Zen Monthly Newsletter

Will the EU's Weee put up the price of Nintendo's Wii? The EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive, a new 'green law' introduced to tackle the growing problem of high-tech trash, is expected to drive up the costs of hardware as manufacturers are forced to meet the cost of recovery and recycling. But in the UK, companies are still seeking guidance from the government about their exact responsibilities and which goods will be subject to the regulations, although it is certain that the directive will be enforced here, and the DTI is saying that it came into play last month.

Anyone yearning for a turbo-charged mobile Web can peek into the tech utopia future they've been dreaming about via the Far East. Asia is gearing up for mobile life post-3G. It's called HDSPA, high-speed downlink packet access, soon to be the nationwide network standard in South Korea. Korea's wireless companies have spent $5.4 billion on the technology, which moves data at up to 3.6 megabits per second faster than a DSL connection. Korean carrier KT is rolling out an even faster wireless network in Seoul, the nation's capital, where more than a quarter of the country's residents live. Backed by Intel, the telecom provider is set to unveil a mobile WiMAX standard that is as fast as broadband cable. The subscription cost is under £20 per month.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Brothers introduced its 'Total Hi Def Disc', a high-definition DVD format that combines both competing high definition DVD formats, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The disc puts one format on each side of the disc, continuing their policy of neutrality in the DVD format debate, and "groundbreakingly", letting the consumer make the choice without consequences. Also at the Consumer Electronics Show, LG announced a product that attempts to solve the DVD Format War from a different angle. Instead of making a dual-format disc, LG has created a dual-format player. The 'Super Multi Blue Player' automatically detects the inserted disc's format, and plays it accordingly. The unit runs what we must now call 'old style' DVDs too.

Fab at Home is a Web site dedicated to making and using fabbers - affordable machines for home users that can make almost anything, up to a certain size. They sit next to your PC and are available to build for less than £2,000.

Mortgage repayments up again? Employer cutting back? You can reduce the effect of rising prices and effectively give yourself a pay rise. Here's a tool that may help. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has launched a personal inflation calculator to help work out the effect of rising prices on finances.

Sealand, a concrete fortress island off the Suffolk coast seven miles from Felixstowe and Harwich, is up for sale. Established during World War II as an anti-aircraft base, the principality of Sealand is the smallest independent nation in the world and has its own flag, passports, currency and stamps. In 2000, it became part high-tech industrial park, offering its first tenancy to Ryan Lackey, a 21-year-old MIT dropout with $1 million in seed money provided by entrepreneurs intent on creating a fat-pipe Internet server farm and global networking hub with elements of a Caribbean tax haven, sheltered from UK government regulation and most other legal restrictions.

In 1999, Coca-Cola was reported to be testing a vending machine that charged more for its drinks in hot weather. "It's fair that it should be more expensive," said then-Chairman Douglas Ivester. In 2000, Amazon was found to be charging people different prices for the same DVD. The company said it was doing this randomly, but stopped the practice when the story leaked. In 2007, writes columnist David Streitfeld, Amazon appears to be using a more sophisticated approach to price hiking, adding a small surcharge to unpopular book titles when users express an interest in them and return later to place an order.

The days of free advertising that the likes of Coke and Dove have enjoyed in the form of uploaded YouTube videos (which YouTube didn't make a penny from) are numbered. The advertising industry has been anticipating YouTube introducing some form of video ad system to cover fees claimed by video producers and copyright holders - and free-ride viral advertising will almost certainly have to be paid for in future. BBC News interviewed YouTube founder Chad Hurley shortly after an announcement at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week revealed that the online video provider would begin generating revenue to share with producers. Hurley said it was the first of a number of major changes YouTube will make over the coming months, including the introduction of "audio fingerprinting" technology that would be used to identify copyrighted material.

In an example of the risks associated with viral advertising in public spaces, an outdoor campaign in Massachusetts promoting the Cartoon Network triggered bomb scares and the closing of two bridges in the city of Boston yesterday. Roadside LED signs showed images of a cartoon alien giving drivers the middle finger. Alarmed members of the public called police, who sent bomb squads to nine locations. The river was closed to boat traffic and there were long motorway queues and mass transit delays as police searched for explosives.

