Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Library House, run by former Dragons Den panellist Doug Richard, has developed a new government-funded online service, VentureNavigator, designed to help start-up businesses. The service is free and, says Richard, "assists with a broad range of requirements including managerial, financial, cultural and administrative factors, all of which a business needs to develop, grow and ultimately thrive".

The Trade and Industry Select Committee says there is a danger that small and medium sized businesses are being squeezed out from tendering for government contracts. It's thought that smaller businesses without the resources to deal with long and complex tendering processes should get more support when it comes to awarding public contracts. Meanwhile, central and local government officials were accused of being "too timid" in their purchasing decisions, with some simply opting for the lowest bid rather than checking for best value, which SMEs often provided.

A survey reveals that one third of UK companies think they made a poor choice when selecting their domain name and believe that if their Web address was based on a different domain it would bring in more business. But many said they were unwilling to make a change because of the perceived amount of work involved. Five per cent of business owners surveyed even admitted they couldn't remember what domain name they were using.

Nominet, the not-for-profit organisation that runs the .co.uk domain name database, has been awarded the contract to build the new ENUM registry. ENUM domains will map telephone numbers to Web addresses. The advantage of ENUM is that it will enable a company's VoIP server to connect with another VoIP server via the Internet without having to connect to the telephone network and pay for the call. This is done by translating the phone number into a domain name. ENUM is designed to get around the problem that few phone keypads have an "@" key, which makes dialling a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) address for a VoIP call tricky. A SIP address is similar to an e-mail address. An example would be: 200700@sip.zen.com.

Surrey is expecting to save £300,000 after streamlining its book procurement, Birmingham is using recycled IT for social programmes, and the EU looks to biometrics for resident card security.

From billion pound mistakes at the Child Support Agency to en-masse missed holidays in 1999 when Siemens got things wrong at the Passport Agency, not to mention the Millennium Bug that didn't bite and the faulty satellites that nearly caused World War III, poorly executed IT has had a lot to answer for over the years.

When a government department carelessly copies and then loses millions of banking details, or an unwiped company hard disk is sent for recycling, you have to wonder how much protection Britain's privacy laws are providing. The loss of 25 million personal details by HM Customs last month was just the latest case of highly sensitive data being poorly handled. Another prime example was exposed recently when a computer containing personal details and records of cancer patients turned up on Ebay. Yet the Data Protection Act (DPA) appears powerless to force government or companies to accept their responsibilities and organisations responsible for keeping data safe are frequently letting the public down.

ZoomInfo, a new site that compiles information about your personal profile - whether you like it or not - will be supplying that information to Web site operators and advertisers soon so that they can target you as you surf the Web. The inquisitive startup arrives at a time when Facebook is unleashing its own advertising platform that it says makes precise targeting possible. Based in Massachusetts, ZoomInfo already has personal information for almost 40 million business professionals, which it gets by scouring the Web, gathering things such as your name, past work affiliation, and even your e-mail address if it can find it. It attempts to track the industry you work in, your company, title, job description, education, sex and location. ZoomInfo calls its information "bizographic" - biographic data related to business - and says it is much more useful to advertisers than Facebook’s targeting information, because it is more precise. Both companies think they have something better than Google. "Contextually placed ads don’t cut it anymore", says ZoomInfo CEO Bryan Burdick, referring to the ads supplied by Google. "They simply look at the words on a Web page and serve up advertising related to the words without knowing anything about the reader". ZoomInfo says it updates over 3 million profiles per day and that about 100,000 people a week are finding their profiles on the site and clicking through to confirm or correct them.

Typosquatters are targeting children's Web sites. Sites that attempt to steal traffic by using misspelt Web addresses are increasingly targeting the young, according to security firm McAfee, and over 1,000 of the 46,000 typosquatter sites the company tested recently were redirected to adult content. McAfee claims that anyone who misspells a common Web site address has a 1-in-14 chance of landing on a typosquatter site. It is difficult for business Web site owners to cover all the bases with misspelt domains but some companies are making the effort to buy up domains of potential typos, says Greg Day, security analyst at McAfee.

"Web 2.0 - More than Social Networking", is a university research study that looks at current levels of Web 2.0 adoption and understanding among UK businesses. It found that even among those organisations that are currently using Web 2.0-based tools, only 11 per cent purchased the technology to achieve increased collaboration and more streamlined systems. The rest relied on the advanced Web capabilities to improve content management and search facilities.

