Patents, a stealth internet, Bigpoint on social gaming

On this week's podcast, Aleks Krotoski, Jemima Kiss and Charles Arthur are joined by the Guardian's senior software engineer Dan Catt to talk about the latest headlines from around the technology world.

First, they tackle the app patent wars going on behind the scenes of the smartphone industry. There are epic struggles between the handset makers and battles raging between "patent trolls" and independent developers. With very little to be done to protect the thriving development ecosystem, the team asks what indies can do to protect their turf, and keep pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Dan explains how the "internet in a suitcase" works – the technology supported by the US Department of Defence and parachuted into territories run by regimes who have tight control over information. Jemima questions the ethics of such an initiative.

Aleks dons her psychologist cape and picks apart the significance of a Columbia University study about the cognitive effects of Google. Betsy Sparrow and her team found that people are using their transitive memory less, because they think the machine will remember for them. But how different is this technology from the pen and pencil, or the mobile phone?

And Charles speaks with Philip Reisberger about Bigpoint, one of the world's biggest social gaming platforms, about the best way the tiny indies and the big boys can get rich quick in the highly lucrative market.

All this, plus the technology that's driven hackgate, on this week's Tech Weekly.

Source: guardian.co.uk