Zen Monthly Newsletter

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It's a market of 1.3bn people with an affluent urban population of 562m consumers - and they're buying from Britain. The Business Telegraph's Jamie Oliver advises on how to find a foothold in China, a massive market that's fraught with misconceptions.

The world over, Google is Google. But Chinese surfers have been pronouncing "Google" as "gougou" or "gugou" - among other variants - meaning "doggy" and "old hound". An easier-to-pronounce name is one reason that rival search engine Baidu has been more popular than Google in China. Given that, and the company's displeasure on discovering its new-found hound dog connotations, executives announced they had come up with a tweak for the iconic name a few days ago as they opened a new engineering centre in Beijing. The search engine has been renamed "Gu Ge" (pronounced "goo-guh"), which translates as "song of the harvest of grain". Google officials said the new name projected "the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way".

If you'd rather have your calendar or appointments diary available via the Web instead of always back at the office when you really need it, Google has something new for you. It's a free application that you can use in addition to others, or you can import information from the ones you already use like Outlook and Yahoo! Calendar, It also lets you share some or all of what you're getting up to with others. As Google puts it: "You control how much you share, and who you share it with. You can let Aunt Jane see details about your ballet recitals but not your Lambada lessons. Friends and organisations can share their calendar info with you, too, and you can view it alongside your own agenda.

Microsoft has launched a new search engine exclusively for academic publications. Windows Live Academic Search lets users scour the Web for journal articles, academic papers, and notes and slides from scholarly conferences in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, and physics. Google previously launched a similar service, Google Scholar. The academic search engine performs some tricks Google's can't, says Justin Osmer, a senior product manager for search at Microsoft, citing the ability to mouse over a result to see an abstract, and the use of authors' names as hot links to their other published work. Researchers, students, librarians, and journalists are expected to be the major users of the new facility.

Yahoo! is accused of allowing fraudulent click activity generated by spyware. In "The Spyware Click-Fraud Connection", Harvard Law School researcher Ben Edelman documents connections between Yahoo! and "a startling number" of notorious spyware programs that use pop-ups and search redirection to clock up revenue with no benefit for the advertisers footing the bill. Edelman gave Yahoo! a list of the offending companies nine months ago but says that over a hundred of them have continued not just to show Yahoo! ads, but persist with click-fraud activities. His study names Claria and InfoSpace among those directly involved. The problem, says Edelman, is that Yahoo! has some bad partners in its network. Because it distributes advertising to third parties who might in turn syndicate ads to others, the company has no real control over how its ad codes are used to generate clicks. Click-fraud isn't going away, he says, and it's a problem for Google too. Although Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters, "Believe me, as computer scientists, we have the ability to detect invalid clicks before they reach advertisers", such reassurances need to be set against the $90million that Google paid without argument to one advertiser that threatened court action to get its money back.

Most people think of spam as a relatively new phenomenon. It may be a lot older than you think. Here's an e-mail sent to everyone using the Internet's predecessor, ARPANET, on the west coast of the USA in 1978. It came from a sales rep at DEC, a company that went on to become the world's second largest computer manufacturer, rivalling IBM until it made huge losses in the early 1990s.

The LURHQ Threat Intelligence Group, virus hunters based in Chicago, are warning about "ransomware", a new Trojan threat that encrypts files on your computer and keeps you out of them until you pay a ransom for a password to unlock the cruncher's code.

You want to hear what spies chatter about? They're saying very secret things, mostly in code and you're not supposed to listen. But if you have shortwave bands on your radio, you can, and it might become obsessive.

If your boss gets you a new mouse, and it looks like this one, take care what you say about him when he leaves the room.

A new mobile phone service from Disney allows parents to monitor their children's phone usage and track their movements. 'Disney Mobile' includes features to control who children can talk to, when they can use their phones, and how much they can spend. Subscribing parents can set or vary the controls via a Web page. The service also lets parents see exactly where their offspring is using the GPS (Global Positioning System) function of the child's phone. They can retrieve the information either by address or on a map, on a PC, or their own Disney Mobile phone. If they don't like what they see, or want to order the youngster back home immediately, a 'Family Alert' feature lets them send messages that pop up on the phone display and prevent it being used for anything else until they get a reply.

It was only a matter of time before mobile phones became vehicles for buying and paying for stuff. They're already the ultimate multifunction devices. We use them for talking, texting, blogging, for accessing news, watching video content, listening to music, voting for reality TV contestants, and who knows what else. But now, we'll be able to use mobiles to pay for things too. PayPal, a unit of Internet online auctions giant eBay, has introduced PayPal Mobile so that you can pay on the go.

How would you like to download the Web and take it along on your next flight overseas? Webaroo aims to make that a possibility with a new service offering a searchable snapshot of the Web that users can download to their laptop or other mobile device. Not the entire Web, of course - you would need to heve at least 1 million gigabytes to spare before you could think about grabbing all of it. Webaroo uses an algorithm to store the most relevant Web pages for each user by storing 'Favorites' and anything cached, as well as editor-compiled "Web packs" that collect content on certain subjects. The packs are automatically updated when users connect their mobile devices back to the Internet. Webaroo says the service will be free and supported by advertising, although it's not clear if that means that existing ads on stored pages will be replaced.

Nike has rolled out a software-based TV channel for Joga.com, a joint global social networking partnership with Google aimed at football fans. Features include Nike's US TV spots for "Joga Bonito" (play beautiful) and clips featuring Ronaldinho and Ronaldo. The application automatically downloads new content each week, notifying end users when it's available. The branded channel is being promoted by Nike to blogs and discussion forums, as well as via Nikesoccer.com and Joga.com. The soccer-specific site is one of many branded content projects developed recently by the global shoe and apparel-maker, part of a growing trend that marketeers call long-form advertising.

In another example of a major marketer bypassing established media outlets and using the Internet as a means of direct distribution to consumers, Land Rover has launched a new broadband channel featuring original programming on sports, lifestyles and popular culture aimed at the kind of 'adventuresome' viewers it perceives as potential buyers of its hefty people carriers.

Recently, a team of international archaeologists came across a remarkable find when they located the Gospel of Judas, written on 1700 year-old papyrus. The National Geographic Society has created a Web site that allows users to explore the entire document and see the work translated into English, or in the original Coptic. A timeline includes background material on early Christian history and the site is rounded out by an area that contains information about the painstaking conservation process.

Last month, we pointed readers to a ZDNet report about the supposed security risk faced by Mac users following the results of an online competition that invited hackers to take control of one foolhardy Mac owner's machine. As updates posted at the link we provided soon made clear, and several aggrieved Mac owners wrote to us to point out, the successful takeover claimed within half an hour of the competition being launched was not everything it was cracked up to be. Newsletter reader Dan Ebdon recommended commentary at Slashdot ("News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.") for a better take on the fiasco.

There is a new search engine that provides more than information. It offers prizes too. There's no cost and no registration. An early winner, Caroline Barth, got an iPod Shuffle. "I told my friends about it. They didn't believe me. I told them really, you'll win. And they did. It only took them a couple of days." Blingo provides the same search results as Google, but it also gives away prizes at the rate of two or three per hour. Search at the right time, and the reward could be anything from a couple of cinema tickets to a portable Play Station. Frank Anderson is Blingo’s CEO. "We make money by showing sponsored results next to the search results you get. And when people click on the sponsored results, we make money" he explained. To date, according to the Web site, Blingo has already given away almost 20,000 prizes. There is a limit of two giveaways per household per month - and the free gifts are for delivery to US addresses only.