Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

Making the announcement at the massive E3 gaming conference and expo currently underway in Los Angeles, Mirosoft said that the service is set to launch in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece,  Hungary, Poland, Russia and South Africa.

Said Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live for Microsoft,“This expansion is another step toward our vision for Live – to deliver the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, wherever you are in the world.”

The service will be available in the USA summer, which means it should come online in South Africa within the next three months, and definitely by the end of September.

Microsoft said that Xbox Live in South Africa will focus first on delivering core gaming and community features including matchmaking, friends list, achievements, Gamerscore, a tailored Games Marketplace and other features, with content like movies and music being excluded at launch, but on the cards for addition later on.

Yvette van Rooyen, product and marketing manager for Xbox 360 in South Africa added that, “Xbox fans in South Africa will now be able play the best games in the industry with 23 million other Xbox Live users across the world who have made this their online gaming destination of choice. “

Given the long wait for Xbox Live it is likely that most South African Xbox users will have already created international accounts by lying about their location and will be loathe to switch to a South African account because they will lose all their stored information in the service. This will keep numbers down, I predict, while making it look like regions such as the USA and UK have unrealistically high numbers, as is the case with, for example, the Apple iPad which claims 2 million sales in the USA in under 60 days while I’m willing to bet that half those sales ended up elsewhere in the world (heck, I bought two).

I have been an Xbox Live Gold subscriber for some time and have compared the service to Sony Playstation Network (PSN). In my opinion there is no competition really, Microsoft’s service is streets ahead of Sony’s – but the latter gets all the credit for betting on South Africa first.

Microsoft had a slew of announcements at E3 2010, including unveiling its Project Natal accessory which will go to market as Microsoft Kinect and a new version of the Xbox 360 called the ‘Slim’ that will retail in the USA for $299.

Microsoft has unveiled a new Xbox 360 accessory called ‘Kinect’ that was previously known as Project Natal. Unveiled at the annual E3 gaming conference currently underway in Los Angeles, the Kinect enables controller-free gaming for the Microsoft console. Demos of the accessory included fighting, driving, dancing and other games all controlled by player’s actions without controllers. Checkout the video above for a taste of Kinect in action.

The device can also be used to control media playback on the Xbox 360 by just waving your fingers around in the air, which looks pretty sweet.

I personally like lying on the couch in a semi-vegitative state while gaming, but the Kinect is certainly the most impressive piece of console technology to hit the scene of late.

Kinect will be available worldwide from November 2010.

In the Web 2.0 echo-chamber  bad ideas spread fast. This time nodal sparks came from web celebs like entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and online broadcasting demigod Leo Laporte – both of which I have the utmost respect for, and both of which are proponents of the anti-Facebook movement.

I also respectively believe they’re taking things too far.

Calacanis is known for jumping to conclusions and he’s been wrong before. A great example of this was his Twitter attack on the New York Times’ David Pogue for daring to publish books on products from companies he writes about in the ‘Times. He attacked Pogue’s integrity and my opinion that he was wrong in doing so isn’t just an assertion – but listen to Pogue defend himself in TWiT episode 213 and decide for yourself.

Calacanis is clearly a principled guy who feels strongly about things. I’m the same and have made bad calls on that basis before too, so it would be hypocrisy for me to criticise him too harshly. But I believe he’s wrong about Facebook.

That Zuckerberg is an awkward kid with a track record of doucheness is undoubtable. He has been presented as such from all quarters and even the movie about the birth and rise of Facebook apparently casts him as ruthless and untrustworthy, amongst other things.

But so what? I’ve met some hard hitters in the tech space, including CEOs of large companies, and I can assure you that being ruthless is a common trait amongst almost all of them. Being untrustworthy, on the other hand, is a common trait with young men in general and Zuckerberg was very young indeed when he allegedly knifed business partners in the back. Raise your hand if you went through your teens without doing anything stupid… I didn’t think so.

If you’re going to quit Facebook because its leader is an arrogant know-it-all with weird preoccupations and because the company isn’t in full adoption of the open approach to privacy and technology in general then I would tender that you should be selling all your Apple products, deleting Windows off your PC and getting rid of all your gaming consoles. No more Kindle books, and you should probably sift through Google’s user agreements too. And good luck finding a mobile phone and network to use it on.

The fact is that Facebook is a great and useful service irrespective of its CEO being a douchebag (which may or may not be true). The privacy thing also isn’t as big a deal as some will tell you.

I’ve always been very wary of online privacy and have implemented advanced controls on my Facebook account since it was possible to do so. I have groups of users and I control who can see what. For example, I don’t let anyone except really close friends and family see most of the pictures and videos of my kids. Those settings have persisted and Facebook hasn’t changed them. My account is still as secure as it was this time last year.

