Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Cast your vote in PC Pro's 2007 Awards to win a £1,000 laptop.

Register with MyFootballClub and you will be among 50,000 fans invited to become members in a scheme to raise £1.4m to buy a British football team. Each member will be an equal partner, able to vote on transfers, player selection and all major decisions affecting the club. Registration is free until all the applications are in, after which potential shareholders will be asked to confirm their interest and pay £35. The man behind the scheme is former football journalist Will Brooks, who supports Fulham. However, the most likely buy-out target - voted for by most pre-registrants so far - is Leeds United.

As mentioned in last month's newsletter, The Daily Telegraph's 'Your Business' section has introduced Launchpad, an exchange where entrepreneurs can tell the world about their new enterprise. It offers a substantial marketing bonus that costs nothing. If you e-mail up to 100 words to yourbusiness@telegraph.co.uk saying when your business started, something about the people behind it and why you think it will be a success, your article could appear in "Britain's biggest circulation quality daily newspaper" as well as online at telegraph.co.uk/money. Note that Launchpad is open only to businesses that are about to start trading or have been trading for less than three months.

Google has announced a pilot project to support third-party developers of gadgets, the cornucopia of items you can choose for your Google home page. It is offering (1) grants of $5,000 to developers who’ve built gadgets for Google’s directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views, and (2) seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who’d like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform.

If your Web site includes news content, you can submit your pages for inclusion in Google News. Later, if your site has been accepted as a source, you can keep the search engine up to date with your latest articles by submitting a News Sitemap, using the facility that Google News introduced for Webmasters last year.

A 24-year-old from South East Cornwall has become a multi-millionaire after selling his Internet music site. Richard Jones, from Saltash, became £19m richer when Last.fm was sold to US media giant CBS. The former Saltash Community School pupil joined Last.fm in 2003 after designing a system called Audioscrobbler for his dissertation at Southampton University. Audioscrobbler enables Last.fm to build profiles of their customers and recommend music by tracking what they listen to. Richard and his partners still run the site from London. "The deal feels good", he said.

Another 20-something has turned down $1 billion for his company, which Advertising Age says is Google's biggest rival. Google may have an "operating system for search" and a bank of data about each of its users, but the future according to Ad Age belongs to Michael Zuckerberg's Facebook, the second-largest social network on the Web. Facebook has grown at a stunning rate - it has 30 million users and shows no signs of stopping. Although Google is best known as a search engine, it makes its money from businesses' marketing and promotion spending, where it's thought that Facebook could gain the upper hand.

Last month, Zen Internet introduced its new Zen IP VPN service - a Virtual Private Network solution that enables businesses to securely connect offices, remote workers and partners - wherever they might be - as part of one 'share the whole' access system. This flexible new facility will be invaluable to any company faced with managing personnel and resources across multiple sites and different geographical locations.

This summer will see Zen launching a new range of Linux-based dedicated servers, combining the performance and reliability that customers have grown accustomed to from Managed Windows Servers with the control of full administrator access. The new server range will be suitable for hosting high availability Web sites, databases, applications and e-mail services - all without the cost and commitment of purchasing, setting up and hosting the hardware yourself. Register your interest now to get full details.

The June issue cover story of Business 2.0 magazine named him "The man who owns the Internet". Until then, Kevin Ham had kept a very low profile. No one knew this Vancouver based entrepreneur was sitting on a $300 million empire. As the owner of 100,000s of domain names, mostly acquired by exploiting a loophole that allowed him to pick up names on a free trial basis as soon as they became available, Ham gets 30 million unique visitors a month and is able to make $70 million a year from hosting ads on his portfolio, which includes Hoteldeals.com, Weddingcatering.com and his less lucrative personal favourites: God.com and Satan.com. He gets most visitors to his domains via 'type-in traffic' when people use the address bar of their browsers rather than searching on Google or another search engine. His biggest deal to date was gaining the rights to mistyped domains that end in .cm instead of .com, so that he gets the traffic if someone types Google.cm, instead of Google.com. Ham put this deal together by contacting the Government of Cameroon in Africa and offering them a revenue percentage if they directed all their traffic to him. Cameroon's domain names end in .cm. He plans to arrange similar deals in other countries, including Colombia, where domain names end in .co.

Seattle company Marchex says it has launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites, publishing more than one billion pages of content to bait people surfing online. These are third-rate resources, originally filled with advertising, but now carrying more than 15 million business listings in sundry categories. Marchex 'scrapes' the Web for reviews and other content to fill the sites, which have credible names like Cuisine.com, Locksmiths.com and BayAreaHotels.com. Marchex paid specialist company Name Development $164 million to create the 100,000 sites and claims to trap 30 million unique visitors per month who are tempted by the likely looking domain names.

