray – could be heard as early as December, but no later than February 2012. •
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Scotland Yard detectives tell high court hearing that number of victims may be bigger than previously thought Scotland Yard’s renewed investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World has identified that the number of victims is in excess of 91 people – far higher than previously estimated by detectives, the high court heard today. The publisher of the newspaper has also offered Sienna Miller £100,000 in compensation and offered to pay the actor her costs – an offer she has neither accepted nor rejected. Detectives are trawling through 9,200 pages of material seized from a private investigator used by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid to hack into voicemails, a case management hearing to decide how best to handle the flood of lawsuits against the paper heard. At the hearing in the high court, Jason Beer QC, representing the Metropolitan police, gave an idea of the scale of the scandal. Beer said that the number of potential victims is “substantially” higher than 91 people. The figure of 91 is significant. Previously police had said they had recorded a total of 91 pin numbers – necessary to access a mobile phone’s voicemail – in the possession of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the News of the World. The police counsel told the hearing: “It is wrong to say that 91 is the answer, that that is the maximum [number of victims], it may be on a bigger scale.” The court hearing also heard of the offer to Miller, which was designed to reflect the number of times her phone had been targeted. Her case is one of the most advanced of the phone-hacking lawsuits, and arguably the highest profile because of her celebrity. Mulcaire was convicted of intercepting voicemail messages in January 2007, along with the News of the World journalist Colin Goodman. During the course of the original investigation, police seized paperwork and records from Mulcaire, who was employed by the tabloid. Subsequently, John Yates, the Met’s acting deputy assistant commissioner, who handled a previous phone-hacking investigation, said that the police had only identified 10 to 12 victims. That figure is far lower than the level identified by the fresh investigation team, which is under the leadership of deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers. Yates said earlier this month that he had quoted the figure on at least four occasions because prosecutors had told police they needed to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but also that this had been done before the messages had been heard by the intended recipient. So far, 24 public figures who believe their voicemail messages were intercepted by journalists at the tabloid are suing News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp. Many more are expected to come forward after News International apologised to eight victims last week and said it would set up a compensation scheme. Law firm Mishcon de Reya, which is acting for several of the claimants, says it has received an unprecedented number of inquiries since News International published its statement, and estimates there could be more than 6,000 potential claimants. Judge Justice Vos said that four test cases – those of Sky Andrew, Kelly Hoppen, Sienna Miller and Andy Gray – could be heard as early as December, but no later than February 2012. •
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Tim Radford finds Bronowski’s history of humanity, The Ascent of Man – reissued with a foreword by Richard Dawkins – as compelling as ever Fame has a momentum all of its own, but that does not explain the enduring recognition accorded to Jacob Bronowski. In 1972 he was a little-known mathematician who knew a lot about the poet William Blake. In 1973, thanks to a 13-part television series on BBC2, he had become one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, and by the late summer of 1974 he was dead. The book spun from the television series went on to sell millions. Now, 38 years later, the BBC has reissued it, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins but otherwise unchanged. In the intervening years, a hundred popularisers, practitioners and science historians have tried to tell much the same story, each time with more up-to-date information and a more acute sense of contemporary awareness. So The Ascent of Man should have a decidedly dated feel. But it doesn’t – not, at least, to this reader. It proceeds briskly through what is by now the standard science-oriented western European version of human history – the Palaeolithic, the dawn of civilisation, the Greeks and the Romans, the Islamic empire, Galileo, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein and the nuclear age – and it still seems as good as any other history of discovery, and a great deal sharper and more readable than some. Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski’s greedy enthusiasm for intellectual adventure, including poetry (I still have his 1972 book William Blake and the Age of Revolution, and felicitously, a new scholarly monograph from Imprint Academic, The Happy Passion by Antony James, tells us a lot more about Bronowski’s output). Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski’s decision to put as much of the script for the TV series into the book as possible. “A spoken argument is informal and heuristic; it singles out the heart of the matter and shows in what way it is crucial and new,” he writes in his own foreword. But the enduring freshness stems from something else. Bronowski had a gift for identifying the themes and advances that would seem just as vital 40 years on. He also had a gift for sentences minted with precision, and Dawkins picks out two of them in his foreword: “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind … The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is pleasure in his own skill.” That is more than just an example of the Bronowski way with words. It is an illustration of his ability to stand just slightly off-centre, to see the unexpected in the familiar, and select imagery that has life, action, movement. He identifies the keen edge of a stone blade, the baked bricks of Sumer, the marble of Greece and the stone arches of Rome, as evidence of human exploration of the visible structure of matter. This same attitude helps him demonstrate that the hit-and-miss handiwork of the Bronze Age, the intricate craftsmanship of Samurai swordsmiths, and the not-quite-futile endeavours of the medieval alchemists, were all tentative explorations of the invisible nature of matter. Geometry, and Greek and Islamic experiments in mathematics, began to expose the importance of shape, distance, perspective and to reveal a vision of the universe “not as a series of static frames but as a moving process”. Ultimately, his journey leads him “through the gateway of the atom … in a world which our senses cannot experience. There is a new architecture here, a way that things are put together which we cannot know: we only try to picture it by analogy, a new act of imagination.” And the Bronowski imagination dances on, leading us to new insights: he talks about the fabrication of the 92 elements through stellar fusion from the universal raw material of hydrogen and pauses, just for a moment, to contemplate carbon “formed in a star whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a million millionth of a second. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision.” These are sentences formed by a mind that can compose imagery, and then select exactly the right words to represent the image. The additional puzzle is that he can express them so flawlessly in a language that, until he was 12, he had never heard. The book, of course, is in one obvious sense out of date: it stops at Crick and Watson, and von Neumann, and the notion of Homo sapiens as an egghead, a highbrow, the product of a brain determined by its shape and capacity. In 1973, the last Apollo astronauts had just left the moon, molecular biology had barely begun, computing was something cumbrous involving small memories and whirring tapes, and neuroscience was still stuck in its own Dark Age. But in another sense, The Ascent of Man is as compelling as ever. The brain, he understands, is not just an instrument for action. It is an instrument for preparation; it both drives the human hand and is driven by it; it is an instrument wired to learn, control speech, plan and make decisions. In the course of the last chapter, he reminds us that from the printed book comes “the democracy of the intellect” and that humans are primarily ethical creatures. These are the words of a man who studied the devastation of Nagasaki. All our science, all our endeavour, is for something. “We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.” This is not just a book about science. It is a book about why science matters, and what it really tells us. That is not a message likely to go out of date in a few decades. Tim Radford’s geographical memoir The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things is published by Fourth Estate on 28 April Anthropology Evolution Neuroscience Physics History Science and nature Tim Radford guardian.co.uk
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Proposed changes to legal aid and immigration rules are at odds with the government’s action plan on domestic violence and could put more women at risk The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week. Domestic violence was “serious and pernicious”, Keir Starmer reminded us . “It ruins lives, breaks up families and has a lasting impact. It is criminal. And it has been with us for a very long time, yet it is only in the last 10 years that it has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue.” The DPP applauded the good progress that has “undoubtedly been made since those administering criminal justice woke up to domestic violence”. “But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency.” According to the CPS, nearly 1 million women experience domestic violence every year and 750,000 children witness it. Two women die every week as a result of it. Legal aid has a vital role to play in creating an escape route for many battered women and children from bad relationships. “I left a controlling and abusive ex-husband who it then transpired was a child abuser, something for which he was later prosecuted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment,” said a mother of two young children in a recent report published by the Rights of Women group. “I had to spend about six years fighting his various applications for contact with our children, despite the severity of the charges he was convicted for.” Without legal aid, the woman could not have afforded to see a lawyer. “This would have placed my two young daughters at very real risk of future abuse.” “No level of violence against women and girls is acceptable in modern Britain or anywhere else in this world,” declared the government in last month’s Action Plan . It was launched by Theresa May on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and expressed the government’s commitment to helping victims come forward. It’s not an original observation, but not all parts of the government machine listen to each other. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice’s green paper on legal aid appears to have been drafted without cognisance of May’s desire to protect battered women. Its proposals on domestic violence need to be binned. For the past 35 years Rights of Women has provided legal help to the victims of domestic violence. Its response to the legal aid green paper, which seeks to remove much of family law advice from the scheme, is a powerful testimony to the value of publicly funded legal advice at its most effective (and includes the comment from the mother of two above). It is all the more persuasive for being an evidence-based response drawing on a survey of 336 women: more than half experienced violence (58%) and the vast majority described that violence as domestic violence (81.6%). Just under half (46.6%) had reported that violence to the police or applied to the court for a domestic violence injunction. That last statistic is critical in the context of the MoJ’s proposals. Women experiencing violence will only receive legal aid if there is an injunction or conviction for a domestic violence offence. The mother who successfully fled her child abuser husband wouldn’t have qualified because she was not able to demonstrate evidence of the risk he posed to her children until after she separated. Lucy Cohen is a partner at the Bradford firm Williscroft & Co and reckons they take out injunctions to protect clients on average half a dozen times a week. “A lot of those that are vulnerable and need legal aid don’t have convictions or injunctions precisely because they’re so vulnerable. A lot of women we come across over issues of contact and finance have been victims of domestic violence but they don’t want to get an injunction, they don’t want to air their problems publicly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need help.” All the women respondents in the RoW research were asked for their reasons for reporting and not reporting violence. “My partner was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. He would tell me that the police would not take me seriously and it would be his word against mine,” said one woman. “He made much of the fact that husbands are never convicted of rape of their wives in this country.” Cohen argues that ministers are paying lip service to the issue. She points to their definition of domestic violence, which excludes “emotional” violence. Such a view is strikingly at odds with other parts of the government, the supreme court and, frankly, a commonsense understanding of domestic violence. “It has long been known that psychological abuse within a domestic context can cause at least as much long-term harm to the victim as physical abuse,” said Lord Brown earlier this year . Apparently not in the MoJ. As I blogged recently , the issue topped the list of concerns expressed by the Alan Beith-led select committee. Finally, May – despite her declaration – is planning to change the domestic violence rule in the immigration rules. It enables people who are on a spouse or partner visa and experiencing domestic violence to be able to leave that relationship and apply for indefinite leave. According to the immigration minister Damian Green, 700 victims of domestic violence rely upon it every year. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association tells me the figure could be as high as 1,500. In a letter to the ILPA, Green says the UK Border Agency will continue to provide leave when needed to help protect women and girls “but settlement will not be automatic”. “For the very small number of cases of minor unspent criminality which would lead to a refusal under these rules, we will take a case-by-case approach.” Well, the numbers might be small, but that misses the point. “One person remaining in an abusive situation is one too many,” says the ILPA’s Alison Harvey. She believes it is “nothing short of astonishing” that a part of the Home Office is “allowed to rewrite the immigration rules” creating a risk for those in abusive relationships. “UKBA may say that it will look carefully at applications, but to no avail. The way the rules have been rewritten means that those survivors will not make the applications in the first place.” Joined-up government? I don’t think so. Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures , which runs the Justice Gap series examining different aspects of justice. It will publish a collection of essays with the Advice Services Alliance on public legal education next month Domestic violence Keir Starmer Legal aid UK criminal justice Women Jon Robins guardian.co.uk
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Peace campaigner loses attempt to appeal against mayor’s possession order, but can move tent on to pavement The veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw faces eviction from an area of grass in Parliament Square Gardens after losing an attempt to launch a legal challenge against a possession order granted to the mayor of London. Haw’s longstanding presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square is not, however, threatened by the order, which relates to his encroachment on to a small adjoining part of the gardens where he has pitched a tent. Haw has come under pressure to quit his decade-old protest just metres from Westminster Abbey as the royal wedding approaches. After the appeal attempt was lost, co-campaigner Barbara Tucker said she did not believe the eviction had anything to do with clearing the area for the royal wedding – “it is about getting rid of our peace campaign”. Last month, the mayor, Boris Johnson, won a high court possession order to evict Haw and Tucker. Rejecting the application at the court of appeal, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, and Lady Justice Smith ruled there