The problem Facebook has is that it does privacy too well. It allows for advanced control of your personal content and I’m yet to see another service come close in terms of the granularity it allows. As with any feature in technology, if you don’t apply these controls then it’s you that has the problem, not Facebook. The user is still in control of what the public gets and what stays private in terms of specified user groups and networks.

Because it does this better than most, people expect Facebook to shine at privacy. They don’t care that Twitter is completely open because it’s always been that way, unless you have a locked account.

I am not suggesting that Facebook is faultless, however. The company certainly has played hard and fast with the information of people who do not lock down their information and accept the default settings. It also clearly plans to leverage its situation to make money. But I’m not sure those are malicious actions. God forbid anyone makes a profit, right?

My suggestion is that everyone takes a deep breath and calms down. Facebook is no more or less evil than any other company trying to drive a profit. We could pick out individuals from any organisation and form opinions of the company as a whole based on that one person – but this is shortsighted and infantile as far as I’m concerned. Zuckerberg is the baby and Facebook is the bathwater. Let’s not throw them both out – even if Mark has been peeing in the bath.

There are way more people involved in the creation and running of the company than just the CEO.

I’m all for open software and networks. I believe the guys over at the Diaspora project are on the right track with their plans for a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” and I can’t wait to see the fruits of their effort and funding. But for now Facebook is still a useful tool to me. I have no privacy concerns because I’ve taken the time to set things up properly. I don’t approve of everything the company does, but I could say the same for all the other providers whose products I use on a daily basis including Twitter, Sony, Apple, etcetera.

And, it bears repeating: if you accept the default settings then you can’t complain too loudly when they change. Lock it down like I did.

I had an enlightening discussion with science fiction author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow in Croatia in 2008 where we discussed his abandonment of the Mac, amongst other things. Cory, who has a tattoo of a Mac on his right bicep, found himself at odds with Apple as a company in recent years and switched to Linux. I asked Cory how he was enjoying Ubuntu Linux, which he runs on a Lenovo laptop.

“I’m extremely impressed with Ubuntu,” he said. “But less impressed with Lenovo as a company.”

The problem? Lenovo’s user agreement for their laptops. The reality is that if you look at most technology companies closely enough you’ll find something to disapprove of. Sometimes you just need to consolidate that in terms of the advantages offered by the technology itself. Cory still uses Lenovo products. And I still use Facebook.

And no, I won’t be deleting my account today. Spare me the hype. I’d go so far as to say that most of the people who have been swept up in the anti-Facebook togetherness are ignorant as to exactly what it is they’re protesting.

But, if you do want to get rid of your Facebook account, check out Seppukoo – a service that aids you in your virtual suicide. And ra-ra for taking a stand.

In the enterprise space cloud is less remarkable than its most vehement proponents would have you believe. The IBMs and Microsofts of the world have established metrics, case studies and methodologies for how it’s done. And, as IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said in a meeting with press at Armonk, New York Yesterday – this cloud stuff is “nothing new”. He’s seen it all before. In the consumer space things are different, however, and here I include small business.

In that arena cloud is pitched as a vital next-level computing paradigm. And so it is. Google, Microsoft and Apple are all being challenged by the consumer market for cloud solutions that enable a distributed personal computing model where online is everything and individuals rely on multiple devices that need to be kept in sync.

Google is perhaps most favourably positioned in terms of this new paradigm. In its arsenal it has… well, the Internet. Everything Google does is intrinsically online. Orchestrating cloud services for its technologies is a natural progression more than a challenge.

For Microsoft and Apple, however, distributed meshes in personal computing are contrary to the centralised approach they inherited from a previous era.

Before we continue, we must separate Microsoft in terms of enterprise and consumer markets. We’re talking about the Microsoft that is pushing Windows Live and Office Live services here – not the Microsoft that developed Azure. To make the point again: the challenges and principles are different for corporates – we’re dealing with personal computing in the consumer sense here where a distributed typography underpins the trend.

While Google was born online, Microsoft has made great inroads in moving into the cloud. The laggard here is Apple – but I get the feeling it is about to take a giant leap forward.

MobileMe was part of Apple’s first play with cloud services, along with iWork.com. As is the typical Apple approach Steve Jobs and co. started with simple services that are slowly being ramped up. Apple never goes all out at the get-go.

Jobs clearly has big plans. In recent months Apple has been ramping up its server infrastructure. A new data centre for the company is being rolled out in North Carolina to supplement its existing site in Newark, CA. With an east-coast centre online Apple will apparently add five times more capacity at a cost of about a billion dollars. Either Jobs thinks that MobileMe is going to grow substantially, or Apple is planning something big and new in the cloud space.