Google AdWords prices are soaring, returns are diminishing and click fraud is still an uncontained problem. Advertisers are saying they plan to do less business with Google this year. Many intend to reduce spending significantly. In the US, retailer eBags.com, which depends on search engines and shopping-comparison sites to drive traffic to its site, spent $4 million with Google last year. But keyword costs for some retail items have skyrocketed. CEO Peter Cobb said, "the cost of an ad on Google.com or one of its AdSense affiliates now equals up to 45 per cent of the cost of the product it promotes. Google's slice of our ad spend has got to go down". With competition for ads reducing profit margins so dramatically, advertisers are being forced to diversify their spending. Although losing a few million here or there may not be enough to threaten Google's business - which generated more than $7 billion in sales during 2006 and made a $1 billion profit in the first three months of this year - if enough companies curtail their spending with the search giant, it will certainly dent the company's growth rate.

Google closed its 'Google Answers' service at the end of 2006 after four years in operation. The project was the brainchild of Google founder Larry Page. A team of more than 800 people provided answers on a diverse range of topics at a price between $2 and $200 for a correct answer. 25 per cent of the fee went to Google. Announcing the decision to close the Google Answers site, a statement on the official Google blog said: "Google is a company fuelled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time - and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want". Regular users of the service collected signatures for a petition calling on Google to reverse the "barely explained" decision. Google's response has been to say only that the site had served its purpose and that it was time to move on. The hundreds of researchers who lost their jobs were not given any further explanation. David Sarokin, was sorry to lose his employment and writes about the loss of the service and why its competitors are succeeding. Both Yahoo (Yahoo Answers) and MSN (Windows Live QnA) have launched Q&A services.

A Brazilian court ordered the shut down of YouTube in the country after a clip showing model Daniela Cicarelli 'interacting' with a partner on the beach was distributed across the popular AC Milan's Ronaldo, is suing YouTube and the Brazilian government has responded by complying with her request to shut down the video site until the case, which has dragged on for months according to Reuters, is resolved. For several days, the video was the most viewed in Brazil. Cicarelli seeks $116,000 in damages for each day the clip remains up. Obvious questions arise. Why aren't YouTube and parent Google in a hurry to comply with requests to ban the video? Isn't it YouTube's policy to censor explicit videos? Last year, Google refused a Brazilian court request to identify local users of its Orkut social networking site who had pages supporting child pornography.

Wikipedia shot up in the global rankings of the world's most influential brands, debuting in the top five in the latest survey conducted by Brandchannel.com. The survey has thrown up controversial results in the past, naming Arabic TV station Al Jazeera as the world's fifth-most-influential brand in 2004. Over 3,000 branding professionals and students were asked about the brand names that had the biggest impact in 2006. Search leader Google topped the list for the second consecutive year, followed by iPod-maker Apple, online video showcase YouTube, Wikipedia and Starbucks. News Corp's MySpace was 15th.

Wikipedia is said to be "taking on the spammers" with a new links policy. The online encyclopaedia is attempting to cut down on link spamming (attempts by contributors to promote their own Web sites) by tagging the external URLs included in reference articles and lists so that search engines will ignore them. The collaborative information repository will begin inserting a rel="nofollow" attribute into link tags to tell search engines to disregard links to external Web sites. The tag was introduced two years ago as a measure to deter spam on blogs and is supported by the major search engines, but it has no real force and search engines are free to ignore it.

Microsoft is accused of attempting to alter Wikipedia entries about an open-source document standard that rivalled its own format by employing a blogger to change technical details in published work. Programmer Rick Jeliffe revealed that Microsoft offered him money to edit articles on their behalf. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch said: "Paying others to make direct changes isn't smart, even if you tell them they are free to write their unbiased opinions". Microsoft staff claim that current procedures for addressing a perceived inaccuracy or imbalance in an entry about yourself or your company are not good enough.