Ning, a service that lets people with no technical knowledge create their own social networks, has passed a new milestone: Users have created more than 115,000 individual networks, the company said. Offering the opportunity to "Create Your Own Social Network for Anything", Ning lets you set up a Web site with features such as a forum, blogs, photo gallery, groups and more all in a few minutes. It’s also a platform for developers to create their own features. But it’s still not clear how it will ever get big enough to justify the massive $44 million investment it received earlier this year, or the $9 million spent on development and running costs before that.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy says that Internet users who share copyright files over P2P networks in his country will be disconnected. A Memorandum of Understanding between music producers, audiovisual producers, Internet service providers and the French government, provides for a body that will have the power to terminate Internet connections in the event of "prolonged infringement". The BPI, which represents UK record labels, says that the British Government should follow France's lead.

A new research report on the ability of Internet infrastructure to cope with burgeoning demand warns that usage could outstrip network capacity both in North America and worldwide as early as 2010. Described as the first-ever study to independently assess Internet infrastructure and model projected traffic patterns, the report from Nemertes Research estimates that additional global investment of $137 billion is required to prevent the whole thing grinding to a halt. Current demand is growing because of the high take up of voice and bandwidth-intensive applications, such as streaming and interactive video. According to research by comScore, 75 per cent of U.S. Internet users watch over two hours of online video per month and view more than 8.3 billion video streams. "This report identifies a critical issue facing the Internet - that we must take the necessary steps to build more network capacity or face gridlock," said Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance.

Quivic allows you to download streaming videos from YouTube to your computer and convert them for playback on your PC, iPod, Cell Phone or Sony PSP. You simply supply Quivic with the Web address of the video you want. Quivic can download and convert multiple videos at once. Quivic will also convert any flash video file (FLV) on your computer to WMV, MP4, 3GP or 3G2 file format. The free version adds some watermarking.

Drivers tend to ignore 'cat's eyes' in the road until they hit bad weather or country lanes in unfamiliar territory, when being able to see where the road ahead might be going becomes a lot more interesting. Invented in the 1930s by Yorkshireman, Percy Shaw, 'cat's eyes' and all standard reflective road studs rely on illumination by headlights and are most effective over short distances. Now solar power is improving the situation with the creation of stand-alone, self-powered illumination devices. The latest generation of solar road studs has just been announced by pioneering British company Astucia. The SolarLite "smart stud" uses stored solar power to run built-in Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), providing an effective guide for drivers at up to 900 metres, extending reaction times from 3.2 seconds to over half a minute when driving at 60mph.

Planned and promoted as "The $100 laptop", but eventually priced at $200, the XO laptop went on sale in November. There is a special promotion: For $400, customers can order a laptop for themselves and bundled into the price is the cost of delivering a second XO to a child in a developing country. The "Give One Get One" scheme is part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project to equip the world's poorest children with a learning tool. The XO uses open-source software, has long battery life, a built-in camera, mesh networking and a simple user interface. It features a screen that's clearly visible even in bright sunlight, uses a tenth of the power of a conventional laptop and can be recharged by hand when mains electricity isn't available. The rugged, green-and-white machine is made in Taiwan by Quanta Computer, the world's largest laptop manufacturer and maker of laptops for Apple, HP and Dell. Quanta will build 80,000 units this month and 120,000 in January.

Merriam-Webster has teamed up with QA International to launch a new online visual dictionary, which contains information on over 20,000 terms and more than 6,000 illustrations. To visit Visual Dictionary Online, remove the spaces in the name, add dot com, and you're there.

Lingoz, a new online dictionary was announced last week. It is available in eight languages including English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. The site currently has over 4.4 million definitions and encourages submissions from its users. You can do a keyword search, explore a huge list of glossaries (browsable by category, or you can look at ones that are new/have lots of definitions/have been updated recently) or look at a list of terms that need definitions. The jury is still out on just how appropriate the 'wisdom of the herd' wiki approach will prove to be for a multi-language dictionary. The site's originators, Babylon, whose business is online dictionary software, say they believe that contributors can easily write a full and accurate dictionary definition.

In the world of online scientific research, Web giants Google and Wikipedia may not be ideal places to begin your search. Students, particularly in America, are discovering Scitopia, a new search engine that gathers its information from more than three million scholarly and government documents as well as European, Japanese and U.S. patent offices.

Cambridge-based True Knowledge, the engine that gives "direct answers to human and machine questions", rather than a list of statistically relevant links, is previewing in private beta. It presents its facts alongside the answers derived from them, and lets users correct any mistakes. The system produces answers from its database, which is fuelled by external databases and users who add knowledge, and the system can eliminate data that is semantically incompatible with other information used. True Knowledge founder, William Tunstall-Pedoe, previously developed Crossword Maestro and Anagram Genius, which use AI techniques to solve word puzzles. The concepts used in True Knowledge, another harbinger of Web 3.0 according to those who can't wait for it, are reminiscent of what Powerset.com is doing with natural language, semantic search and user-contributed metadata, and the inspiration for semantic Web-oriented startups like Metaweb's Freebase.com and Twine.com from Radar Networks.