was “no prospect” of any appeal being successful. They said the mayor was entitled to his order for possession without any further delay as “justice delayed is justice denied”. Tucker interrupted Neuberger as he gave his judgment, saying: “This is a cover-up. Are you finished now?” She and several supporters walked out of court as Smith announced that she agreed the application should be dismissed. Haw is being treated for lung cancer in Germany. Mr Justice Wyn Williams last month granted an order for possession and an injunction against Haw, from Redditch, Worcestershire, and Tucker, but the orders were not to be put in place until after any appeal. All Haw and Tucker have to do now, however, having lost the right to appeal, is to move their tents from the green, owned by the Greater London Authority, to the pavement, which is owned by Westminster council. The prime minister, the home secretary and the mayor of London have all vowed to clear the pavement of protesters before Kate Middleton and Prince William marry on 29 April, but so far have found no legal power that allows them to do so. The high court judge ruled: “Parliament Square Gardens [PSG] is not a suitable location for prolonged camping; such camping is incompatible with the function, lawful use and character of PSG and it is also inconsistent with the proper management of the area as a whole.” He said the campaigners’ tents and placards were occupying more space than was permitted. The pair would be allowed use of a three-metre length of kerb to display placards as that had been a part of the protest for several years, the judge said. Last July, bailiffs and police evicted demonstrators from Democracy Village – the scattering of tents, placards and home-made police boxes set up in the square in May 2010 – after the mayor was granted a possession order for the site, citing vandalism. However, the court remitted the question of whether it was reasonable and proportionate to enforce orders against Haw, whose decade-long presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square was not challenged, except for his encroachment on to a small part of the gardens. Westminster council has launched legal action against protesters who occupied the footpath after being evicted from the green last year. Protest London politics Boris Johnson London Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk
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EcoWorldly : Innovative solar energy plant will generate 392 MW of power and is due for completion in 2013 Google’s product portfolio has now expanded from search engine power to solar power. The company has invested $168 million in a Mojave Desert facility that will become the world’s largest solar power tower plant. The site is located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California. According to gizmag , “the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun’s rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall.” Construction on this plant started in October 2010. When finished in 2013, the facility is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy. Solar power tower development, while less advanced than the more common trough systems, may offer higher efficiency and better energy storage capabilities. Parabolic trough systems consist of parabolic mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a Dewar tube running the length of the mirror through which a heat transfer fluid runs that is then used to heat steam in a standard turbine. Solar power tower systems such as the ISEGS on the other hand focus a large area of sunlight into a single solar receiver on top of a tower to produce steam at high pressure and temperatures of up to 550 ° C (over 1,000° F) to drive a standard turbine and generator. The ISEGS also uses a dry-cooling technology that reduces water consumption by 90 percent and uses 95 percent less water than competing solar thermal technologies. Water is also recirculated during energy before being reused to clean the plant’s mirrors. According to BrightSource Energy , the plant developer, this will be the first large-scale solar power tower plant built in the U.S. in nearly two decades and will single-handedly almost double the amount of commercial solar thermal electricity produced in the U.S. today and nearly equal the amount of total solar installed in the U.S. in 2009 alone. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System • A 370-megawatt nominal (392 megawatt gross) solar complex using mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers. • The electricity generated by all three plants is enough to serve more than 140,000 homes in California during the peak hours of the day. • The complex will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 400,000 tons per year. • Located in Ivanpah, approximately 50 miles northwest of Needles, California (about five miles from the California-Nevada border) on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. • The complex is comprised of three separate plants to be built in phases between 2010 and 2013, and will use BrightSource Energy’s LPT 550 technology. Solar power Renewable energy Google California guardian.co.uk
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Gallery: A penguin with joie de vivre, an eagle with va va voom and a spider with a certain … je ne sais quoi
