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Online election the way forward?

After last Thursday’s slightly chaotic UK general election there have been calls to shake up our ‘Victorian’ voting system in favour of one more fitting to 21st century lifestyles by implementing electronic voting. Members of Solace, the society for local authority chief executives’ electoral matters, are pushing for the reform after resources failed to cope with the large turnout of voters last week, leaving many unable to vote as they were still in queues when the 10pm deadline was reached. A recent poll from Virgin Media found that the number of voters backing a digitised ballot system had risen from 19 to 43 per cent since the 2005 election. In a recent paper, ‘Election Day: Weekend Voting’, a post-consultation report for the Ministry of Justice on the question of remote voting, 62% of respondents either supported greater access to remote electronic voting, or at least further investigation of e-voting to determine whether issues of transparency, security and cost-effectiveness could be dealt with satisfactorily.
Its interesting to think that India, which has the world’s largest democracy, has already successfully implemented online voting since 2004. In the wake of the disputed US general election in Florida in 2000, which saw George W Bush controversially elected president the US, electronic voting is being introduced across the United States, and Canada is also taking steps towards introducing online voting. So why are we still lagging behind? Come on Britain, its time to move with the times.

Google Goggles translation tool

During the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced a new feature for popular Android app Google Goggles that turns the cameraphone into a translation tool. Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology the nifty little app can locate the foreign text in the photos,  then its just a few short seconds before the search giant has translated it. The upgrade offers snap-happy travelers a real-time, pocket size alternative to lugging around a weight dictionary – no more confusing your cerveza for ceviche, then. Even if its not the first of its kind, the app will no doubt prove a hit with tourist struggling to get to grips with street signs, poster and restaurant menus – just watch out for the roaming charges! More of this over at Tech Radar

Twitterbug: Twitter in a frenzy as everyone loses their followers

The Twittersphere was sent into a frenzy on Monday as Tweets from confused users spread like wildfire across the web regaling tales of how their following / follower accounts had been reset to zero. Sure enough, the Pancentric account also caught the Twitterbug so we did a little digging to find out more. As it happens, the entire fiasco seems to have been triggered seemingly innocently as a music fan tweeted about heavy metal band Accept . Having tweeted “Accept pwnz” the chap in question discovered that user @pwnz was now following him, leading to the inadvertent discovery that the following code “[tweet] accept [username]” forces [username] to immediately start following you. Once Twitter caught wind of the masses of users exploiting this bug to force others to follow them Twitter reset all the accounts to zero until they were able to fix the problem. Twitter have reported they’ve now fixed the bug, following / follower accounts are as they should be and peace and tranquility have been restored…phew.

0 to £60 in under 10 seconds

The Square Payment System, a mobile credit card transaction application, is now available on the iPhone, allowing individuals to receive or make credit card payments any time, any place. The beautifully designed application is free but requires a card reader (also free upon signing up with Square) which functions through the audio input jack of any device. Photo verification allows users to visually confirm who you are and receipts can be sent to you by SMS or email, plus photo’s and descriptions of items you’ve bought can be viewed in an interface and shared with others.