Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Callers to Zen Internet have been asking about the music they listen to if they are asked to hold. The songs they hear are by Will Tang, taken from his forthcoming album, Everything Changes. If the name sounds familiar, it might be because it's Zen director Richard Tang's brother, or it might be because you've already seen it in the music press. 'Everything Changes' is the first release from Zen Music, a partnership between Will and Richard that brings together their expertise in music and digital media. The new album is not due for release until next month, but Zen Music has a free download of one of the tracks available now. Check the link below. Businesses interested in using Will's songs for their own hold music can e-mail Zen Music at simon@zenmusic.co.uk - or call 0845 058 9224 for more information.

Zen Internet has announced the launch of Zen Broadband Voice, a product that allows customers to make low-cost phone calls using their broadband connection. Calls to other Zen Broadband Voice users and calls to Zen Internet are free of charge and the £4.99 per month package includes 1,000 minutes of calls to UK landlines. You can try Zen Broadband Voice with no risk and no obligation on a flexible one month contract. To mark the launch of this new service, there's a special offer on the recommended hardware, the SpeedTouch 780WL, a wireless router with integrated analogue telephone adapter. Sign-up today, or find more information at www.zen.co.uk/voice.

Television companies are convinced that the biggest Internet opportunity for their industry is not digital downloads of programmes, but streaming over the Web with advertising. American TV networks began streaming video experiments last year. An ABC survey found Internet viewers believed they were getting "a great deal" by being allowed to see streamed programmes free, even if it meant watching commercials that could not be skipped. This year, streaming is moving beyond testing to widespread adoption and content will be available through a variety of partners as well as via TV company Web sites. AOL has already signed to show a range of popular series, including "Desperate Housewives". In spite of the industry's optimism, there are still concerns about streaming. Delivering video to large numbers of consumers is taxing on Internet infrastructure and it doesn't come cheap. (Linked here, the full text of the Financial Times report requires a membership log-in, but there's a free trial).

Finding videos in search engine results - including Google Universal Search listings - is still the exception for most queries and even searchers using video-specific search engines like Blinkx or Pixsy may not find the results they're expecting. Video search is still in its infancy, with both crawlers and search engine users learning how to improve results. Webmasters can help by optimising video content on their sites and Enquiro has some timely tips, best practices and rationale on video optimisation to get you started.

Apple has been in some famous battles in the past, going toe to toe at various times with IBM, Microsoft and, of course, Apple Corps (the Beatles' music company). Now it's facing a belligerent NBC Universal. The media giant has a storehouse of thousands of hours of video and music content that it doesn't want to share too cheaply. Apple has its wildly popular iPod and the iTunes music service to feed and likes to set its own pricing. Can NBC shake Apple's stranglehold on portable media consumption and go it alone, or will both sides have to cut their opponent a bigger slice?

Galileo, Europe's answer to America's GPS, will be developed with public money under a proposal by the European Commission, leaving the EU as the sole owner of the service. One of the main justifications for launching Galileo is that the USA's GPS is ultimately at the mercy of the U.S. Department of Defense, and could be jammed for strategic reasons. Galileo, on the other hand, is intended purely for civilian use. Most countries are backing the project and only a few EU member states, including the UK, have expressed any doubt that there is a real need for a European owned GPS.

After an 18-month-long probe, police raids in several German cities have resulted in the arrests of 10 Russians, Ukrainians and Germans involved in "phishing" - running e-mail scams that tricked Internet users into revealing personal or financial details.

This weekend is the grand finale of the world's best-known beer festival. Here's the official Web site for the annual event in Munich that celebrates Bavaria's favourite liquid refreshment in famous style. It features history, photos, details about the current festival (map of beer tents, festival events calendar) and travel and tourist information. October 7th is the last day.

The Internet gets a lot of measurement, but unlike print and TV, where a few systems have held sway for many years, the Internet is surrounded by an embarrassment of audience monitors and number estimators. We have comScore and NetRatings, who collect behavioural and demographic data from panels of Internet users. There are companies like Alexa, which collects information from Web users who have downloaded and installed their toolbar, and Hitwise, which collects data from ISPs. There are some new entrants, like Quantcast and Compete, that offer free online access to profiles of a Web site's audience. Quantcast combines data from advertisers, publishers, ISPs, and ad networks; Compete combines data from panelists, ISPs and toolbars. Then there are the Web analytics providers - like Google Analytics, Omniture, WebSideStory, WebTrends, and Unica - supplying 'site-centric data', with the focus on the activity that goes on when visitors reach a site. Web site owners can install and run two separate analytics packages and end up generating two divergent sets of site-centric data. It's a reflection of the lack of agreed standards that applies across the whole of the Internet bean counting community, and it's a big community. One of the consequences of the Internet being the most measurable of mediums is that it ends up with the most measurers. In an attempt to get the major players on common ground, The Web Analytics Association has published a set of Web Analytics Definitions to get agreement on exactly what is meant and what is being reported when they use terms of common currency like Page Views, Visits, Unique Visitors, New Visitor, Repeat Visitor and Return Visitor.

