Zen Monthly Newsletter

From today, companies in the UK must include certain information on their Web sites and in their e-mail footers or they will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine. The minimum information needed on any business site includes the name, geographic address and e-mail address of the business and the legal name of the organisation with which the customer is contracting. (Also, if the business is a company, the registered office address and the registration number). If the business is a member of a trade or professional association, membership details, including any registration number, should be provided. If the business has a VAT number, it should be stated - even if the Web site is not being used for e-commerce transactions. Prices on the site must be clear and unambiguous and state whether they include tax and delivery costs. Retail sites must comply with the Distance Selling Regulations, which cover requirements for businesses that sell to consumers (B2C, as opposed to B2B). For details, see OUT-LAW's guide: The Distance Selling Regulations - An Overview.

This year, the tax-man will be looking for e-Bay sellers and other online traders making a secondary income without declaring the cash. HM Revenue and Customs is organising a new intelligence team to identify the growing number of people who are trading illegally online and in the wider black economy. "We will be monitoring what is sold online in order to ensure that people are not running businesses," said a Revenue spokesman. "We need to remind people that tax applies to income from online buying and selling at sites like eBay, or providing any service for payment". Last year, a TV campaign targeting "dishonest" self-employed people prompted 100,000 calls to a hotline with information about traders suspected of operating without paying tax.

There are just a few days left (up to January 5th) to put in your bid for a free Garmin Geko 201 Personal Navigator® by completing Zen Internet's 5-minute survey on your business data back-up requirements. Gekos are the smallest and lightest waterproof GPS units on the market and you could win one by completing Zen's latest online business survey here:

Some of the worst broadband providers in the UK do their best to make things difficult when you want to switch to an ISP with better service. Ofcom has announced new rules on broadband migration that come into effect next month to make it easier to switch providers - or to move your broadband connection to a new address. From Valentine's Day, broadband providers will be required to supply customers with a Migration Access Code (MAC) on request and free of charge. A MAC is a unique reference code, needed to ensure that customers stay connected during the time it takes to complete their transfer.

From Monday 22nd to Friday 26th January, the Microsoft UK developer team will be touring the country to bring the UK Vista and Office 2007 story to individual businesses and organisations. The team will pack in sessions at as many locations as possible, depending on the travelling time between each one and the kind of reception they get. You can ask the team to visit you by sending an e-mail to msukdpetech@hotmail.co.uk with full details about your location and the facilities you can offer, with confirmation that you can provide an audience of 35 or more - and enough space to put on the show.

Vista is Microsoft's newest operating system and therefore "best". Or perhaps not. You can read some opposing views and learn about alleged alternatives at BadVista - and find out more about the different versions of Vista at PC Pitstop.

Every year at about this time, the major search engines compile lists to show the most popular search queries of the year. It's also a staple of year-end press coverage to revisit the biggest celebrity names, trends and oddities of the last 12 months. Google has chosen to highlight search terms that grew in popularity over the previous year, including queries about social networking sites (MySpace, Bebo), significant world news (Hezbollah, North Korea, Darfur) and scandals. It's also fun, says Google, to compare the top lists for years past and ask, where are they now?

Did you know that: The speed of the world's fastest supercomputer will be measured in "petaflops", which represent 1,000 trillion calculations per second. There were no numbers in the first UK phone directory, only names and addresses. The InterCity 125 train was designed by the same man who came up with the angle-poise lamp and the Kenwood Chef mixer. Check 97 more surprising factoids and full details about each one at the BBC's 100 Things We Didn't Know In 2006.

January is the traditional month to begin planning the year's holiday. Remember having exchange students visiting your school when you were younger? The Holswap Web site runs on the same principle, and it can be a very cheap way of organising a holiday. First you have to find a place you would like to stay. Use the drop-down menus along the top to select a country and region. You can refine your search, or use the link to look for a holiday swapper who has specified your area in their "wants". Each property on offer is posted with a detailed description about the accommodation and area, and in most cases there are pictures too. You will also find details of what the owner wants in return, and a way to get in touch. The usual caveats about meeting strangers online apply.

Matrin Hallenberg is a student from Copenhagen who has devised a way of searching for budget flights without having to visit too many Web sites. Using his 'Skyscanner', you can fill in the full details of your trip to find the cheapest deals - or leave most details out and simply let the search run with low prices as the top priority.

Green And Easy is a UK site with some useful tips and information about various sectors offering environmentally friendly alternatives to meet everyday needs. There's a guide about carbon off-setting for anyone feeling guilty about their holiday flight's carbon footprint.

The Google Maps Online Flight Sim. Use keyboard controls to bank and dive above the landscape of London, Paris, New York... or your home town.

