You’ll get a live commentary from the team in the press room (and it’s not the same as our long running Alternative Commentary MP3, which you can find here).

During each Eurovision show you can hit the green thumbs up button, or the red thumbs down button, to share your view on the song, and the worm will show the combined thoughts of everyone using the app.

Its a free download from the Apple App Store. Head to bit.ly/esccommentary to download the app for your iOS device. Or you can search for ‘ESC Commentary‘ in the store.

What are you waiting for?

That is all.

t’s subtle, but I reckon the Eurovision Song Contest hits the three original tenets of the BBC – to educate, to inform, and to entertain. The Eurovision provides one way of looking at population movements across Europe via the often commented on voting process. Is there any other mainstream programme where you can hear so much local music from other cultures? And when a live show brings in millions of viewers across a continent throughout a three hour spectacular (and even more come in from the iPlayer and time-shifted recorded versions), can there be any doubt that is entertaining?

You can read all my thoughts on About the BBC.

Instantly recognisable, but with a twist. Iconic design with a simple one-piece thick leather cover, slightly rounded corners and strap with gel popper cap. Beautiful in its simplicity, with perfectly balanced proportions. Working with extra thick leather and using traditional construction techniques, these personal organisers are made by our UK factory who piece together the components by hand, using thick thread to carefully stitch them together.

Unfortunately it’s still the 25mm (7/8 inch) ring size. I’m still waiting for a new Filofax with a Winchester sized 31mm (5/4 inch) ring size.

At the time, I figured it wouldn’t be long until I could experience the game for myself, as a device-carrying member of the app-consuming public. I even got to try an unfinished version of it once, at the apartment of a friend of the developer, in a somewhat frantic thirty-minute session that left me both slack-jawed with awe and certain I’d no more scratched Faraway’s surface than I had physically exited our solar system’s heliosheath.

That was two years ago.

“These agencies use communications date – the who, when, where and how of a communication, but not its content – to investigate and prosecute serious crime,” it says. ”Communications data helps to keep the public safe – it is used by the police to investigate crimes, bring offenders to justice and to save lives.

“This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public.”

The problem is this. Until someone has had their day in court and declared guilty by a jury of their peers… they are all innocent members of the public.

Colour me surprised.

For the sake of discussion, let’s use $3 per device as our figure. This number is an estimate, but given all information in the market it’s our best guesstimate.

We can now do the math: 860 million Android devices in 2013, of which 65% pay Microsoft a fee, and that fee being $3 leaves Microsoft with $1.677 billion in Android revenue this year. That works out to just over $400 million per quarter, which fits with our earlier statements of Android patent revenue being in the low hundreds of millions.

The Next Web looks at just how much Android is making… for Microsoft.

DRM means permanent lock-in. Once you get permanent lock-in, readers don’t switch. They don’t switch because the cost of switching is losing all existing books bought from the vendor. Readers are locked-in – once again at the mercy of Gatekeepers. Authors too are at the mercy of the new Gatekeepers. If people don’t leave the two biggest stores because of DRM related lock-in, then we’ve just replaced The Big Six with The Terrible Two.

Authors have no means to get to readers without ‘pleasing’ these two big ebook stores.

This is why Amazon never puts in that extra effort to make its hardware superb. It doesn’t have to. This is why B&N never goes out of its way to match Amazon prices – it doesn’t have to. This is why eReaders are evolving at a snail’s pace. Amazon and B&N know that they could add ZERO new features in the next 5 years and their readers would still be reluctant to switch because they have $500 to $2,000 to $5,000 worth of books locked into the ecosystem,

Dusting down my HTML5 skills, I have to agree with Heilmann. The Keon, although it shows a huge amount of promise, is not a handset you would hand to a family member or recommend to a colleague in the office. What it will give you is a head start in developing HTML5 apps optimised for the Firefox OS platform. Mozilla are banking on this being a platform with a huge amount of reach, and now is the time to get ready for that launch if you’re confident in Mozilla’s predictions of uptake and distribution. Neither will the effort go to waste, as HTML5 is a very transportable skill.

