Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet has over 35,000 customers nationwide and gains 2,000 more every month. To maintain the excellent levels of customer service and technical support that are fundamental to the company's longstanding reputation for quality provision, Zen will double its staff over the next twelve months, taking on about 100 new employees. There are immediate vacancies for Customer Accounts Administrators, Partner Account Managers, Sales Executives - and positions to fill across all customer service and technical support departments. This is a fine company to work for, with assured prospects (Sunday Times Tech Track 100; Deloitte & Touche Technology Fast 50) and it could be the key to the future you're looking for. Check here:

If you're a Google employee, the last thing you want to do right now - ahead of the IPO - is get yourself fired. Never mind that you won't be taking home a nice monthly pay cheque if your services are no longer required, you could also be losing up to ten million dollars in stock options. Even rank-and-file employees stand to be worth an average of $2.8 million apiece based on the estimated value of the stock and options they hold, according to analysts. No surprise then, that recently dismissed Brian Reid, 54, is fighting his sacking in the courts, charging that he was shown the door only because he didn't fit in with a culture that emphasised "youth and energy".

Should Google look in the mirror and reflect on its image? Is it getting things backwards?

A 17-year-old, sacked by insurance company Domestic & General when he failed to complete a time sheet, brought the business to its knees by bombarding his ex-employer with five million e-mail messages. The attack clogged the company's servers, brought down the corporate Web site and cost an estimated £18,000 in lost business - about three years wages for the teenage rebel, who now faces six months in prison or a fine of up to £5,000.

Virus writers are selling spammers time on the 'zombie' PCs they control for $50 an hour. "Viruses are now intrinsically linked to spam," says MessageLabs' Chief Technology Officer, Mark Sunner, who believes that most viruses written this year were designed to create networks of zombie machines. Message Labs estimates that as much as 70 per cent of spam now comes from PCs maliciously recruited by virus writers.

A movie industry survey has made the shocking discovery that lots of people use the Internet to download movies, reports PC Pro. The survey, commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), reveals that one in four Web users download movies illegally, amassing a total of 2.6bn files copied each month. Cinema ticket sales have slumped. In 2003, attendances were four per cent down on the previous year. Movie moguls are worried about a repeat performance of what happened to the music industry.

Would you like to know if another Web site is using content taken from your site? This tool is for you. Just enter the URL for the page on your site that you want checked and it will return pages from other sites that are using your content. You are sure to get some surprises - and it won't all be bad news. Some pages will be offering friendly links to useful information that you're providing, and quite a few results will simply be listings by obscure but nonetheless helpful search engines and directories. If there are no results at all, your site isn't getting the attention it deserves and you probably need to talk to Zen's Web Solutions team about getting your business promoted across the full range of search engine resources.

It may have worked for Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams" but mostly, and especially online, the saying "build it and they will come" is just not true. You need to be promoting and marketing your Web site to bring in the paying customers. Search engines will do most of the work for you, if you can get a high-ranking position in the search results that most people (up to 80%) use to find goods and services online. But publishing a Web site without first-class search engine promotion is like putting up an advertising poster in a cupboard - you'll know it's there, but hardly anybody else will. Zen's Web Solutions team has a range of Web site optimisation and search engine promotion services guaranteed to boost your site's search engine rankings and maximise the flow of potential new customers. For information, or to get started with a successful Zen Web Solutions search engine promotion campaign, e-mail SEO@zenwebsolutions.com, or call us on 0845 058 9061.

Looking for a quick way to start a HTML page from plain text? The Prototype Pad can be used to visually edit and format text content in easy steps. It's part of the freeware HTML Kit, designed to help HTML, XML, and script authors to edit, format, validate, preview, and publish Web pages. Newcomers to HTML coding can benefit from the software's error-catching abilities. Experts can save time spent on common tasks, using the customisable editor.

If you want to offer downloadable documents from your Web site, you'll need a way to convert Word and text documents to PDF. There are options besides Adobe. PDF Moto and Win2PDF are two worth checking.

Don Fluckinger of PDFZone.com shows off his latest collection of free PDF creation tools, including one that converts AutoCAD files and images to PDF as well as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access output, which it handles "with ease and joy".

Doing business online means you'll need to be able to accept credit cards on your Web site. If you don't want the expense of a merchant account, there are some inexpensive third party services you can use.

One million copies of Windows XP SP2 will be distributed on CD by Microsoft - free of charge. According to Paul Randle, Windows client product manager at Microsoft UK, "if you don't want to tackle the download, there will be an order button on the Microsoft Web site where you can get a copy on CD completely free, including postage and packing". Computer magazines will also be recruited to distribute the software whopper on cover-mount discs. SP2 is expected to be at least 80MB in size and could be much bigger.

