Zen Monthly Newsletter

Introducing Zen Office 8000 - the latest 8Mb Premier Business Broadband - Zen Office Broadband service with a generous and flexible usage allowance, enabling business customers to benefit from traffic prioritisation and increased upstream speeds, whilst economising on cost.

Home users will have to wait until after Christmas, but Microsoft is rolling out the long-awaited Vista operating system to business customers this month, along with its Exchange Server 2007 and 2007 Office System. Five years in the making, Windows Vista is the software giant's biggest launch for eleven years. Silicon.com has the lowdown.

PC World says that the fuss about the launch of Vista may not match the hoopla that greeted the arrival of Windows 95 in the summer of 1995. Revisit those far off days and watch again the news bulletins and promotional videos of a decade ago, including the complete ad with the Rolling Stones contributing a 60-second burst of "Start Me Up".

Microsoft plans to set the UK price of its Office 2007 Ultimate edition at £600 - almost 70 per cent more than the company's suggested US retail price.

The European release of 'Microsoft's iPod' is being delayed until late 2007. The company’s Zune player comes with a 3" screen and a 30GB hard disk drive and - thanks to Wi-Fi connectivity - some functionality not available on competing products from Apple and Creative, including ad-hoc music sharing between people in range of the device, and FM as well as digital radio. Along with the player, Microsoft is expected to launch its new online music store, Zune Marketplace. The product will be available in the USA this month for $249.

Podcasting is a new phenomenon to most of us, but it became popular with some enthusiasts as early as 2004. Early adopters regarded Podcasting as a democratising technology, allowing anyone to create and publish radio programmes without the need for a broadcasting infrastructure. You may have decided that you should give this new medium a try, but where do you begin? The Data Doctors have some suggestions.

Do you know what an RSS feed is? If you publish a blog, you publish a feed, says FeedBurner, and that means you have a format that allows your content to be delivered and subscribed to via the Web. FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters and publishers - and that means businesses too - to promote their content and deliver it more directly.

From Blogger and Bebo to WordPress and Wikipedia.

Don't believe the Web 3.0 hype. Before we can move on to whatever "Web 3.0" is, we need to wrap our heads around two things: Copyright law and Net Neutrality, says Internet pioneer and multimedia expert Sean Carton.

Do you let Firefox save your passwords because you can never remember them when they're needed? Robert Chapin thinks that might not be such a good idea. That's because he's found a new security hole in the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that he's calling a Reverse Cross-Site Request (RCSR). The vulnerability exposes saved passwords and could affect anyone visiting a Web site that allows user-contributed HTML codes to be added. Read more here:

PC owners will spend £3 billion on anti-virus software next year and many small business and home users pay their annual subscriptions without checking the dozens of free alternatives available. Four freebies lead the pack and most reviewers agree that they provide adequate protection. In order of popularity, they are: AVG (from Grisoft); BitDefender; Avast 4 Home and a relative newcomer: Avira from Germany. Avira has versions for older Windows systems, including Windows 98, and offers a Linux version as well. It also provides a separate undelete utility, which is not related to its anti-virus functionality, but could be a useful standby to keep on the bacon-saving shelf for another day.

Researchers say they have discovered a serious, unpatched vulnerability in Mac OS X - a "memory corruption bug" that could allow attackers to take control of even fully patched systems. Security watchers advise Mac users to deactivate the "open safe files after downloading" option in their Safari preferences as a workaround, pending the release of appropriate security patches from Apple. Mac OS X version 10.4.8 systems are confirmed to be at risk and other systems could also be vulnerable. Read the full report:

A court case in Philadelphia looks set to revive the Child Online Protection Act, a law that makes it a crime to knowingly post explicit material that is "harmful to minors" on the Internet. Enacted in 1998, COPA was immediately blocked by the American Civil Liberties Union and has never been applied. CNET News says the 1998 injunction is about to be lifted and the law will be enacted soon. Violators would be fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to six months. However, COPA isn't restricted to targeting porn producers. News organisations, or any Web site publishing articles and videos that could be deemed "harmful to minors" might also be in trouble.

Google's purchase of YouTube and a format that big-spending advertisers are comfortable with after decades of buying time on commercial television will drive spending on online video advertising up to $410 million this year, says a new study. Grown 82 per cent since 2005, and reaching $1.3 billion in 2008, Internet video advertising will be a $3 billion business by 2010, according to latest US projections.

With movie clip sites becoming so popular online, competition to provide the best meta-search for video content is heating up. One of the first contenders is PureVideo search, which offers search across multiple providers as well as popularity charts for over 30 different video sources (YouTube, MySpace, CNN, ESPN, MSN, Comedy Central, etc.)

Google is having legal problems again. Flach Film, the French company that produced "The World According to Bush", a two-hour film investigating President George W. Bush's administration and the Bush family, including its connections with the Bin Laden family, is suing the search giant for damages after the film surfaced on Google Video. Flach issued a writ in Paris for copyright infringement, telling the court that the film's chances in the legal video market had been ruined. Google France removed the documentary only after thousands of viewings and downloads for which Flach is seeking $648,000 in damages. Last month, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt denied that his company had set aside $500 million to settle copyright claims by media companies.

The average Video Gamer is 41 and half are female. Most people guess that the audience consists almost exclusively of teenage boys and young men but, according to comScore Media Metrix, a quarterly syndicated study found that video games have a much broader appeal. On average, gamers are 41 years of age with an average annual income of $55,000. And females account for 52 per cent of the gaming audience. The average gamer has been using the Internet for nine years and 84 per cent have broadband access at home.

At a push, one of these freebie accolades could be pressed into service as a last minute online Christmas card, but customising one particularly heart-felt greeting that will be more obviously fit for purpose on February 14th might be more rewarding.

Any watch can tell the time, but how many can tell you when to sacrifice your goat to ensure the fertility of your crops? You need the StoneHenge Watch for that. Yes, harness the power of the sun and the stones and impress your friends as you predict the spring and vernal equinox with this pocketable monument. Line up the tiny reproduction of Stonehenge with the built-in compass and you can tell the time just as our ancestors did all those millennia ago. If you're in a hurry, you can turn it over and use the standard analogue pocket watch on the other side. Sadly, although the original Stonehenge Watch, designed in 1980, is in the Salisbury Museum, the new reproduction is being sold by a company 3,000 miles away in New Jersey - and although the English Heritage shop at the monument itself has a lot of jewellery, and a cheap wall clock, it has no watches to offer.

Data from the recently updated UK Electoral Roll and business listings from Thomson are provided for online search at 192.com. Although it's a mix of free, free with registration and paid services, most information does not have to be paid for. The accompanying location map facility is faster than most and comes with a handy preview slider window and aerial photo zoom built-in.