Speculation is rife as to what this could be. Recent acquisitions suggest that an iTunes streaming service is on the way – something that would allow you to store your media libraries in the cloud and access them from anywhere. This seems logical, but I get the feeling there is more to it.

Services like Dropbox and Google’s pending Gdisk are making amazing things possible in terms of online storage, while companies like Carbonite are taking online backup to the masses. My prediction is that Jobs intends to take MobileMe, which already includes iDisk, and turn it into Apple’s “hard drive in the sky” complete with Time Machine backup and a range of services building on iWork.com, Mail and its other existing offerings.

With Apple’s developer conference around the corner iPhone fixation has once again hit the market – but I would pay careful attention to Jobs’ “and one more thing” when he presents his keynote because I think it is likely he will announce additions to Apple’s cloud offering. It just makes sense to include MobileMe with every Mac, including a cloud hard drive for media and other file storage and backup. Apple needs to do something now as Microsoft and Google continue to plod ahead in terms of cloud services and third-parties fill in the gaps.

The recent launch of Ubuntu Linux 10.04 also introduced Ubuntu One, which is Canonical’s first romp into cloud services that includes online storage and a music store with cloud media services. In the next few months and years we are going to see Ubuntu rising to challenge what Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing in the space and I’m inclined to think that Jobs’ strategy will more closely resemble Ubuntu’s than anyone else’s.

I have become a highly demanding gamer. New titles have five minutes in which to grab me. If the intro montage is too long or the gameplay anything less than spectacular, they’ve lost me. Gone are the days where I had hours to spend in front of a console after school or between classes. What I need now is short, potent doses of escapism, delivered without prelude, so I can get back to work.

Alan Wake is one of the few titles in the last year that gripped me from the get-go and kept me glued for longer than the gameplay tutorial. And that isn’t because it delivered on premise, but rather because it didn’t. What I was promised was an action thriller from the creators of Max Payne with a clever gameplay gimmick involving light. With bad memories of the flashlight in Doom 3, I was immediately skeptical of the light-bit. The title also seemed a bit lame, tying the lead character to the storyline a bit too literally.

What I got was an intriguing storyline with robust gameplay and gorgeous graphics. Elements that, on their own, would not hold up – but combined to keep me interested and wanting more after the first play.

Alan Wake is not “scary”. The zombie-like foes one faces in the game are about as frightening as a stumble in the dark. There is little suspense or believable danger – but the psychological element that underpins the story is compelling and this is part of why I like this game so much.

You are Alan Wake, a famous writer who is escaping to an island on a lake in the country with your partner Alice for a much needed break. But everything goes pear-shaped when your dream-states start merging with the real world. People and objects referred to as ‘The taken’ are after you. Some of them are characters from your books, others are people from the local community of Bright Falls.

It’s not the most ingenious of story-lines but in the world of video games is about as intelligent as they get. There are also absorbing little additions to the story – such as references to old-school scuba diving in the murky waters around the island – that keep the intrigue going.

Alan Wake also breaks the mold of immersive storytelling in games that all too often happens at the expense of gameplay – which was one of the reasons I didn’t like Heavy Rain much.

Then there’s the gameplay. This is a third-person shooter, with a twist. The Taken are pretty unstoppable in the dark, but shed some light on the matter (sorry, couldn’t resist) and it impedes them allowing you more time to take them down with a gun. You can use a torch to slow down or knock back your enemies and a flare gun can be used to spectacularly blow away groups of Taken.

Whereas this approach to gameplay could’ve turned out to be more annoying than anything else, in practice it just works. The only improvement I would’ve added is some form of targetting system, ala GTA.

Another effective gameplay element is that you can dodge axe-swings and the like which leads to a brief, slow-motion cinematic sequence that is highly satisfying.

This is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent video games I’ve played and a coup for Microsoft in that it is exclusive to the Xbox 360.  It remains to be seen how long it will manage to keep me intrigued, but for now Bright Falls will be a preferred destination for my brief spurts of escapism.

It’s also really easy to activate. All you have to do is:

1. Create a new folder somewhere (right-click -> ‘Create folder’).
2. Name the folder “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” and hit enter.
3. You’re done. The folder icon will change to look like the picture in this post. Click it to open up your new, super Control Panel.

GodMode is awesome. I find the standard Control Panel somewhat counter-intuitive. Fortunately Microsoft really did think of everything with Windows 7. And thanks to my cousin Alessio Camera who gave me the heads-up =)

Oh, and apparently this will work with up to date versions of Windows Vista too…

I use my own country, South Africa, as an example of Microsoft’s misguided strategy. The South African gaming market is the fastest growing in the world, according to sales recorded during 2007 and 2008. South Africans have flocked to the Xbox 360 and rewarded Microsoft for launching the product in their country at a great price – it is cheaper than the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, making the 360 the most affordable console available in SA.