We thought he was busy enough already, and that's certainly what he tells us, but Zen's Technical Development main man - James Blessing - has been elected by members of the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA UK) to put in some extra time serving on its board of representatives. "It's a huge accolade to be voted on to the ISPA council", said James, "I'm delighted to accept the role. It will allow me to further Zen Internet’s fight for consumers on broadband availability and consumer protection issues. I will be concentrating on the broadband sub-group, but will also act as a judge for the ISPA Awards".

Every successive computer generation and upgrade seems to run hotter than the last. Now someone has decided to put the heat to good use with "Computer Cookery 5000". While you surf the Internet, you can defrost and cook an entire meal - using your CPU. This funny infommercial (requires Flash) resides at an obscure Web address owned by Everyones Internet in Texas. It looks like the good ole boys at AMD might be giving Intel a little ribbing about the powerful thermal properties of their rival's new Prescott processor.

It is the documentary film buff's dream archive find - never-before-seen footage of one of the most famous moments in 20th-century history: the assassination attempt on Hitler at his Rastenburg headquarters in eastern Prussia in July 1944. The Führer is looking at a map laid out before him on an oak table. As the camera pans, he leans on his right arm to get a better view... and there is a flash followed by a ball of smoke as the picture blurs. The scene could have been captured by the Führer's private cameraman, Walter Frentz, filming inside the 'Wolf's Lair' as a plotter's briefcase bomb exploded beneath the table. In fact, Hitler's near-death experience was not caught on camera at all, but was created for TV's Discovery Channel in the Soho editing suites of the Moving Picture Company, Britain's most successful creator of computer-generated imagery. Will it look like faked footage when it's shown on television? Not at all. See it first here:

Digital Media Converter fixes the headache of dealing with competing audio and video standards. If files aren't compatible with the player you want to use - convert them. This application covers all the likeliest formats and converts audio and video files between: VCD, DVD, AVI (DivX, MS MPEG4, uncompressed), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MP3, MOV, WMV, and WAV. Converting QuickTime MOV files to AVI, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 certainly isn't a facility you see everywhere. The trial version is fully functional and the registered product is $30.

A number of customers are reporting receiving letters from either Domain Registry of America, Domain Registry of Europe, or EU Registry Services. These letters appear to be domain renewal notices, often headed "Domain Expiration Notice" and warning that "if payment is not made the domain is subject to immediate suspension and deletion" but are actually purchase orders to transfer domain names to another registrar. The Domain Registry of America company has already been barred in the USA by the Federal Trade Commission. They operate in the UK and Europe under the name Domain Registry of Europe. EU Registry Services is based in Cambridgeshire and operates as Domain Registry Services, from addresses such as Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge, CB4 9AD. If you receive a letter from them you may want to report it to the local Trading Standards Office - http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=5c - or file it in the bin before anyone else in the office takes the threat seriously and pays the fees demanded.

Nine months on, the jury is back with its verdict on VeriSign's hijacking of unregistered or mistyped domain names, which the company used to redirect wandering users to a commercial Web site, purpose-built to push traffic into other areas and turn a profit. ICANN, the Internet’s naming authority, issued a damning report on the controversial service launched by domain name registry VeriSign last year, concluding that the company violated architectural principles, codes of conduct and good practice.

Internet addresses are running out. About two thirds of the allocated 4.3 billion Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) numerical equivalents of domain names have been used up so far. A new set of rules, called IPv6, will increase the number of numerical addresses massively - to 340 billion, billion, billion, billion.

UK business use of broadband is growing at 100 per cent a year. France will see 90 per cent of SMEs with potential access to DSL by 2005, Germany already has 250,000 SMEs with broadband connections. E-Minister Andrew Davies says more small and medium businesses in rural locations should be taking advantage of broadband Internet access. Government subsidies for remote areas mean that no company need be excluded. Even the green and pleasant land of Wales will have 96 per cent broadband coverage by 2005, although take-up by the principality's small companies has so far been disappointing. Davies, also Business Secretary for the Welsh National Assembly, said that only six per cent of SMEs in Wales have broadband connections, compared to 10.4 per cent nationally.

The BBC's new media director, Ashley Highfield, in a Guardian interview, says the corporation plans to launch its own search engine to compete with major search entities like Yahoo! and Google. Highfield said that the market was dominated by American sites and it would be good value to invest licence fee payers' money in a UK-centric search engine. More controversially, the BBC also planned to enter the broadband market, he said, with a low-cost service aimed at achieving a near universal spread of British broadband connectivity.

Due to launch today, new search engine Blinkx is already being hyped by an enthusiastic press as the main contender for Google's crown and a rival for Microsoft's upcoming integrated Web and desktop search machine. Developed in Cambridge, Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) uses the latest self-learning algorithms to work in the background indexing what appears on your computer screen, such as documents, e-mails, Web sites, news articles, blogs and even videos, building a customised search engine that will later find content on your PC or online. The offline engine needs a free to download installation to start working, but Web searching is available separately online with a traditional Web site interface.