Don't let the kids fool you - the Internet is no longer the domain of young, male geeks. The over-50s are the UK's heaviest users and everyone is shopping online more frequently, regardless of the crime statistics.

Publishing the UK's largest investigation yet into possible health problems from mobile technology, scientists said the six-year programme - which cost over £8 million - found no evidence that short-term mobile-phone use affected brain function or could cause brain cancer. Are there still long-term issues to be concerned about?

London-based Trutap was the only British firm invited to San Francisco's Techcrunch 40 conference last month, where it presented its free mobile service software for users who want to easily combine instant and group messaging, update their blogs on the move and post photographs online via their mobile phones. "Piece of cake to use", says Trutap, "just like sending a message", but with support for Blogger, Blog.com, Livejournal, Flickr, Friendster, Xanga and others.

Also launching at Techcrunch was Powerset, a new 'natural language' search engine, in development since last year and now at the consumer testing stage. The goal of natural search is to make online information hunting much easier by letting users ask questions as they would when speaking naturally. In the words of Barney Pell, Powerset's chief executive: "Our system reads every single sentence in every single document and extracts meaning from them". "Move over Google", says Business Week's Robert Hof in a piece that discusses the Powerset Labs testbed procedures and the technology behind natural search.

It's cheerfully cheap, has an Intel chipset, is designed for school children, and weighs only two pounds. Can a £100 laptop cut the grown-up mustard for day-to-day computing? PC Pro's David Bayon finds out.

Former Intel chief and computer industry grandee Gordon Moore believes that his famous 'Moore's Law' has another 15 years to run before it might hit the buffers, or at least have the brakes applied. It is already over 30 years since Moore predicted that PC computing speed or, originally, the density of components on a piece of silicon, would double every two years and cost less at the same time. Now, he thinks that in another decade and a half or so, the industry could hit a fundamental barrier that will end the law's successful run. "But these barriers that look like they're impenetrable seem to disappear as we get closer to them", he said. "That has continually amazed me".

Despite all the new hardware advancements for PCs, the operating system still plays a major role in overall performance. ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes assumed that if he threw enough hardware at Windows Vista, he would get better performance, or at least something similar, to that produced by XP. After using 'The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion' to test his theory, he says: "I was wrong".

Midnight queues of UK gamers waited for the launch of Microsoft's Halo 3 last week and it sold almost 2 million copies in the first eight hours in the US. But if blasting aliens isn't your cup of tea, video game analyst Billy Pidgeon offers alternatives worth considering, including a role playing game with a strange take on the death of Chopin.

One of the best e-mail clients in the competitive market that existed before the dominating spread of Microsoft's Outlook is now completely free. Qualcomm, the company that owned the software, stopped selling it in May and has made the code open source. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops free software including the Firefox Web browser, has already started distribution, under the name Penelope.

With a growing crowd of 'people search' search engines (Spock, Wink, etc) all claiming to do something "better than Google" does it, it was inevitable that somebody would set out to put their claims to the test. Web Worker Daily put Spock, SquidWho, WhoZat and Wink to work looking for people, including a well-known Web expert, their columnist (less well-known), and a friend with very little Web presence. From the results, it seems that although each engine has its merits, none of them is ready to be crowned the outright people-searching Google beater that some wishful thinkers have been looking for.

The UK has a new search engine that offers the chance to win prizes every time you search. Called Wabbadabba, the engine awards up to 15 prizes per day at random, ranging from Amazon vouchers to TVs. Registration is quick and easy - and no personal details are required until you win something. "We aim to add a bit of fun to a task that has become a part of everyday life for most people who use a computer either at work or at home. With the average person typically doing a dozen searches a day, that's a lot of chances to win," said Ben Akin-Smith of Wabbadabba, which delivers its UK results using an index provided by Yahoo!