Very few small businesses selling local products or services advertise online. SMBs usually have low ad budgets, which rules out TV, and when they turn to search engines, they often find it's easier to raise their profile in overseas markets than it is to reach the population on their doorstep. If you're trading in Oldham or Oxford and most new business comes from customers within a twenty-mile radius, attracting interest in Ohio and Okinawa is not much help. Google does offer 'geo-targeted' pay-per-click advertising, but it's a very blunt instrument. Small business Web sites offering local services in America have always had to deal with more than their fair share of enquiries from citizens living hundreds or thousands of miles away. But Skyhook Wireless, a small technology company in Boston, now offers software that lets advertisers restrict their ads to users by geographic location, with technology that identifies the longitude and latitude of anyone using a device with a Wi-Fi antenna. Skyhook's mapping currently covers 70 per cent of the country and it is working on securing deals with all the major search engines.

Jonathan Carson, CEO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, takes a look at the constantly changing, rapidly evolving and always interesting world of consumer-generated media: where it is, where it's going and why it matters for today's leading marketers and brands.

When a user deploys Google's simplest service, basic search, the company tracks the clicks. Its 'cookies' help to record any Web page visited, any video viewed, any product priced and any document downloaded. The information is linked to the computer's address on the Internet and all of that computer's Google search activity is filed away for any use that the company may choose to make of it for years to come. Privacy advocates believe Google is inviting trouble by retaining so much data and competitor search engines are gearing up to make an issue of it. Microsoft wants users to know that it offers a 'snoop free' alternative. When users go to the Windows Live search engine, it automatically scrubs the user's identity from search activity, replacing it with an anonymous ID. Yahoo! makes similar claims: "When visitors conduct a search, we keep track of which terms are popular", says spokesperson Diana Lee, "but anything we might get to know about you is used only in aggregate form. It's mixed in with data gathered from every other user and that guarantees your anonymity".

Find out who is trying to hack into your PC and report them with this free Zone Alarm add-on from VisualZone. The extra utility performs a backtrace that attempts to locate a would-be intruder's IP address, physical location, and Internet service provider. With an extra click, you can report incursions to DShield, part of the threat tracking operation at the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute's Internet Storm Center based in Maryland.

ChaCha Search is a new engine that, as well as traditional DIY searching, offers the services of real-people guides to do the searching for you in real time - free of charge. Founders Scott Jones and Brad Bostic say they pay online helpers up to $10 per hour and claim that since launching an experimental Alpha version in September 2006, they have had "more than 14,000 people enter the system to serve as guides, with as many as 1,500 being added on any given day". ChaCha is said to be the first search engine to offer two options for searching: with a human guide who assists in real-time via instant-message chat, or without a guide for immediate search results. Scott Jones said "ChaCha stores the human-curated results, so that people searching related topics later will benefit from the work". Until then, however, immediate results come mostly from InfoSpace, which means that the first 10-20 you see will be the InfoSpace metasearcher's mix of ads from Google, Yahoo! and Ask, re-presented by ChaCha without identification.

Introducing itself as "the future of media watching and brand monitoring", Swamii is an instant sign-up free alternative to traditional and expensive press-cutting services that is almost as easy to use as an ordinary search engine. Currently in its beta phase, Swamii will also be running a more sophisticated paid service for companies that will allow firms to monitor their own and competitor businesses when they are mentioned anywhere in newspapers, on TV, and across millions of Web sites.

Government-sponsored search engines designed to deny American companies, principally Google, a clean sweep of the European search market are on the drawing board in France and Germany. Germany’s Economics minister, Hartmut Schauerte, said the French had their sights on a conventional search engine to go into direct competition with Google and others, but the German Government had something less expansive in mind. Named Quaero (France) and Theseus (Germany), and funded by taxpayers to the tune of 250 and 280 million Euros respectively, at least one of the new engines should be launched this year.

Viral marketeers at Ask.com have leaked the location of a "double-secret" site where the company is testing new search engine features. Called Ask X, it gives users an alternative to the standard design found on most search engine pages. The experiment (found at askx.com) divides the search results page into three columns: Related search and suggestions are on the left, search results are in the middle and - if your screen is big enough - thumbnail content from video, images, news, shopping and blogs searches is shown on the right. Google has an experimental alternative too, at www.searchmash.com

During the last twelve months, a dozen new search engines have appeared that promised help for your favourite charities, offering to make a donation "every time you search" or saying that you could raise money simply by using them. Small print conditions revealed that you would need to click on specific advertising or sponsored search results to generate the cash. An exception to the rule is 'zotspot', a new search engine that simply shares the income from its unobtrusive AdWords-style advertising with its registered users whether they click on ads or not, and regardless of how they search or which results they select. In fact, zotspot is completely transparent, allowing users to select the charities they want to support, customise the proportion of revenue paid (10 per cent to one, 50 per cent to another, etc) or even collect all the money for themselves via PayPal or cheques in the post. Although based in the USA, it is open to residents of other countries, including the UK.