Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly July 2009 Podcast

Zen Internet is introducing new broadband services with download speeds of up to 20Mbps and upload speeds of up to 1Mbps. Existing customers will be moved to the faster connections in a phased approach as BT's new 21st Century Network (21CN) upgrade is completed at local exchanges. There will be no increase in price for the new service, which is being rolled out across the country. "We have been working on this upgrade since late 2008. The final phase of tests and trials is due for completion this summer and we expect to start moving existing customers over from late summer onwards", said Andrew Saunders, Head of Product Management and Marketing. The speed that a customer can expect will depend on a few factors, including how far they are from their local BT exchange, but based on current trials, it is estimated that the average download speed will be between 9Mbps and 13Mbps. Zen has upgraded its own network and is using elements of BT's new 21CN project to bring customers the faster services. 21CN is a UK wide communication network upgrade that will involve enabling all BT exchanges for faster broadband. BT plan to cover 55 per cent of homes and businesses by March 2010, depending on demand.

Businesses will be able to use their own names in place of domain extensions such as .com, .org, .net, or .co.uk, when so-called 'brand domains' are launched in January. The change will allow companies like Ford and Nike to control their own domain and better exploit their brands, as well as countering cyber-squatters who buy variations of brand names using the 280 or so domain extensions already available. The organisation that oversees domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will start taking applications for the new top-level domains early next year, but according to Future Laboratory, which conducted research last month, the majority of companies are unaware of the move. "This change has not yet permeated into the mainstream for businesses or consumers", said a spokesman. ICANN is expecting a low response, limited initially to large companies, because the new domains will be priced at over 10,000 when they are first made available early next year.

With the rise of social networks, registering a domain name like bovis.com or hovis.co.uk is no longer enough to secure your company or brand name everywhere online. Consumers are increasingly using social networking sites and other online communities to look for businesses and communicate with them, making the services a target for brand hijackers, impostors and opportunists. Since Facebook started giving out customised Web addresses and MySpace allowed users to create their own Myspace.com extensions, there is a growing list of cybersquatting opportunities for businesses to worry about. According to The New York Times, fights have broken out over names registered on Twitter and "somewhere out there on the Web, another new service or social network is on the rise, threatening to start yet another online land grab". New services are appearing that claim to help protect brand names and company names on social media sites. Namechk.com allows you to check availability across a hundred locations. Enter a username, and it will display the sites where the name has been taken and those where it can still be registered. KnowEm.com goes a step further. As well as checking availability at 120 sites, it offers - for a fee - to register the desired username for you, where available, and send you the account information.

Comet is growing its online customer community with a new Q&A social commerce tool, following the successful implementation of its Ratings & Reviews platform late last year. The nationwide electrical retailer is adding 'Ask & Answer', a customer-to-customer online helpdesk plug-in from Bazaarvoice. The decision was made after Comet noticed customers were using its reviews platform as a way of asking each other questions. "Customer reviews have made a significant difference to Comet, influencing our customer service and commercial teams in particular. Our site has a vast product set with questions not always answered by product specifications, so we wanted to give customers their own platform to air product-related queries", said Ryan Thomas, Comet's Head of Direct Channels.

Dell Computers announced last month that it has achieved more than $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts, making it one of the most successful high profile examples of Return on Investment (ROI) from social media. The @DellOutlet account has more than 600k followers on Twitter and frequently posts links to discounted computer hardware. But many businesses trying out social media participation as a marketing tool argue that the greatest benefits of engagement are not drawn in straight lines to the sales desk. Building a strong community, listening to customer concerns and discovering new business and product development ideas are indirect benefits, less easily recorded, but ultimately more valuable.

Getting too busy to Tweet? There is a workaround. Spend an hour planning your Tweets in advance and your followers will never know the difference. There are a number of sites to help - dedicated to setting up pre-scheduled Tweets - and FutureTweets is one of the best. It offers a totally free scheduling service, complete with the ability to pre-schedule automated messages to Twitter, set up recurring Tweets, and more.

Are you growing weary of keeping up appearances at all the social media sites you've signed up for? It can be exhausting as well as time-consuming. Once you have a presence to maintain across a spectrum of social media locations, the idea of updating your status regularly at multiple locations can be overwhelming. Ping.fm is a tool that can update information for you across dozens of sites. The service covers the top 40 resources, including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Linkedin.

This social networking site gives you an insight into what other people are doing online and helps with the discovery of new Web applications, games and software. Once signed up, you can build contacts by adding people already on the site who share similar interests. You can also download a tracker that looks at what software is running on your computer every 15 minutes and adds it to your profile. The site's software section displays the top used applications, alongside a feed of what members are doing right now.

