Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

British consumers spent more than £7 billion online in the 10-week run-up to Christmas in 2006 and sales during the next two months are expected to top £10 billion as we rush through the festive season once again. New Business magazine offers its top tips on how companies should prepare their Web sites for the busiest period of the year.

Going green heads the list of predicted shifts in IT for 2008. Moving towards "Green IT" and getting things together with unified communications will be next year's top two trends, according to analysts at Gartner Research.

Britain's National Physical Laboratory has set out on a two-year campaign to triple the number of small businesses that use it. The NPL, which specialises in "the advance of measurement", plans its own small-firm incubation centre, called AIMtech, that will house companies seeking to exploit scientific breakthroughs made by its own scientists. Steve McQuillan, NPL's managing director, has set a target of advising 12,000 firms during the next two years. He says the initial free consultation and subsidised in-depth consultancy and project work which the lab can offer should be useful to far more firms than currently use it. While the institution is working on such subjects as nanotechnology and the measurement of radiation, it can apply its knowledge for a wide range businesses. Examples include a cheese producer and a biscuit maker. One wanted to work out the optimum time to allow his niche-market cheeses to mature, while the other was keen to find out how long his biscuits stayed fresh in the different kinds of packaging on offer. The NPL can be contacted direct, or via a Business Link or regional development agency.

Picture a school with no daily rush through traffic to get there, where children could turn up for lessons in pyjamas if they wanted to. It's called InterHigh, the UK's first Internet school, founded by former teachers in Wales as a response, they say, to a growing demand for "more choice". Choice is a thorny issue at this time of year, when families enter the annual lottery race for suitable secondary school places. Ofsted reports tell anxious parents that more than half of England's secondary schools are not good enough. It's hardly surprising that thousands of British children are already being schooled at home. As disaffection with mainstream education increases, could virtual schooling offer a better solution? Pupils of InterHigh log on to school at 9.15 sharp every morning, each on their own laptops, and complete lessons in virtual classrooms. Each student is equipped with a headset to communicate with their teachers or classmates, some as far away as Australia and Africa. There is also a whiteboard, Power Point facility and "follow me" browser, which every student can see from their screens. If they need to ask the teacher something, they fire off a question using a private instant-messaging service. Although experts say it would be a mistake to assume the virtual world can mimic the richness of personal contact and the daily knocks of playground politics, "technology has allowed us to raise the bar in terms of what we expect for our children's education and the choices we can consider," says Jacqui Daniell, co-director of InterHigh.

The government may crack down on ISPs in an attempt to stop illegal file sharing. Lord Triesman, the parliamentary under-secretary for innovation, universities and skills, said it was unlikely that "there are going to be successful voluntary schemes between the creative industries and ISPs" to prevent users downloading music and films via peer-to-peer (P2P) sites - and the government would have to legislate. The Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) says ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope. Renowned blogger Cory Doctorow describes the idea as "misbegotten". "It represents the opinion of someone who doesn't understand technology very well and hasn't really thought through the implications of what he's promising", he said. "You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who's an actual computer scientist involved in digital signal processing who believes that you can accurately identify copyrighted works with any kind of reliability".

Last week, The Guardian launched Guardian America, a new site aimed at Americans. Editor Michael Tomasky explained to potential readers: "It's the US-based Web site of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK with content that we originate here in the US to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers". The reference to Manchester, where the paper began, is a useful tag to include in America where the publication is often referred to by its original name, The Manchester Guardian. (Most users checking the site from the UK will find they are redirected from the advertised address to www.guardian.co.uk/america).

The Independent newspaper is using Proximic, a new program written by German mathematician Thomas Nitsche, to locate archived material by using letter patterns instead of words and phrases. The software, which ignores language and works equally well in German, Japanese and most mother tongues in addition to English, can also match relevant advertising to Web page content. In theory, this makes Proximic ideal for delivering advertising for the mass of news and user-generated content posted daily on blogs and social-networking sites around the Web, which often defies categorisation by established algorithms. Proximic is showing off its technology via a free Firefox plug-in that produces a sidebar to match the content of a Web page with additional articles or other information on the wider Internet.

It seems a search engine is launched or re-launched every few weeks and now it seems that Baidu, the hugely popular Chinese engine, is moving into the European arena. Baidu's technology is built around Chinese languages, which could make the westward shift difficult, but recent expansion into Japan appears to be going well and the company has set up an office in continental Europe to mount "a serious challenge to Google's domination". Google tried moving in the opposite direction, with less success. Baidu retains almost 60 per cent of the huge and still expanding Chinese search market, where Google manages less than 20 per cent.

Another search site that might be operating in the UK soon is Microsoft's latest acquisition - a comparison shopping engine, inexplicably named Jellyfish, that shares its revenue with users. "You use Jellyfish.com just like you would any other shopping search engine to find the right product at the best price. But when you actually buy something from a store in our engine, we share at least half of what we earn by connecting you to that store. All you need to do is sign up for an account to earn cash back. There are no fees or hidden charges". Here’s an example search result, complete with details of how much you would get back in cash.

