Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

The Federation of Small Businesses has warned that small companies are failing to make the most of the potential of e-commerce because of worries about online fraudsters. The Federation says that a crack-down is needed to protect businesses and that Internet crime should be given the same status as offences committed against bricks and mortar firms. FSB Chairman, David Croucher-Jones, is also backing proposals that would force banks to take some responsibility for losses incurred as a result of electronic fraud, highlighting the unfair treatment suffered by many small businesses and online retailers who are being penalised by charge-backs resulting from card fraud.

Malicious alterations to Wikipedia pages have been traced to Civil Service computers in Belfast according to WikiScanner, a Web site that tracks anonymous contributors to the online encyclopedia. The misuse by staff using Government computers in Northern Ireland was exposed by the same process that revealed a computer in the Vatican had been used to remove allegations that Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams was involved in murder. Protecting Wikipedia content, even from seemingly innocent notes and alterations, is a daily task for some businesses, as the third link below demonstrates.

Bizwiki is a new British business listing site that anyone can edit. If your company is in the UK and listed in another business directory, it's likely that some details will have been picked up by Bizwiki and used to create an entry without your knowledge. If you 'claim' your business listing, you can become the registered editor for your company's Bizwiki record, which means that you can monitor and, if necessary, remove any incorrect changes made by others.

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.

Adpinion gives visitors to Web sites a way to vote with a thumbs-up or thumbs down on banner ads, depending on whether they like them or not. It is also developing a recommendation engine that tracks the kind of ads you tend to like and then serves them to other users that have shown similar interests. It's a smart idea that no one else is doing quite so simply. The challenge, though, is to get advertisers and publishers to buy into it before a bigger ad network steals the concept. Adopinion is still in beta testing, but you can see it working at several sites like barcoderobot.com.

Vizu, a provider of online polls, has added a new feature for mapping the results of its polls that uses Google Maps to display who voted and how, geographically. The map feature displays every vote for a poll, regardless of which site it comes from. A single poll can be embedded on multiple blogs and sites. The basic version of the service is free.

Edgeio, a company that provides online classified services, is introducing an e-commerce widget for Web publishers, to help them create marketplaces on their own sites. The company lets Web site owners put up their own digital information for sale and allows other sites to resell the information for a cut. Amazon and others have affiliate schemes by which Web publishers earn a percentage fee by directing users to their sites to make online purchases. Edgeio’s offering is different because it lets affiliate sites make sales without having to send their visitors somewhere else. For now, the company is focusing on digital information, such as video, audio and downloadable files, but it hopes to cater for other goods soon.

This issue of the newsletter is available as a podcast, something we've been doing for the last few months. If you are considering podcasting as a company news channel or marketing tool for your own organisation, you might want to check the examples of business podcasts listed at the US-based 'Small Business Trends Radio' Web site, which includes a "Podcasting for Business" how-to podcast. Closer to home, Podcast.Redevelopments.co.uk has a succinct page of step-by-step instruction.

A new hosting service at Zen Internet will offer a 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.

Which? editor, Malcolm Coles says, "It's shocking that Internet service providers can advertise ever-increasing speeds that seem to bear little resemblance to what most people can achieve in reality. If it’s unlikely you’ll reach the advertised speed it should be made clear up front, so that you know with some certainty what you’re buying". New research by the consumer organisation found that over a third of its members had signed-up for broadband packages that offered speeds of "up to" 8Mbps or more, but a test of over 300 connections found that while they promised much, they actually delivered, on average, just 2.7Mbps, while some users were reduced to browsing the Web with connectivity speeds as low as 0.09Mbps.

Mark Cuban, who famously got away with selling a dying duck to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion (where are you now, Broadcast.com?), is touting the idea that "The Internet is dead. It's over". Speaking to operators of high-bandwidth cable systems, Cuban said that apart from YouTube, the Internet is for old people. The future, he said, belongs to intranets, or closed networks, which is what the cable-system operators have. He believes they should get together to create a high-bandwidth alternative to the Internet that would deliver HD video and provide superior platforms for building interactive services. According to Cuban, that's the replacement we need for what he calls the unsustainable, stretched-for-bandwidth mess that the Web has become.

American researchers are working on new ultra-high-frequency radio technology that has achieved a phenomenal 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) wireless data transfer. For reference, that's a DVD-sized chunk of data transferred in a little over 3 seconds - and they're hoping to double that speed within 12 months. With transfer rates like that, high-definition media streaming and file sharing becomes a think-nothing-of-it affair. It's estimated at about three years from hitting the market, but this technology is set to make big waves.