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Thinking of shelling out? These are the Easter eggs which our panel of enthusiasts think tasted the best • Food blog: do you prefer a taste of childhood or something more grown-up at Easter? This is a list of all the Easter eggs tasted which scored 3 or more out of a possible 5. Paul A Young salted caramel egg (milk) £19.95, 90g (min) 4.5 out of 5 “Gooey and delicious and almost too good. Best shared with a close friend, and not only because of the price!” “The business” Betty’s milk chocolate & orange Easter egg (milk) 315g, £19.95 4.1 out of 5 “Lovely, slightly orangey but not overpowering. Moreish” “Simple but very tasty. Good, clean hit of orange” La Maison du Chocolat Harold the bunny (milk) 205g, £45 4 out of 5 “An somewhat kitsch take on the Easter egg but all high-quality and very tasty chocolate” “Toothsome!” Cloud Cocoland 3 little eggs (milk) 150g, £8 3.9 out of 5 “A perfect Easter egg – unfussy with the maximum amount of delicious, creamy chocolate” “Best shared – even though it’s small, it is unbelievably rich. But also delicious – the chocolate is sweet and creamy” Marks & Spencer white chocolate and raspberry topped egg (white) 155g, £5.99 3.6 out of 5 “Delicate red raspberry flavour” Rococo dark chocolate foiled Easter egg no.3 (dark) 220g, £21 3.6 out of 5 “Very rich, high quality chocolate with delicious sweets inside” Green & Blacks butterscotch egg (milk) 180g, £6.59 3.5 out of 5 Green & Black’s Maya gold egg (dark) 180g, £6.59 3.5 out of 5 “Quite like the spicing but it’s about the flavours not the chocolate” “Classic, delicious” Montezuma’s chunky dark chocolate egg (dark) £7.99, 150g 3.4 out of 5 “Lovely and bitter although a sugary aftertaste cost it a point” “Lovely! Good snap, really round taste, very complex warm flavour” Hotel Chocolat ostrich egg (dark) 1.3kg, £65 3.3 out of 5 “Lovely generously thick egg with nuts. Great” Betty’s dark chocolate & rose Easter egg (dark) 315g, £19.95 3.2 out of 5 “Perfect amount of rosiness, my favourite. Oo, Betty!” William Curley sea salt caramel Easter egg (dark) 350g, £30 3.1 out of 5 “Like the double layer effect” “Very creamy for dark chocolate – delicious” The Co-operative truly irresistible fairtrade milk chocolate Easter egg with fairtrade chocolate selection (white) 210g, £7 3.1 out of 5 “Promises a rush of vanilla because of the visible pod, but there’s no discernible vanilla flavour” Rawr Organic solid chocolate Easter eggs (dark) 280g, £8.95 3.0 out of 5 “The graininess of raw chocolate can be strange at first but a leap over that hurdle leads to flavours – particularly the mint and orange – that are deep and satisfying” Prestat dark salt caramel truffle Easter egg (dark) 227g, £25 3.0 out of 5 “Salty enough without being too much, chocolate nice and thin and snappy” “Lovely but perhaps a bit salty” Waitrose organic and fairtrade dark chocolate egg (dark) 250g, £14 (reduced to £10) 3.0 out of 5 “Nice but a bit vague” “Smooth but a little underpowered” Artisan du Chocolat mallow bunny Easter egg (milk) 325g, £15 3.0 out of 5 “Delicious, nice texture” Pierre Marcolini bunny egg (“oeuf oreilles”) (dark) 45g, £13.99 3.0 out of 5 Easter Chocolate Food & drink guardian.co.uk
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Got a killer idea for an app but don’t know how to get it to market? Submit it to FundedApps and watch the cash roll in … or that’s the theory at least App: FundedApps By: Offficial , the trading name of Ridgegate Digital Price: Free Available on: iPhone What is it? It allows you to submit your own app ideas, for £1.19 a pop, to the FundedApps creators who will analyse your idea before dumping it or creating it. Who is it by? FundedApps was formed in November 2010 as part of Offficial – an investment funding company which develops mobile apps, set up by ex-Nokia designer Alastair Curtis and msn.co.uk developer Jamie Lyons – and launched in February. What does it promise? FundedApps says it is “bringing brilliant ideas to life”. If it likes your idea it will pay £250 plus 25% of any net profit the app makes when it is published. How does it work? FundedApps will acknowledge receipt of your idea in writing within three working days of your submission, and you will get a simple “yes” or “no” decision within seven working days (app ideas not submitted in English will automatically be categorised as a “no”). If accepted, your idea must overcome a further hurdle: it will be presented to an investment committee and you will only get your £250 if the committee grants final approval. FundedApps still reserves the right to cancel development of your app after this stage but it won’t ask for the £250 to be refunded if it does so. Once you have been paid £250 you effectively give up your full rights to the app. You will then be paid 25% of net profits on a quarterly basis within 15 working days of the end of each quarter, and be provided with a statement setting out the revenue generated and your share of it. So far, so transparent. But what happens if your idea is rejected? According to the legal blurb FundedApps will keep your idea “in strict confidence”, and employees, agents and sub-contractors will be bound by confidentiality obligations. And Curtis himself says “All ideas are time-stamped and logged on a database, and we have no ownership of ideas unless they go forward. If we reject an idea, it remains the owner’s idea.” Is it easy to use? The actual process is simple. The home page features a giant grey wheel that users can move to access their history, notes and the legal terms and conditions – and has a large purple button in the middle for users to submit an idea. If users do so it is at this point they enter into a binding contract with Offficial. Is it fun? The process itself is not exactly a riot – you cut and paste an idea into a box and click send – although the wheel does make a robotic noise and parts of it glow when it turns. It would obviously be more of a blast if your idea gets turned into an app, but this is statistically unlikely: the creators state “the percentage of rejections will