Zen Monthly Newsletter

Online amateurs processed images of Titan from the Huygens probe faster than any of the giant space agencies in charge of the mission. Scientists released raw images as soon as they came in and enthusiasts grabbed, processed and published the results before the boffins. One stunning landscape, produced using free software downloaded from the Internet, came from Mike Zawistowski, a computer repairman and "casual astronomy buff" from Massachusetts, who turned the basic aerial photo data into topographical ground-level scenes reminiscent of a tropical beach at sunset.

Zen Internet is providing a 1Gbps connection to the world’s most popular download location for gaming files to cope with the site’s phenomenal demand. "Our site feeds gaming fanatics", said Razekiel Heath at GamersHell.com, an online gaming magazine that offers the latest in news, media, and blockbuster downloads. Visitors to GamersHell.com are able to choose which ISP they use to download their selected game or preview. Zen Internet has made significant infrastructure investment to maintain its position as one of the UK's fastest broadband ISPs, making it the provider of choice for avid gamers hell-bent on top speed downloads.

From today, the Zen Internet Sales Team will be available to customers from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, adding an extra hour at the beginning of each day and another in the evening. They can be reached by telephone on 0845 058 9000 and via e-mail at businesssales@zen.co.uk for business enquiries, or residentialsales@zen.co.uk for residential enquiries. Working hours for Zen Technical Support staff remain the same (8am to 8pm from Monday to Friday and 9am to 5pm every Saturday). General office hours, for all other departments, are 9am to 5pm as before.

Unpaid overtime is worth £23 billion to British Companies, according to the TUC, and many employees are missing out on as much as £4,000 per year. Nor are they compensating themselves unofficially by taking time off on sick leave. Britain’s sick note culture is a myth, says the TUC report. Workers in the UK take fewer sick days than employees in any other European country, with the exception of Denmark.

The latest amendments to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) require all businesses to make "workplace adjustments" to accommodate the disabled and to buy new equipment or modify existing systems so that disabled people can use them. Since October last year, employers have also been required to consider disabled people when recruiting new staff. Disability rights campaigners say it would help if more businesses knew about the generous Access to Work grants now available, which are designed to cover the cost of any new equipment or new technology needed to fulfil their obligations.

A new government Web site is planned for later this year that will provide direct access to local and central government business opportunities for smaller companies. The site is intended to be the main gateway for sub-£100,000 government opportunities in the UK and comes in response to recommendations made by the Better Regulation Task Force towards creating a level playing field for SMEs seeking public sector work. New research is looking at how public authorities can save money by using the "increased innovation and productivity" that SMEs can offer. DTI Small Business Service Chief Executive Martin Wyn Griffith said, "SMEs are the engine of this economy, but for too long they have been overlooked when the bidding starts for public sector work." Business Link Lancashire offers an online briefing with advice and links that companies can use before the new site appears in the summer.

An all-party group of MPs including Claire Hobson, head of the government's anti-spam team, leaves on a Microsoft-sponsored trip to Washington this month to discuss how the UK and US can combat the menace of unsolicited e-mail. But Steve Linford, who runs the independent spam fighting organisation Spamhaus, said the parliamentarians are going in the wrong direction. "I suspect they will go over there, see a couple of senators and be told 'yes, we'll do something' and that's where it will end. They should go to Sydney," Linford maintained, noting that under Australian legislation spammers can be fined up to £450,000 per day for sending unwanted messages.

Espotting has secured an exclusive distribution deal with The Sun, giving the PPC advertising agency paid listing spots for clients throughout the paper's online news pages and across the Entertainment, Movies, Life, 'Bizarre' and Sports sections of the tabloid's Web site. The online version of the UK's most popular newspaper generates 128 million page impressions from 4.7 million unique users each month.

Rumour has it that Google is about to take on BT by offering free telephone calls via the Internet, according to the Motley Fool financial advice Web site, which puts in a plug for existing VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) provider, Skype, based in London. Unlike early attempts at VoIP, Skype's service provides good quality sound and offers calls to UK landlines (1p per minute). VoIP may be in its infancy in the UK, but it is booming in Japan where one in ten households uses it, and many businesses rely on the service to cut the cost of overseas calls.

Imagine a world where re-charging mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players is completely hassle-free and convenient, and you never need to remember to carry a charger with you when you travel. British company Splashpower has devised a way to charge multiple devices simultaneously, without the need for wires. The invention, known as a Splashpad, uses electromagnetic fields to charge mobile devices. Simply place as many as you can fit on the pad - and then let the power flow.