Fauxto (pronounced "photo") has created a Web-based photo editor that might be powerful enough to rival Photoshop. In a launch-day demo, the founders took the Google logo, stuck it on a photographed volunteer's forehead, matched the logo’s background to his skin colour, changed his eye colour, shifted the image to grayscale and, without leaving the interface, uploaded the revised photograph directly to Facebook. Fauxto also allows two people to work on an image at the same time. It may never replace Photoshop completely, but it does beat the Adobe product on price - it's free.

Fuzzwich is offering a new tool called Mini-Vid that lets you create very rudimentary animated clips and publish them on social networks. You choose a set of five characters (or animals, robots, etc) from a list, press record and use the mouse to move them around to music. Marketing possibilities? You can add any text you like in dialogue bubbles and the company plans to introduce 'product placement', making it possible to add products to the animations.

People say they love iTunes, but the copy protection on the music can be a major nuisance. As the battle over Digital Rights Management (DRM) continues, a new approach from Universal Music could help change the tide. They are testing the idea of selling music without Apple-style restrictions to see what will happen.

There's an excellent new Web site that wants to be 'iTunes for the Web'. It lets users upload songs from their iTunes or desktop collections to a Web-based account, so they can access their music from anywhere. It allows track sharing as a 'radio station' to friends, and in turn lets you access their stations. You can also browse the site’s community for genres of music you like. The site has a lot of competition on all sides, from Internet radio companies like Pandora or Last.fm to music storage/player companies like imeem, Mp3tunes, Maestro, MediaMasters and Streampad and many more, but it still looks like a winner.

Venture money continues to flow into video and music content creators at prolific rates. London investment group, Ingenious Media, has raised £40 million to invest in new deals, including finance for comeback albums from past-their-prime rock bands. Last month, it signed UB40. Record labels, hit by rampant piracy and falling profits, have been cutting back on the number of bands they support. With the power of the big record companies diminishing, bands are trying new ways to reach their audiences. Anyone can produce video and music; there are cheap tools to make it look or sound professional and there’s no cost to distribution over the Internet. There’s nothing stopping new talent, or fading stars, from creating their own content on the cheap.

"Nattering nabobs of negativism, including professional complainers like me", says PC World's Stephen Manes, "are all that keep us from a world where marketing and public-relations messages are the only ones that matter". As long as Microsoft is not going to take out magazine ads to proclaim "Lots of incompatibilities remain", somebody else will have to do it. People accuse Steve of being "just too negative all the time", but he says that taking up his pen to dwell on the bright side reflected by marketing messages isn't the way to help his readers discover high-quality, high-value products and services.

What's in a name? Zune, Segway, Rokr, Newton, N-Gage, Dreamcast and more were the product of expensive think tanks, but none of them lived up to expectations when they hit the streets. CNet News has a list of ten devices with allegedly cool names that you may remember from the torrents of hype that preceded the launch of each one, before it turned into a damp squib.

The oldest .com domain names include adobe.com (registered 1986), apple.com (1987) and ibm.com (1986). Bill Gates, famously a late developer in terms of the Internet, apparently waited until 1991 to register microsoft.com. In 2001, Microsoft forgot to renew its passport.com domain name and forgot about hotmail.co.uk when it came up for renewal two years later.

One of the promises of Windows Vista was to make your computer more "digital content friendly" with new ways to work with music, video and photos. If any Windows XP users want a taste of this amicable stuff without having to make the switch to Vista, they can try Microsoft's Photo Story 3 - a free download that makes creating photo slideshows complete with titles, background music, panning effects and even voice annotation amateurishly simple.

Spyware and other sneaky interlopers are still a threat for many Windows users and there are almost as many applications that attempt to fix these vexing problems as there are intruder installations to detect. The latest version of SUPERAntiSpyware, which is free for home users, does better than most. It includes features like complete hard drive scans, the removal of various spyware and adware threats, and process interrogation technology that locates threats anywhere on a given operating system. It is compatible with computers running Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.

Gary Price at Resource Shelf has complied a brief list of science search tools available on the Net. He explored several scholarly searchers including Scirus, Live Search Academic, Google Scholar, Scitopia, Global Science Gateway and CiteSeer.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows. So say Microsoft, plugging their alternative-to-Flash plug-in, and they have a new search engine - Tafiti - designed to show off some of Silverlight's bells and whistles.