Zen Monthly Newsletter

For the fourth consecutive year, Zen Internet has been included in The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100, a listing of Britain’s top-performing private companies. Zen reported sales growth of 56 per cent, from £7.8m in 2003 to £19m in 2005, and "significant technical growth" that included the building of an Internet link to New York. "We are delighted about our inclusion in The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 for the fourth year running," explained Iain Johnstone, Sales and Partner Programme Manager for Zen Internet. "The listing illustrates our continuing work to grow as a company, with significant sales and technical growth. As one of the first ISPs in the UK, we have continually grown and improved by staying true to our core values of quality, reliability and service and this has helped us to expand".

From today, all current fire certificates at UK businesses will automatically expire when new legislation makes building or company owners, or a "designated person", responsible for fire prevention and safety and requires them to carry out a risk assessment at their office, shop, or other premises. "The new legislation will cause a lot of headaches in the short-term", warned Matthew Knowles, spokesman for the Federation of Small Businesses. "A survey we carried out in March showed 59 per cent of small firms in England and Wales were unaware of the new requirements".

Also beginning today, businesses of all kinds must comply with new legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of age, or face the probability of expensive legal action. The new rules mean it is now illegal for companies to specify an age when advertising a vacancy, or even to request applications from "young" or "mature" people. The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations make it unlawful to discriminate against employees, job seekers and trainees because of their age. Businesses are being warned that this is their very last chance to take action if they are to safeguard themselves against possible lawsuits, by updating HR policies and company handbooks. ACAS say that with 23 per cent of firms currently specifying maximum recruitment ages and 13 per cent using age to fix a starting salary, there are many organisations risking prosecution unless they make changes this month.

Seventy percent of local authority Web sites do not meet the basic levels of availability that sites run by commercial businesses achieve every day as a matter of course, according to a report in Computing magazine.

Public libraries have suffered a fair bit of criticism in recent years, as they have filled up with computers, CDs, videos and the like, leading to suspicions that the written word is being sidelined, says over-50s magazine The Oldie. But computers and Internet access at libraries around the country offer some fabulous online book browsing and offer readers free viewing of reference works that would cost thousands of pounds to access at home.

Search engines like Google can make the job of finding information on the Internet easier than tracking down some things within the four walls of an office. Employees often find it easier to create existing documents again, from scratch, than to find the copy that someone put together a year ago. It is estimated that some workers spend more than twice as much time re-creating old content as they spend creating new content. This explains the growing popularity of 'Enterprise Search' within larger companies. Enterprise Search works in a similar way to using Internet search engines, with a simple, logical interface and the ability to search using keywords typed in everyday language, but it is designed to locate and sort unstructured information - that is, data held in Word and PDF documents on servers and users’ desktops that isn't indexed, tagged or archived for easy location. Richard Lewis of Staffordshire Business Intelligence firm, Ardentia, compares Enterprise Search to meditation. In both cases, he says, the best answers are those found within.

Microsoft has removed the beta, or test, tag from Live Search, its next-generation search engine, and is making it the underlying search tool at its MSN.com portal. Microsoft has invested heavily in improving its search engine and accompanying ad network and hopes to make a large dent in Google's dominance. Google handles about 50 per cent of the world's searches and Yahoo! manages a third. In the month before the full launch of Live Search, Microsoft was picking up about half of the rest. In the UK, Live Search retains the "Only from United Kingdom" option previously offered at MSN Search - but not on the search engine's opening page - it shows up only after an initial search has been completed.

Are search engines infringing on Web site copyright? The Belgians think so. Two weeks ago, a court in Belgium dealt a stunning blow against Google and its Google News search service, forbidding the search engine from indexing Belgian newspaper content without payment to the publications for its use. Faced with a million Euro fine, Google removed the content. The ruling sets a precedent that other newspapers will follow and brings up a tempting legal option for all the sue-happy webmasters out there who are thinking "if my site is copyrighted, can I make Google pay for indexing it?"

Thousands want to get in early on any type of Google beta test anyway, but the company has decided to pay volunteers for taking the time to use Google products and report back on their "user experience." According to the Google User Experience Research FAQ page, Google will be paying $75 an hour to users willing to do some testing work and answer questions about various Google products.

