Zen Monthly Newsletter

From today, ZenADSL Home 2000 - Zen Internet's top flight broadband service offering full-on 2Mbps connectivity - is down in price to £34.99 monthly, previously the going rate for a 1Mbps connection. ZenADSL Home 1000 is also down, by £5.00 to £29.99 monthly. The new charges include VAT and apply for new and existing customers. ZenADSL Home 250 and Home 500 - competitively priced at £17.99 and £24.99 per month respectively - are unchanged. A standard £15 regrade fee applies for customers upgrading to ZenADSL Home 1000 or ZenADSL Home 2000.

Zen Internet is re-launching its co-located hosting service, Zen Co-location. Previously known as ServerConnect, Zen Co-location provides the best in secure and resilient co-located hosting with high performance network connectivity and unrivalled customer support. A brand new micro site provides one-stop information covering all server co-location requirements. For more details, please call Sales on 0845 058 9000, or e-mail your enquiry to: colocation@zen.co.uk.

Tired of tripping over computer wires? Irritated by the constant need to change wires from computer to computer? Depressed at the thought of spending the summer tied to your desk when the sun is shining outside? Wireless could be for you! Whether you have a desktop PC, a laptop, a MAC, or even all three, Zen can provide the hardware that affords you the easy and convenient wireless solution that you have been looking for. And there's a special offer this month - buy the Netgear DG834G Wireless ADSL Firewall Router and you'll get a free PC MCIA card, saving a full £40 in set-up costs. For more about wireless home networking packages, or any other information on wires-free Internet connection, please contact Zen's helpful team of sales advisers on 0845 058 9000 today.

If you must stay indoors to stay connected, the EU has a plan to make broadband available in every room in your house and make plugging in to get online as easy as turning on the lights.

Almost 200,000 Britons left the UK to live or work abroad during 2003, the most ever recorded. One man living the expat dream with help from the Internet is John Stanmeyer, a photographer who tired of congested city life and moved his family to a three-bedroom villa on the Indonesian island of Bali. Stanmeyer is self-employed, and his business depends on a 200ft antenna in the garden providing high-speed Internet with its own satellite dish. The connection keeps him up to date with home (free phone calls, Radio Four and UK newspapers online) but Marmite has to be smuggled in by visiting relatives.

Greetings, courtesy of PC World Magazine, from the most connected place on Earth: South Korea, where broadband is cheap, and the gaming is easy.

As more Net surfers take up faster connections, multimedia content becomes ever more practical - and the vaults of last-century news and entertainment are being emptied onto the Net to meet the demand. See and hear these key movie clip and soundbite moments from history including the breaking of the sound barrier, Vietnam war protests, Neil Armstrong, Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill.

The television industry was unprepared for the success of cable TV. The wisdom of the day held that nobody would pay for TV when they could get it for free. But cable offered its customers much more choice. Now, the Internet is poised to offer viewers and listeners an even wider range to select their entertainment from - but once again the established media don't see it coming. Podcasting is only the beginning.

Invented by Netscape, mostly used by Webmasters and Bloggers as a means to deliver news headlines, RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask) has gained an audience of millions and now savvy marketers, big brands and small business owners are latching on to its commercial possibilities.

Trendwatching.com and its 4,000 trend tracker volunteers scan the US, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and 50 other nations and regions for hot, emerging consumer trends and new business ideas.

This year, standard DVD capacity will rise to between 15GB and 50GB, depending on which of two new formats - HD-DVD or Blu-ray - wins the war that will be staged by retailers in the run up to Christmas. And an even more impressive optical technology is already waiting in the wings. Backers of the Holographic Versatile Disc announced last month that their favoured format will support a mammoth 200GB when it launches, and it may be ready to retail by the end of the year.

Despite its name, Screamer Radio is one of the better applications that helps to comb the Web for new and interesting radio entertainment. Hundreds of ready-to-play radio stations are easily accessible and Screamer offers the option to record as well as listen. The application is compatible with Windows 98 or higher.

Create professional quality PDF files from almost any printable document. Free for personal and commercial use! No watermarks. No popup Web advertisements.

You can edit most PDF files in Microsoft Word, without having to touch Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Solid Document Converter v2.0 is free for use on PDFs up to 10 pages.

A special agent from the FBI is to join Microsoft as its UK security chief next month. Ed Gibson, already making an impression in Britain on lecture tours with his penchant for wearing sunglasses indoors, spent 20 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation tracking criminals engaged in money laundering and intellectual property theft.

The Government has joined the fight against online viruses with a new Web site, ITsafe, designed to send rapid security alerts to home and small-business computer users. The free service will be run by the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC). Along with alerts, it will offer advice on protecting personal data on both home and work computers. "We need to up the security game of ordinary citizens. If they fall down on information security, their compromised machines can be used against us" said NISCC director Roger Cummings.

PC World Magazine's recommended best-buy anti-spyware application is CounterSpy at around £10 - and there's a free trial. Counterspy reportedly finds more spyware than former favourites, Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy.

ViewRemote, from US company Rampell Software, records everything that happens on a computer and allows remote viewing of what's going on from any other Internet-connected PC. Once installed, ViewRemote begins recording everything typed, every application used, every chat conversation held, and more. It also records screenshots, which is the equivalent of having a surveillance camera pointed directly at the monitor.

India has spawned an innovative business called ad clicking fraud in which thousands of home workers are paid to click on Google ads to increase Web site owners' revenue. Middle-class housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals are signing up to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 per month - in a country where the average annual income is less than $500 per year. Lawyers in Texas have initiated a click fraud class action suit against the major search engines, accusing them of overcharging advertisers for pay-per-click advertising and have created a Web site - LostClicks.com - to gather evidence from businesses stung by miscreant clickers.

Reported in The Register, columnist Robert Cringely imagines the Google Web Accelerator leading to some surprising logical conclusions. Soon, he says, you could buy your PC from Google, use Google as your ISP, surf an Internet that is really the Google cache, be fed ads and sold content from Google servers and live in a GoogleWorld that requires no AOL, no Microsoft, no Intel, no HP or Dell - only Google, cable companies, telephone companies and the two communities that Google can't live without: advertisers and Web page producers.

Yahoo! has a new experimental search engine named Mindset that promises "Intent Driven Search" that allows users to change the ranking order of listed Web sites according to how much useful information they provide. By default, Mindset returns search results that are identical to those provided by the standard Yahoo! search engine, but a slider at the top of the page allows users to re-order the listings to give priority to either commercial or non-commercial sites. Results are re-sorted gradually as the slider is dragged right, toward "researching", or left toward "shopping". If the technology moves to the mainstream, commercial sites will need to pay Yahoo! to lock their listings in the "sponsor results" near the top of the page if they want to avoid being buried under dozens of informational pages prioritised by users.