Last month, Bill Gates proclaimed that it's time to bring the business phone into the digital age and revolutionise business communications in the process. TechRepublic's Jason Hiner examines Microsoft's broad ambitions in unified communications and how it could impact IT.

With all the anti-spam laws it has in place, you wouldn't expect to see the US named as the primary source of the world's nuisance e-mail traffic. You'd probably guess it was China, Russia, South Korea or Brazil. But the latest spam report from security firm Sophos says that almost one third of the planet's Internet junk mail is generated in the US, which is much more than the 10 per cent that rival culprits South Korea and China manage between them.

The Generations Network, operator of Ancestry.com, has received $300 million from Spectrum Equity Investors, a Silicon Valley buyout firm. Ancestry.com has just launched $200 DNA testing for its members to help resolve mysteries about their ancestors. The new service comes at a time when a number of other companies are offering sophisticated DNA services, but Ancestry.com’s DNA service combines DNA testing with its collection of 5 billion names in family trees and historical records. The company says it has 15 million users and will let them take a cheek-swab test and compare DNA test results in its database, so that they can "prove (or disprove) family legends, discover living relatives they never knew existed" and check other users with similar last names to see if and how they are related. Family tree research can have surprising results. US presidential hopeful Barack Obama found out that he was the eighth cousin of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Next New Networks, a new company launching online TV channels, has bought BarelyPolitical.com, creator of the viral video, "I Got A Crush On Obama", which starred aspiring model and actress Amber Lee Ettinger as The Obama Girl. Her song about the would-be Democratic presidential candidate, with lines like "Universal health care reform, it makes me warm," got 3 million hits and 10,000 comments in two months after being posted on YouTube. BarelyPolitical will focus on producing political comedy shows on NNN, with its videobloggers and correspondents contributing content.

Hull has a Web site for the 2007 commemoration by the east-coast port of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in England. William Wilberforce, from Hull, introduced the "parliamentary bill to end the slave trade that was passed in the House of Commons in 1807 and throughout the British Empire in 1833." The site includes background about Wilberforce, the slave trade between 1776 and 1807, and current human trafficking and human rights concerns. "There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade", according to Wilberforce2007.

If you favour the 'don't fix it, you might break it' approach to software upgrading, you will sympathise with PC World's grumpy old man, Steve Bass, who hates to change anything until somebody makes him do it.

Deep pocketed Web giant Google continued its spending spree in October with the acquisition of Finnish start-up 'micro-blog' Jaiku, which specialises in RSS consolidation and information delivery to mobile devices, fuelling further talk of a Google phone.

Google's co-founders have added a Boeing 757 to their fleet of aircraft. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, would not comment about the new plane, which joins a Boeing 767 and a helicopter on the search engine tarmac. The giant jet, designed to carry large groups, will have its effect on the environment mitigated through the purchase of carbon offsets, according to Google spokesman Matt Furman.

Richard Brandt discusses the merits and flaws of Relevant Mind, another new Web 2.0 amalgam service - this time blending social media and product reviews - that aims to use human power to sift through the mass of product information on the Net and offers an alternative to the usual kind of online product reviews. The problem with reviews is that there's a lot of "review spam" on the Web, written by people trying to sell their own products, or by competitors trying to put them down. Even Amazon book reviews are said to be 30 per cent spam. Relevant Mind looks for online conversations about products you're interested in and shows brief excerpts. Click on one that looks interesting, and you're taken to the site where the discussion appears. The company has a long and labour-intensive road to travel before it has every kind of product covered and needs all the help it can get. So far, staff have completed just two product sections for the beta service, covering golf equipment and road bikes.

If your Web site combined social networking features with live shows that broadcast 14 hours every day, you could go from 10,000 unique visitors a year ago to more than 8 million per month. That's what happened to Vlaze, the site formerly known as MusicPlusTV. Although not focusing on music-related content alone, it compares itself to "MTV back in the old days, when MTV had more music and less reality TV". Vlaze shoots its videos in huge studios in Los Angeles, but lets users contribute footage too.

Google's Orkut - big in South America and India, but not the USA - is now showing signs of being able to compete with MySpace and Facebook on home ground and in other countries. Google has been rumbling for months with secret plans to introduce more social networking features across its Web properties. Businessweek says that Google will be introducing a number of new features on November 5th. It predicts that third party developers will be able to run applications for Orkut from Google's servers and users might begin to see Orkut combining with Google Maps that show where their Orkut friends are located. Rumour has it that Google also wants to let developers use the data culled from its sites to create programs on Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace.

Thagoo is a new search engine, still in beta, that searches tags - informally assigned, user-defined keywords - on social bookmark sites including BlinkList, BlogMarks, BlueDot, del.icio.us, Furl, Mister Wong, My Web Yahoo, Netvouz, RawSugar, and UVouch.