The first or second thing to look at when launching a new business, or refreshing an old one, is the company logo. But before you dip into your fledgling bank account to pay for an expensive outside service, perhaps you should give your in-house creative talent a chance with Adobe Illustrator and a complete free guide from Computer Arts magazine.

When you want to grab a graphic from a Web site (right-click and "Save Picture As...") are you usually offered the .bmp file extension and bitmap format - even though the illustration is almost always a GIF or JPEG file?

User generated content sites like Bebo, YouTube, Piczo, MySpace and Wikipedia are gaining UK audience share at a faster rate than most others. Recent analysis of UK Internet user activity showed significant traffic growth, with Wikipedia up 253 percent on last year, Bebo up by 328 percent, Piczo.com up 393 percent and MySpace.com growing 467 percent. Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe, said "Many of the sites experiencing the fastest growth today are the ones that understand their audience's need for expression and where it's easy for users to share pictures, upload music and video, and provide their own commentary".

Social-networking sites are a "hotbed" for spyware, says Business Week. Spyware infection rates are on the rise, thanks to the likes of MySpace.com and their growing popularity.

Whether texting, talking or being tracked by worried parents, young children live in a mobile-connected world. How are new technologies re-shaping the boundaries between childhood and adulthood? And who should set the boundaries - teenagers, parents, governments or companies? Join the o2-sponsored debate hosted by spiked-online.com.

Google wins the day at T-Mobile and Vodafone, but at Orange the future is Yahoo!

Does everyone have their own 'Clickprint' when they browse the Web? A research team claims that each individual may have a unique pattern of Web surfing behaviour based on actions such as the number of pages viewed per session, the number of minutes spent on each Web page, the time and day of the week the page is visited, and so on. The researchers say that by observing these patterns, an e-commerce company can distinguish between two individuals with nearly 100 per cent accuracy, sometimes by monitoring as few as three Internet sessions.

A Texas university student who "cares about your freedoms and privacy" has released a modified version of the Firefox Web browser that will give complete Internet anonymity to its users. Named Torpark, the free open source browser is based on a portable version of Firefox 1.5.0.7, and can be run from a USB drive, leaving no trace of installation on any PC. All data uploaded or downloaded is automatically encrypted and it masks the user’s true IP address.

A group of security professionals created a third-party fix for an Internet Explorer flaw used in cyber-attacks that was discovered three weeks ago. The group, which calls itself the Zeroday Emergency Response Team, or ZERT, created the patch for IE users wanting to protect themselves during the time that Microsoft takes before introducing an official fix. The flaw lies in the way that IE 6 handles certain graphics. Malicious software can be loaded onto a vulnerable Windows PC when the user clicks on a link on a Web site or in an e-mail message. Porn sites were among the first to exploit the bug, but many others started to use it once it became widely known. With concern mounting, and increasing numbers relying on the ZERT solution, Microsoft brought forward the release of its own patch by two weeks.

The online version of The Daily Mail reports that the government of Kazakhstan has launched an ad campaign to salvage its country's reputation after being made a laughing-stock by Borat, the latest alter ego of Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. A four-page colour ad supplement has appeared in The New York Times that portrays the Central Asian nation as a modern, industrialised, outward-looking place with a stable economy and thriving tourist industry. And that's a far cry from the land of anti-Semitic, "horse-urine drinking, incestuous people" that fake journalist Borat has brought to TV and (soon) to the big screen in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." Of course, Cohen has done anything but "make benefit" for the country, and the government is understandably furious that it has been made the target of his ridicule.

Imagine a search engine that doesn't ask you to type a word or phrase to find what you're looking for, but presents you with a sketch pad and suggests that you draw it instead. A company in Indiana, the American state with a reputation for asking questions in a different way, and the home of Purdue University, has created it. 3DSeek, "the world’s first online shape search engine", launched last week. It allows designers, engineers and buyers to find parts and products using a 2D Sketch, 2D drawing or 3D model as input. Manufacturers and supply companies can add 2D drawings, images or photographs, and/or 3D CAD models of their products to the index free of charge.