At the 2005 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Steve Jobs revealed some of the racing stripes being added to Tiger - otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.4 - but mostly wanted to talk about the integrated desktop search, which would work with 'smart folders' that behave like iTunes' smart playlists and iPhoto's smart albums. Discounting rumours that the new operating system would be delayed, Jobs said that Tiger was on target for delivery by June.

After coming back from near oblivion, Apple is enjoying growing success with the popularity of the iPod, new desktop machines and business hardware, and the benefits of a comparatively virus-free platform. But Apple remains "an irrelevance", according to UK IT managers, who see it as limited by overpriced proprietary hardware and software that reduces it to little more than an expensive fashion accessory.

Most e-mail providers impose limits on the size of message that you can send or receive. If you have trouble sending large files to certain people, or want to avoid clogged mail arteries or the risk of reaching an overstuffed mailbox that will bounce your message back, there is a free and easy alternative that works every time - and you can send files up to 1GB in size. All you need to do is type in the destination address, select the file you want to send, and (optionally) type in your e-mail address and an accompanying message. It's a Web-based service: the recipient gets an e-mail with a download link that's good for seven days.

Next time you find something on the Web that you simply must let someone know about right away, you can do better than sending the URL and hoping that the recipient will spot the relevant bit for themselves. Snip anything you like from a Web page and send a virtual cutting instead.

Advanced Reality, a Texas software developer specialising in peer-to-peer collaboration technology, has announced Jybe, a free beta release of a new browser-based collaboration service. Jybe enables you to use your browser as the delivery mechanism for co-browsing and PowerPoint presentation sessions that you can invite anyone to attend. The free Browser plug-in enables you to surf in real-time with friends or clients anywhere, perhaps to share favourite Internet locations, but also enabling businesses to offer customers live guided tours of company Web sites or online catalogues. Web conferencing tools have offered co-browsing and presentation facilities for some time, but Jybe works without extra software, using browser plug-ins to turn IE or FireFox into a full co-browsing, live presentation and text chat collaboration channel.

A Wiki is a (usually minimalist) shared white board, a technology that lets a group of people share the maintenance of Web-based content. The most popular example is probably Wikipedia, which is certainly not minimalist, and provides a terrific public resource, but Net-savvy businesses use Wikis to manage interaction between the company and its customers or site visitors. O'Reilly Media is a prime example and it makes a point of sharing its practical Wiki knowledge.

The Web is often the quickest place to look something up - if you know where to go. If you don't, you could start by checking Bob Drudge's www.refdesk.com, or Jim Martindale's Reference Desk, both collections that have been ten years in the making. For single words, there's Onelook, which indexes more than six million words in hundreds of dictionaries. For more depth, the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia and the volunteer-run (contributions welcome) Wikipedia are both online and, unlike Britannica, they're free.

There are a number of places to get books online, but this recent addition is definitely worth a look. The staff members at Manybooks.net have adapted the e-texts created by the Gutenberg Project and present them online in formats that include Palm document files, eReader and PDF.

Bookshare.org, a group that collects digital books for the visually impaired, has announced that its online collection has grown to over 20,000 titles. Some books are out of copyright and are available for anyone to download. Others are for members only. Free or paid, copies are available for the visually impaired in DAISY Digital Talking Book Format and BRF Braille Digital Format, and for anyone else in ASCII text (plain text) or HTML.

The lead programmer of the Firefox Web browser, Ben Goodger, has joined Google. The move is the latest of several feeding speculation that Google plans its own Web browser. The company registered the domain gbrowser.com some time ago. Firefox, which has dented the dominant market share enjoyed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is a variant of the open-source Mozilla browser project begun in 1998 by Netscape.

Google has been headhunting Internet users who tamper with their 'secure' programs. The search engine giant is even congratulating hackers on their attempts, according to an Independent report, and offering them a chance to join the company's team of 2,600 workers, which includes several hundred millionaires.

A Scottish company is introducing a new search engine, Speegle, that reads the results of searches aloud - and in almost natural feminine tones that are some improvement on Stephen Hawking's 'tin man' text renderer. Speegle plays search results as an audio stream, and offers a choice of voices and speeds. Originating company CEC Systems of Edinburgh says it has applied for a patent on the technology.