be high so brace yourselves for a potential rejection.” Is it pretty? There’s nothing offensive here, but the predominantly black and steel-grey colour scheme has a touch of the 80s Playboy theme about it. Should you download it? It’s free, so there’s nothing to lose, but whether you want to pay £1.19 to upload your app idea is a different story. If you are a clueless, penniless technophobe who happens to have a smart idea, it might be worth a look. But if you have any other way of getting your idea built and to market there seems little point in signing over the majority of your potential revenue to FundedApps. As Curtis himself says: “The price of £1.19 helps provide a buffer to prevent people submitting silly or bogus ideas.” Ed Lea of established app developers Grapple Mobile says the FundedApps creators will undoubtedly make the most money out of the app, but it’s “not a bad deal for some consumers”. He was a little wary because the company could not provide any evidence of a customer’s idea making it to market. Indeed, since its launch the creators are yet to publish a customer-led app, nor will they say how many app ideas have been accepted, nor can it produce case studies of people who have had an idea taken forward to the next stage. Until this happens, FundedApps will face a degree of scepticism. Consumer affairs Internet, phones & broadband Apps iPhone Apple Mark King guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Got a killer idea for an app but don’t know how to get it to market? Submit it to FundedApps and watch the cash roll in … or that’s the theory at least App: FundedApps By: Offficial , the trading name of Ridgegate Digital Price: Free Available on: iPhone What is it? It allows you to submit your own app ideas, for £1.19 a pop, to the FundedApps creators who will analyse your idea before dumping it or creating it. Who is it by? FundedApps was formed in November 2010 as part of Offficial – an investment funding company which develops mobile apps, set up by ex-Nokia designer Alastair Curtis and msn.co.uk developer Jamie Lyons – and launched in February. What does it promise? FundedApps says it is “bringing brilliant ideas to life”. If it likes your idea it will pay £250 plus 25% of any net profit the app makes when it is published. How does it work? FundedApps will acknowledge receipt of your idea in writing within three working days of your submission, and you will get a simple “yes” or “no” decision within seven working days (app ideas not submitted in English will automatically be categorised as a “no”). If accepted, your idea must overcome a further hurdle: it will be presented to an investment committee and you will only get your £250 if the committee grants final approval. FundedApps still reserves the right to cancel development of your app after this stage but it won’t ask for the £250 to be refunded if it does so. Once you have been paid £250 you effectively give up your full rights to the app. You will then be paid 25% of net profits on a quarterly basis within 15 working days of the end of each quarter, and be provided with a statement setting out the revenue generated and your share of it. So far, so transparent. But what happens if your idea is rejected? According to the legal blurb FundedApps will keep your idea “in strict confidence”, and employees, agents and sub-contractors will be bound by confidentiality obligations. And Curtis himself says “All ideas are time-stamped and logged on a database, and we have no ownership of ideas unless they go forward. If we reject an idea, it remains the owner’s idea.” Is it easy to use? The actual process is simple. The home page features a giant grey wheel that users can move to access their history, notes and the legal terms and conditions – and has a large purple button in the middle for users to submit an idea. If users do so it is at this point they enter into a binding contract with Offficial. Is it fun? The process itself is not exactly a riot – you cut and paste an idea into a box and click send – although the wheel does make a robotic noise and parts of it glow when it turns. It would obviously be more of a blast if your idea gets turned into an app, but this is statistically unlikely: the creators state “the percentage of rejections will be high so brace yourselves for a potential rejection.” Is it pretty? There’s nothing offensive here, but the predominantly black and steel-grey colour scheme has a touch of the 80s Playboy theme about it. Should you download it? It’s free, so there’s nothing to lose, but whether you want to pay £1.19 to upload your app idea is a different story. If you are a clueless, penniless technophobe who happens to have a smart idea, it might be worth a look. But if you have any other way of getting your idea built and to market there seems little point in signing over the majority of your potential revenue to FundedApps. As Curtis himself says: “The price of £1.19 helps provide a buffer to prevent people submitting silly or bogus ideas.” Ed Lea of established app developers Grapple Mobile says the FundedApps creators will undoubtedly make the most money out of the app, but it’s “not a bad deal for some consumers”. He was a little wary because the company could not provide any evidence of a customer’s idea making it to market. Indeed, since its launch the creators are yet to publish a customer-led app, nor will they say how many app ideas have been accepted, nor can it produce case studies of people who have had an idea taken forward to the next stage. Until this happens, FundedApps will face a degree of scepticism. Consumer affairs Internet, phones & broadband Apps iPhone Apple Mark King guardian.co.uk
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