Firefox OS has a huge number of practical hurdles to overcome, but in terms of building developer excitement in the platform they’ve made a lot of smart moves, including the Keon. it might still be a tool, but it’s a tool that has very few rough edges. From a technical viewpoint, Firefox OS is doing everything right, and I’m watching the project with a lot of interest, both from a professional point of view, and also from a geeky hobbyist point of view as well. It’s been a while since I sat down to work on an mobile application. Even though I know it’s not the same as native code access to a device, the speed and ease of Firefox OS appeals to me.

Wow, Helen Mirren dressed as The Queen just stormed out of the Gielgud stage door, stood right in the middle of Winnett St and told the street band outside the theatre to shut the f*** up!!! Awesome!

Can we have ‘Helen Mirren says shut the f*** up!” on a t-shirt please?

Geoff Marshall knows the Tube better than anyone else you’re likely to meet. He was world record holder of the Tube Challenge (visit all stations on all Tube lines in the fastest possible time) for two years. He’s currently planning his next attempt at the Challenge which will take place in May. I sat down with him and Elephantine Dark blogger Edmund Hardy for a chat and a beer.

My one claim to Tube running fame is that I beat Geoff in at ‘Zone One‘ challenge many years ago (in 2004… yikes!). I’m beginning to think that was beginners luck…

Steven landed back in Scotland today after some time in Spain… Sharleen is boarding a twenty-seven hour flight from Australia to reach Sweden… Sam is throwing herself across the Atlantic to get to Edinburgh and the seats waiting for her on an RJ-145 bound for Copenhagen (with thanks to BMI Regional, for their support of the site this year).

The four of us will get to Copenhagen, we’ll jump on a train to Malmo together…

…and it’ll be time for the fun to start. Two weeks until the Grand Final, and there’s a lot to do and report on. But before that, a striding orchestral march as travel from four corners of the world to assemble the team for ESC Insight, once more to cover the greatest, most competitive, and most watched Song Contest in the world.

Eurovision is calling.

I say I’m “mostly” stereoblind because despite my eyes’ poor grasp of trigonometry, the optical center of my brain seems to work just fine. I discovered this the first time I held a 3DS and played Pilotwings Resort. To be perfectly honest, I really didn’t expect much from the console. But clever readers have already noticed that my sight lines meet at just the right distance for holding a 3DS.

After playing with the depth slider off for a few minutes, I slid it up out of sheer curiosity and saw something I had never seen in my life: a third dimension.

Not only was I “seeing into the screen” the way so many others feel when playing a 3DS for the first time, I was seeing in a direction that had previously been literally invisible to me.

At least one side of the debate will be disappointed in just over a year.  Either we will get Independence or we won’t.  If we don’t attempt to have some lighthearted opinion in the mix the country will be shit to live in whatever happens.

“Present-day browsers offer gorgeous experiences but when we go back and look at the early browsers I think we have lost some of the features that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind.”

…like the <blink> tag.

In-N-Out has applied for permits to build a central Austin location of the California-based burger chain at 4508 N. I-35, near the intersection of Airport Boulevard in the Ridgetop-ish neighborhood.

It wasn’t all music on the bill, incidentally. There was a brief sketch interlude which included Nicki French having a chat with a puppet version of Terry Wogan (called Terry Vision for legal reasons).

Pictures as well!

The interview is over. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first time in its entirety. It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. And winning.

It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.

Only when the tale is told, all at once, in a rush, do the men themselves fully realize the weight of it.

Look at the number of apps on your phone. Now look at the number of apps in a store. Now look at the number of platforms. Stories like this happen countless times over the whole world, and only a very few get noticed, and even fewer make it into a career.

46-year-old Maiden fan Roy Hobbs said: “I go to work doing a job I can’t even be bothered to describe, then I come home and eat either a pie or a casserole with my wife, who is also into Maiden, then we drink a couple of beers and listen toThe Number of the Beast.

“We’re very happy. Why wouldn’t we be?”

Sometimes I wish the Daily Mash would stop doing real world features and go back to doing satire.