Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly July 2007 Podcast

Thanks to Cambridgeshire Web solutions company Silicon Bay, who regularly record newsletters, custom audio tours and business promotions for online audio presentation, you can download a podcast of this issue of the newsletter, subscribe to the newsletter RSS feed, or listen to the MP3 audio version by visiting the Zen Monthly archive page.

Britain is in the midst of a Wi-Fi revolution with offices, homes and classrooms going wireless - but there is concern that the technology could carry some health risks. A recent BBC Panorama investigation raised further questions when it revealed that radio frequency radiation levels in some schools were three times higher than in the main beam from a mobile phone mast. The broadcast can be seen here: http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=79d and this link: http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=79f provides a transcript.

A Government taskforce is to target carbon emissions by the IT industry. The "Green Shift" group aims to cut CO2 emissions caused by IT hardware, claiming it is responsible for an estimated 35 million tonnes each year.

Small firms can gain from green business policies without breaking the bank says Kim Stoddart. The founder of ethical media relations company Green Rocket offers ten small-footprint steps that businesses can take to become environmentally friendly.

Summer or not, the cost of powering and cooling server hardware is fast becoming a critical issue for IT managers as the demand for ever more computing muscle in the data centre continues to grow. What can be done? ZDNet's Alan Stevens examines some of the options.

The green data centre: Is it an oxymoron? In many organisations, power consumption in individual server racks is climbing as high as 24 kilowatts per rack, using the same energy as 10 electric ovens. It's not surprising that it has been one of the first places the IT industry has looked at in addressing its over-zealous consumption of power, says ZDNet.

Guiyu is a town in China where old computers go to die. As the western world comes to terms with the need to dispose of old and broken IT equipment without landfill overspill or harming the local environment, small towns in developing countries are becoming dumping grounds for hardware in need of recycling.

Microsoft says it is offering UK users a free Web site set-up with free domain name and Web hosting, plus "Easy-to-use Web site design tools" to put a site together, 500 MB of Web site storage space and associated e-mail services. Zen Monthly checked with Microsoft for reassurance that all the elements in this Microsoft Office Live package are provided free of charge. (It was easy to see how some of them could be given away, but freely chosen top level domain names cost money, which would mean that Microsoft would be parting with actual cash). The response, from the Office Live Support Team, said: "It will be free this month and next, yes, and totally free of charge for the longest period of time. When you sign up for Office Live Basics, there will be no charge on your credit card. We only require credit cards during sign up for verification purposes. For as long as you're subscribed under the Basics account, your domain name and e-mail account will be yours".

British companies buying pay-per-click advertising on Google are hoping that eBay's decision last month to stop using the search engine's Adwords network in the US will also mean a permanent end to the company's notoriously ubiquitous ads appearing in the UK. At one time, eBay advertising seemed to use the complete Oxford dictionary as its keyword list, with auto-generated text offering politicians, policemen and plutonium for sale - and the ads still claim that you can buy blood, sand and air on eBay in Britain, as well as anything that an independent retailer might be selling. Company spokesman Hani Durzy said the decision to pull the Google ads was "an instance in a continued experiment eBay does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget", but commentators point to the rift between Google and eBay over the auction site's refusal to accept Google Checkout as a payment method as the more likely cause. eBay prefers rival payment processor PayPal, which it bought in 2002. The argument may be settled soon; eBay spent an estimated $25m (£12.6m) with Google in the US last year and some analysts believe that negotiations to win back the business will succeed within a week or two. (They were right. eBay made a new agreement to re-start its advertising with Google a few days ago).

A new search engine for PayPal users has been launched that lists products from multiple sites by assembling them into an attractively illustrated shopping catalogue at no charge to the retailer.

The Daily Telegraph's Your Business page has been redesigned, with a set of new features on setting up businesses that includes the chance to pitch commercial ideas and expansion plans to Doug Richard from the BBC's Dragons' Den. The section also introduces Launchpad, a new ideas and marketing exchange, and a series of articles and podcasts on first-time business planning by the paper's resident sales guru, Mike Southon.

Two successful British businessmen have introduced Ideas Volcano, an online storehouse of business ideas that can be taken at no charge and developed by anyone. James Murray Wells, the 20-something multi-millionaire founder of GlassesDirect.co.uk, and Oli Barrett, founder of new ideas company Connected Capital, are behind the free resource. More than 100 entrepreneurs and advisers with more business plans than they can handle have already signed up to donate to the ideas store. The founders say they were inspired by sites like www.halfbakery.com, a "communal database of fictitious inventions" in the US, but wanted to create a practical resource for the UK where viable business ideas would get wider attention.

Xing, the European social networking site for business contacts, has signed a deal that makes its network bigger than US competitor LinkedIn. It is partnering with ZoomInfo, the largest fact-checked proprietary database in the world, that includes some 36 million business profiles. Xing’s two million members will now be able to search and access basic ZoomInfo information free, giving Xing a much wider reach than LinkedIn’s 11 million member coverage. The merger is most significant because ZoomInfo’s profiles are from businesses in the English-speaking world, where Hamburg based Xing has lacked strength.