If you don't like what Google has to say about you when someone searches for you by name, perhaps the search engine's Profile service can help. At the very least you can make sure that people will be able to find you. Once you have signed in at Google Profiles, you can include personal information about yourself including photos, a short bio, your interests, links to your social profiles and other fascinating facts - and offer people a way to contact you without revealing your true e-mail address. You can also publish your full contact information for a limited audience (e-mail, phone number, postal address, etc) by specifying the people allowed to view it.

Page Speed is a new Firefox add-on from Google that helps to improve Web site performance by reducing load times. When you run Page Speed, it provides suggestions on improvement of CSS, optimisation of images, how to minimise DNS lookups and many more enhancements that reduce bandwidth and hosting costs as well as improving performance for site visitors. Webmasters who run Page Speed get a set of scores for each page, as well as the suggestions. Tests are based on best practices known to enhance Web page performance.

Upload a screenshot of any page from your Web site and get anonymous test results by e-mail based on the reactions of random volunteers who look at your page for 5 seconds and tell you what they can remember after viewing it. You can test-run this speedy judgement test procedure for yourself and check as many designs as you like before deciding to see what the reaction to any of your own pages will be.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will be out on 22 October. Originally, the company said that the operating system would be launched three years after Windows Vista's 2007 release, but has gone for an earlier date to make up lost ground following the disappointing take-up of Vista. The future looks much more promising for the new OS, with positive reports coming from users who have tried the early Release Candidate version. If you'd like to try a free installation before the launch date, you can download the official Release Candidate at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx. This version will work until 1 June 2010, giving almost a year of free use. To run Windows 7, according to Microsoft, will require a 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit), 1GB of RAM for 32-bit operation or 2GB of RAM on 64-bit, 16GB of available disk space on a 32-bit installation or 20GB of available disk space when using 64-bit, and DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

This is a free graphical tool that illustrates what's on your hard drive and other drives so that you can see exactly what's taking up all your valuable space. Once installed, the handy viewer shows how much data your internal and external hard drives, including pen drives and memory sticks, are carrying. It also shows the makeup of the data, identifying what proportions are taken up by system files, downloads, documents, music and other file types. This is a lightweight and intuitive piece of software. Fast, free and much easier to use than trying to see what's on your drives using Windows Explorer.

Next-generation USB will reach speeds of 4.8 Gbit/s. Scheduled to hit the consumer market in 2010, USB 3.0 - also known as SuperSpeed USB - will deliver a tenfold improvement in data transfer rates while retaining backward compatibility with previous versions and adding new features that will make this widespread hardware standard all the more essential to the average consumer.

There have been screen-sharing services before, allowing you to view the desktop of a friend or colleague's computer anywhere else on the Internet - but few that offer true multi-platform support. UK company Yuuguu offers a free application that enables Windows, Mac and Linux computers to interact together. With the Yuuguu Java-based client software installed on two computers, it's possible for one party to initiate an instant messaging session, and then share the screen of either computer, so that both users see the same desktop and any running programs. This works well for virtual presentations, team collaborations on document writing and editing - and for remote IT support, as one company working from a base in rural Shropshire told The Daily Telegraph recently.

Since Snow Leopard - aka OS X 10.6 - was previewed at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Mac users have been waiting patiently for release details. Now they have them, and the good news is that it's affordable. The upgrade for Mac OS Leopard users will be available from September at the Credit Crunch friendly price of 20.

The Mac minority's struggles with e-mail sent by the Windows (Outlook) majority may be over for good. Letter Opener is a convertor that lets Apple Mail users see and use exactly what the Windows sender intended them to get. Theres no fuss with the application - once installed, it does the job automatically.

Are you spending too much time online? If you're burning too much midnight oil surfing, rather than sleeping, but just can't tear yourself away, the Leechblock browser add-on might be just what you need. It's a Firefox extension that blocks time-wasting sites at specified hours of the day. You input the Web sites that you find hard to resist, and the maximum amount of time you want to spend on them, and Leechblock will impose the self-discipline you need by closing your browser when you've reached your limit.

The choice of name has not met with universal approval, but Microsoft's revamped search engine - Bing - is claiming to introduce new ways to sort and manipulate search results in hopes of challenging Google's dominance. Bing does offer some improvements over the company's previous efforts by offering a cleaner interface and instantly categorising results by topic. It also provides a simple way to preview results without having to load a new page; hover to the right of results and a box shows up featuring a preview of content. For some queries like a brand or personality - results are immediately broken down into relevant categories, such as reviews or biographies. Theres also a useful left-hand column, which includes a listing of recent queries and related searches for many results.