However, Microsoft has not launched Xbox Live here, and avoids journalist enquiries as to when it will be launched, if ever. We are constantly told that South Africa is “on the list” for scheduled launch, but Microsoft can not give any indication of when and will not disclose more details.

Meanwhile, Playstation Network is up and running in South Africa and has been for some time, allowing South Africans to play games with each other online and purchase digital content.

Worst of all, Microsoft unethically sells its Xbox 360 games in South Africa at full price – even though the online components of the games, including simple multiplayer online gaming, can not be accessed without an Xbox Live account.

Take Gears of War 2 for example. This is one of the most popular titles available for the Xbox and has been a huge success. It is an expensive game too. However, in South Africa we can only play the campaign mode of the game, which is a small portion of what is included on disk as GoW2 was designed primarily for multiplayer. We can not play against other players online, or access extended content for the title.

We pay the same price for the game as Xbox 360 owners in other countries do, but get less than one third of the content for the price. This is simply dishonest on the part of Microsoft.

In the past South Africans have found a way around the situation by setting up Xbox Live accounts and lying about their location – telling the service they were based in the United Kingdom, for example. They could then set up Xbox Live Gold Accounts using their South African credit cards and play against each other online, amongst other things.

This solution was far from ideal, mainly because it is against the terms of use for the service. It also no longer works as Microsoft has stopped accepting credit cards from countries other than what was specified during account set-up.

And it is impossible to change your country setting, so if the service ever does launch locally, South Africans will lose their gamer points and purchased content by setting up new accounts – which is the only way to change the location setting.

The country-setting lock is ridiculous. If you live in New Zealand, for example, and then immigrate to Australia, or if someone from one central European country moves to another, they cannot take their Xbox Live account with them.

South African bandwidth is also good enough for multiplayer gaming. I know this because I lied about my location and set up a gold account which I used to play games with friends, both internationally and back home. Bandwidth is definitely not a good reason to keep the service from us and I can’t think of any other reason why Microsoft would ignore the fastest growing gaming market in the world where there are more Xbox 360 owners than in some European countries.

I can only assume that Microsoft has little to no understanding of the local market, which suggests the company has not done its homework, or is ignoring its local staff about realities in South Africa.

The strategy is misguided. Plain and simple.

I can only hope someone from the Microsoft Xbox team reads this. The product is great and we would love to be able to use it in South Africa. Playstation Network has proven that it can be done – and Sony gets a lot of local support for this, even though the Playstation 3 is overpriced.

If Microsoft does not bring the service to SA, then it must stop selling its titles at full price.

Ignoring fans is a big no-no for any company and Microsoft should know this. I hope it changes its tune soon and either gives us official access to Xbox Live or a decent answer as to why it won’t.

Edit: Since writing this post I have received a response from Major Nelson of the Xbox team via Twitter. Great to hear from him and hopefully this will lead to something positive in terms of Xbox Live in SA and other countries.

This functionality is made even radder by the fact that the 360 supports external storage devices or can be used as a media extender for any computer running Windows Media Center. You can even share media stored on a Mac in iTunes using connector software called Connect 360.

Of all the options available storing media on an external hard drive seems most logical to me, but this is easier said than done given the Xbox 360′s limited support for filesystems.

You basically have two options in terms of filesystems when formatting an external drive for use with your 360: FAT or HFS+. Weirdly, the Xbox 360 does not support Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, but does support Apple’s HFS+. This is a side-effect of the Xbox being designed to work flawlessly with the iPod.

While it is the most compatible across the board, FAT is a useless filesystem for storing media. For one, it doesn’t support the storage of files larger than four gigabytes – so storing any high definition video is pretty much out of the question. That should be enough reason for us to move on to the more competent HFS+ filesystem.

And this is where we find an interesting anomaly; the Xbox 360 will not recognise external hard drives formatted for HFS+ under Apple’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system. Which sucks for people like me, who solely use said operating system.

But there is a solution. One that involves using a Windows PC, or a Mac running Windows using Boot Camp or virtualisation software.

The steps are as follows:

• Download a piece of trial software for Windows called MacDrive.
• Install MacDrive on Windows.
• Use MacDrive to format your drive as ‘HFS Extended’ and DO NOT use a case-sensitive form of the filesystem.

Et voila – you now have an external drive rocking the superior HFS+ filesystem and fully compatible with your Xbox 360. Skop some media on it and plug it in. The drive will also be compatible with your Mac for file transfers and if you want to use it with Windows, pay for MacDrive and enjoy unlimited support for the filesystem.