Jimmy Wales, the one-time options trader who created Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia, is rumoured to be teaming up with Amazon to launch a new open-source search engine in the next couple of months. Allegedly called Wikiasari, it is destined - according to The Times - to out-Google Google and news of the supposed threat to the world's leading search engine has generated a flurry of reporting, including an astonishing anti-Wales rant from a news agency in Israel. Wales says The Times got its information from an old Web page and that press coverage in general "has been a comedy of errors". This is what's actually going on: Wales has embarked on a people-powered search project that will rely on Open Source projects Nutch and Lucene for its background infrastructure. Apart from some second-round financing in his company, Amazon is not involved. Wales believes that helpers will gather around the project, refining its capabilities, just as happened with Wikipedia, and says he is driven by the idea of transparency: that algorithms and methods be clearly explained, rather than being secret processes that lead to suspicions of bias. However, the launch of 'The People's Google', if it happens at all, is still a year or two away.

What is StumbleUpon? It's a fast-burgeoning 'social networking' site staffed by Canadians based in San Francisco that can deliver more worldwide traffic to your Web pages than Yahoo! In their own words: It is the best way to discover great Web sites and more - all submitted and rated by the StumbleUpon community. There are registered users in most countries and they have reviewed almost 8,000,000 sites so far.

You may have heard of The Borrowers and The Wombles, but what about Freegans - dedicated followers of the latest fashion for middle class foraging? The freegan philosophy of "ethical eating" argues that capitalism and mass production exploit workers, animals and the environment. Adam Weissman, a freegan activist in America, says freeganism grew out of the radical 1960s yippie movement but also has affinities with the hobos of the Great Depression who travelled around the country by stealing rides on the railways. "I pity people who have not figured out this lifestyle," he said. "I take long vacations from work, I have all kinds of consumer goods, and I eat a really healthy diet of really wonderful food: white asparagus and cactus fruit, three different kinds of mushrooms and four different kinds of pre-cut salad. And I’m just thinking of what is in my refrigerator right now".

The government is culling at least 500 Web sites in recognition, it says, that users are more attracted to all-in-one 'super sites' like the multi-faceted portal offered by the BBC. The cuts form part of the Transformational Government strategy, launched in November 2005, and will see relevant content from closed sites transferred to www.direct.gov.uk and www.businesslink.gov.uk. Pat McFadden, the Minister for Transformational Government, said the slimming exercise will improve operational efficiency and deliver massive savings.

The Sun newspaper's Web site gained 56 million new readers and clocked a record 1.2 billion page impressions in 2006, according to analysts Hitbox. A redesign early in the year allowed for video streaming and podcasting, and added a number of other new features including MYSun social networking, Sun Bingo, an online reader classified channel, Sun Local, plus revamped Singles and mobile services.

Steve Jobs options scandal? What Steve Jobs options scandal? With 21 million iPods sold, $7.1 billion in revenues, including a billion-dollar fourth quarter profit (even iTunes sales were stronger than expected) and 2007 promising the debut of more consumer products than ever before, investors could be forgiven for forgetting about the whole options backdating scandal that has pervaded Apple Computer for so long. In fact, Apple is the new Google in the consumer electronics industry, gaining whopping media attention with every new product launch, while posting the kind of growth - 78 per cent net income gain last quarter - that might make anyone overlook a little creativity in accounting procedures. Investors are the only ones who could make enough noise about the reported wrongdoings to bother anyone at the Apple core, and that just isn't going to happen, not when the company is posting such heavenly numbers.

Apple still needs every extra penny it can get, apparently. Confirming rumours that some users will have to pay to get faster Wi-Fi, the company says yes, it's true, they will be making a charge of £1 for activating a feature already built into their MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops.

Handy tool: Copy songs and playlists from your iPod to your PC. Get music from your PC to your iPod. You don't need iTunes to do it.

Gone phishing: Google geht zu vermissen in Deutschland!

A new search engine, Midomi, lets users search for songs by singing them into a microphone at their computer. "Sing as little as 5 seconds of the song, as much as you can remember, and we search the database and bring up the song for you," said Midomi CEO Keyvan Mohajer. Midomi works by combining voice recognition technology, search, and a large music database. Standard-form keyboard searches can also be made. Some stored sound clips are taken from albums by the artists who first recorded the song, but there are almost always a few amateur renditions available too. Anyone can contribute to the database by singing at the site's online recording studio.