Splogs are trashy blogs with mostly stolen content that are published by spurious bloggers - sploggers - for no other purpose than to carry advertising that Google pays them to display on a pay-per-click basis. If you set up a few thousand splogs, use Google's AdSense ad-serving programme to line the pages of the blog with click-through adverts, says a Guardian report, the money will roll in while polluting search results for everyone else. Google enables the whole process, providing easy blog creation, free Web space, auto-fed adverts and a regular cheque in the post to reward your efforts. There are millions of splogs and most of them use Web space provided by Google. Some estimates suggest that three-quarters of the supposed blogs hosted by Google are actually run by sploggers and that nothing is done to discourage them, although it would be easy to keep most of the tricksters out. Splogs are said to make up only 1% of the blogs published at rival service WordPress.com.

(Spiked Book Review). In Britain, where a lot of the innovation that made the modern world was begun, industry is in a poor state, according to economics correspondents Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson. Their sharp critique of Blair’s Britain, Fantasy Island, is a funny and often angry polemic against the empty boosting of the Knowledge Economy, a weightless world where we can all ‘live on thin air’, getting rich on intellectual property while the Chinese dirty their hands making stuff. In fact, most productive activity uses technology that would be called redundant in the pages of Wired or PC World: world bicycle output (100 million) has outstripped car production (40 million) since 1970; B-52 bombers that ceased production in 1962 will still be flying in 2040; the world’s richest man is not Bill Gates, but a carpenter, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad; the 1950s-designed Morris Oxford car still rolls off Hindustan Motors’ production line in West Bengal.

Web Worker Daily columnist Ryan Healy, a self-described member of "Generation Y", claims it's a force that's about to revolutionise the workplace. He says younger workers want the freedom to do work wherever they are - Starbucks, home, or wherever - rather than office "cubicle farms", which are "a thing of the past. Nobody likes them and, thanks to new technologies, the majority of companies don’t even need them".

There aren't enough men to fill the UK's IT skills gap. But the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reckons there are 50,000 qualified women that could meet the shortage of skilled workers in science, technology and engineering. All they need is a little encouragement.

Casio's latest EXILIM Digital Camera release is embracing the Youtube phenomenon by including YouTube capture mode software for recording, storing and uploading video. Following a trend already apparent in recent product releases from Apple and LG, the new EX-S880 and EX-Z77 models facilitate multiple movie uploads directly to YouTube and other video sharing Web sites as well as adding optimisation for eBay photos.

PC World magazine is recommending two software helpers to back-up your DVDs, one to let you use Windows Media Center or another DVD media player to play the DVDs on your PC after they're stored on your hard drive and one to produce copies in any number of video file formats, including VCD, SVCD, DIVX and AVI.

Imagine moving around town and having high-speed wireless Internet everywhere without needing to switch networks every few hundred feet. That's the promise - talked about for years - of Wi-Max, which stands for worldwide interoperability for microwave access. Unlike Wi-Fi, which was designed to send signals no more than 300 feet, only a few Wi-Max transmitters are needed to blanket an entire city with high-speed Internet connectivity. If it's widely adopted, WiMax technology could soon transform the Internet and mobile wireless industries. Compared to DSL service and 2 or even 3G mobile phone networks, WiMax allows more data to travel faster over a much wider territory.

Google is leading a $25 million investment into British company, Ubiquisys, which is developing hardware that lets mobile phones run on home Wi-Fi networks at landline rates. Based in Swindon, Ubiquisys makes so-called femtocell access points for the residential market. Poor indoor coverage often prevents mobile customers using mobile phone services at home and is impeding take-up of multimedia 3G offerings, says Ubiquisys. Femtocell is a technology that improves transmission of IPTV and high-bandwidth services. The company says its ZoneGate femtocell product - a small plug-and-play device that hooks into a home broadband connection - offers users high-quality coverage around the house at landline rates using an existing home broadband gateway or one that includes Wi-Fi, DSL, Ethernet, phone ports and USB. "Our mission is to empower mobile carriers to bring compelling service packages into homes using our ZoneGate solution", said Ubiquisys CEO Chris Gilbert.

A BBC Panorama report on the supposed dangers of Wi-Fi networks in schools (see last month's newsletter: http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=7d0) was heavily criticised in the days following the broadcast as "poor science" and "irresponsibly sensationalist" and sparked widespread debate. Wi-Fi is such a new addition to modern life that no scientist can say with hand on heart that it is perfectly safe - particularly in the long term, but there is no good evidence that it is harmful. Most scientists in the field believe that Wi-Fi is safer than mobile phone radiation because Wi-Fi devices transmit over shorter distances and operate at lower power. The Health Protection Agency says that a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes. Panorama wasn't the first BBC programme to look at the issue. In April, a Newsnight report backing the view that Wi-Fi networks were perfectly safe also stimulated controversy.

Windows Vista has been out for 5 months, so - naturally - it's time to start talking about the next version of Windows. For those who want to see what Redmond is cooking up for delivery in about three years from now, here's the running rumour mill.

After the wrinklies version of My Generation by the Zimmers, it should be no surprise to see a social networking site - 'FaceBook for the over 50s' - thriving and living well at Eons.com, "inspiring a generation of boomers and seniors to live the biggest life possible". Eons was launched by Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com.

The entire Internet has crashed. It's true. No, really. Watch this breaking news newscast.

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.