From Digg and del.icio.us to Simpy and Shadows - Threadwatch editor Chris Winfield bookmarks the top two dozen social networking sites on the Net from a business promotion perspective.

The older generation is generally reticent about revealing personal information on the Web, but teenagers and 20-somethings seem to have no problem growing up online. Now a Wall Street Journal report is claiming that many of them will be turned down by prospective employers because of personal information found on the Internet. HR departments are routinely using search engines to check candidates and then trawling social networking sites for their personal profiles. Sooner or later, applicants will realise it's probably a good idea to take down certain photos and most of their video clips before answering any more situations vacant ads.

The Web industry scoffed when Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton bought the domain Business.com for $7.5 million in 1999. At that time, the purchase set a record as the highest price for a domain name. The pair turned Business.com into a Web portal that receives conversion fees for sending traffic to sites that offer real products and services. Now the duo are ready to sell, and sources say Business.com could fetch upward of $300 million. Not a bad return, even when you consider that the company posted $15 million in earnings before taxes this year. The New York Times and Dow Jones are interested in buying.

The Internet has added 15 million Web sites thus far in 2007, roughly on pace with growth in 2006, when the Web gained a record 30.9 million sites. You can check a few of them, highlighted at Startup Search, a directory that keeps up with the most likely new business prospects, product launches and "new Web technology companies at the beginning stages of their growth".

Netscape has a new Web browser. Navigator 9 taps into Web 2.0 and comes equipped with more than a dozen new features.

The Opera Mini Simulator shows you what your Web site looks like on a mobile phone with the Opera browser. Check to see how your site holds up on a mobile device with this free simulator.

Less is infinitely more, says Charles Jennings, a Windows defector who bypassed the Mac and went on safari to discover alternative operating systems named SuSe, Ubuntu and Mandriva before finding ultimate happiness as a ZenWalker.

Zen Internet's ongoing network expansion has reached its next planned stage, with the introduction of a new Point of Presence (PoP) in Leeds. The new Yorkshire site will ensure that customer bandwidth and service needs continue to be met ahead of demand. David Wylie, Zen's Principal Engineer, explained some of the additional benefits of the new facility, which is close enough to the company's existing locations in Rochdale and Manchester to allow dark fibre links directly between sites, facilitating virtually unlimited bandwidth growth. "With this extra network link there is also a physically separate network route to London, other than our HQ and Manchester links. If there was ever a regional power failure, Leeds is far enough away not to be affected, providing us with additional cover in the UK. We have also invested in new network equipment at Leeds that has the capability to be expanded to handle huge bandwidths in a scalable fashion".

Tate Britain is inviting members of the public to contribute photographs through the community and photo-sharing Web site Flickr for a new exhibition: "How We Are: 100 Years Of Photographing Britain". More a 'who we are' portrait of the nation than a history of changing landscapes since the invention of the medium, the gallery is displaying work by well-known photographers, such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, David Bailey, Martin Parr, Elaine Constantine and Tom Hunter, alongside less familiar names. And well-known subjects - including Brunel, Queen Victoria, Mick Jagger and Sean Connery - appear next to ‘ordinary’ or unknown people, like the street waifs at Barnardo’s home for working and destitute lads; fishing communities of the late nineteenth century; the immigrant clientele in the Belle Vue Studio in Bradford in the early 1950s; beauty contestants in Southport in 1967; and clubbers in 1980s London.

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Rachel Carson, one of three women who wrote revolutionary books that changed the world. In the 1960s, Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' brought first-time worldwide attention to the harm to human health and the environment wrought by pesticides that was the starting point of today's global environmental movement. Months later, in 1964, the publication of Ruth Harrison’s 'Animal Machines' forever changed the western world’s practice of animal agriculture, introducing then-radical ideas of 'animal welfare' and an inkling of 'animal rights' for the first time. The ensuing outcry led to the Brambell Committee Report in 1965, establishing new principles for the rearing of farm animals and the foundation of the Government's Farm Animal Welfare Council in 1979, on which Ruth Harrison served for many years. It outlawed the worst farming practices, introducing 'The Five Freedoms' and basic rules now commonplace in many countries. Twenty years earlier, Eve Balfour wrote 'The Living Soil', which inspired the foundation of the Soil Association and the organic farming movement with its notion of "sustainability" - a term re-coined in 1987 with the publication of the UN report, 'Our Common Future', which brought the debate on the environmental challenges facing the planet full circle.

Faroo, a German based startup, has launched a P2P search engine that lets users search and browse the Web via P2P technology and uses distributed crawling, indexing and ranking to provide results. Whenever a Faroo user opens a Web page in a browser, it is automatically included in the index, which is not stored on a central server but distributed, making every P2P user part of the system, and replicating the index across multiple nodes to create redundancy.