Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly April 2008 Podcast

Do female entrepreneurs really need the Government to give them money from a dedicated venture capital fund that's not available to businesses run by men? Wouldn't that be deeply patronising? The Government doesn't think so. It is pushing ahead with plans, first announced in the Budget, to hand out up to £25 million from a new gender-based cash resource.

New Web sites offering intelligent content for women are booming, attracting an audience that's tired of being patronised by glossy print magazines and their online counterparts. The Guardian's Viv Groskop reports.

Géant, the super-high-speed European network for researchers and academics, is going global - setting up links with similar networks around the world. Géant already links around 30 million users in over 3,500 universities and research centres, aiding collaboration among researchers in high-profile projects such as Expres, the EU radio astronomy project that links the world's largest radio telescopes in South Africa, China, Europe and Chile to a supercomputer in the Netherlands. "The world's largest multi-gigabit computer network dedicated to research and education" currently links the national research and education networks of 34 European countries - including the UK's network, Janet - and has gigabit links to North America and Japan.

Launched last month as a timesaving tool for businesses looking for local or specialist technology suppliers, Conjungo (from the Latin meaning to unite) already boasts over 15,000 listings. The new British business directory, based in Sevenoaks, is a "technology supplier search resource, where buyers identify and shortlist supplier companies worldwide". Conjungo is aimed at business owners or managers searching for suppliers of technologies such as business software, security, networking, hosting, audio/visual, telecoms, VoIP, and IP telephony. BT, Symantec, Gamma Telecom, Hostway, SMC Networks and PGP Corporation are amongst companies that have listed their entire base of channel partners and resellers.

Windows XP was set to be withdrawn from sale in January, but after thousands of complaints, Microsoft added six months to its lifespan. The company agreed to continue selling OEM and shrink-wrapped packs of XP until June 30th. But as the new deadline approaches, users are signing up to even stronger stay of execution campaigns, hoping to extend the software's remaining 3 months of life on retail shelves.

Zamzar is a free file conversion Web site that supports a wide range of file types including the majority of documents, images, music, video, and compression formats. You can make PDF documents editable by converting them to MS Word, for example, or convert Word's new format .docx files back to the more commonplace .doc. Zamzar also handles .xls and .xlsx files as well as .cvs; .odp; .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; .ps; .pub; .rtf; .wpd; .wps; and most sound and video formats. You can easily convert your iTunes (aac) files to mp3. Zamzar has a Web browser button that you can add to your browser's bookmarks toolbar so that, if you are on a video sharing Web site such as YouTube or Google Video, you can click to convert and save the video you are watching. On other sites, Zamzar will auto-detect any of the files on the page that can be converted and highlight them for you.

Channel 4 is to launch a new Web site devoted to animation, offering budding animators the opportunity to upload their work and get paid to provide the TV station with new animations. The new site, 4mations, will allow animators to view and vote on the latest animations, upload videos and secure commissions to create new work. Register interest at the site's holding page.

Don't have a Web site? Don't want a blog? Just type or paste some text and click 'Create URL' at shortText.com and your message will be on the Web for all to see in a matter of seconds. It's instant and it's free. You can include images or video too. In case you don't want to share the information you post with the whole world, you can lock it up and give the URL and a key to a closed circle of contacts. Locked content will not appear in search engine results.

Picnik is an online photo-editing program that anyone can use. It works in a Web browser, so you don't need to install it, or even register to use it. All you need is Flash. Picnik is not as fast or as powerful as the photo editors that run on personal computers, including the free ones such as Paint.net for Windows. But neither does it have multiple sets of hard-to-read menus or toolsets. It works mainly through tabs, big buttons and slider controls. And if the function of a button isn't obvious enough, holding the mouse over it pops up an explanation. Even people who really can't be bothered with photo editing are catered for: there's a button marked Auto-fix that will do what it can to make your picture look better. If you don't like the result of this or any other action, there's a button marked Undo.

People who love the various social sites and news aggregators, like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, Metafilter, Google News, Yahoo! News, Wired News, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Fark, NowPublic, Netscape, StumbleUpon, Furl, Clipmarks and others can have a hard time checking them all on a regular basis. Popurls solves the problem by taking the top 15 stories from every one of these sites and listing the headlines. It also lets you see the top videos from YouTube, iFilm and other sources, the top photos from Flickr, the top podcasts from Odeo, and other things too numerous to mention, all on one page. When you're scanning the headlines and something catches your eye, if you position your mouse over it, Popurls provides a preview that shows the first 40 words or so.

After only a few weeks, Buzz, the new Digg competitor from Yahoo! is hard on the heels of its main rival. According to data from Hitwise, brand-new Buzz is already driving almost as much traffic to Web sites as the long established Digg. Last month, news and media site Salon.com received more than 1 million visitors from Buzz in one day and the US political blog, Huffington Post, received 800,000 unique visitors. The results prompted TechCrunch's Michael Arrington to say, "It's clear that a link from Buzz blows away anything that Digg or any other competitor can offer". Is there a business model for Buzz? Yahoo! vice-president Tapan Bhat says the company is preparing a new advertising package as well as promotional offerings for publishers.

Media blogger Mark Cuban has been calling YouTube "a costly mistake" ever since Google forked up $1.65 billion for the video-sharing site in November 2006. Cuban says that considerable (and growing) bandwidth costs, uncontrollable copyright violation, and inability to make the content pay, add up to a net negative for the search engine company. But YouTube's recent API enhancement, which allows Web developers to set up and customise YouTube for their own sites, may have changed all that. The move lifts copyright responsibility from YouTube's shoulders by effectively turning the video sharing site into a service provider that knows nothing about the content it's hosting. This gives Google a 'controlling interest' in sites that incorporate YouTube video. Terms of Service preclude "the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions targeted to, within, or on the API Client or YouTube video content". Which means: Google ad programs or no ad programs at all. If most site owners are unlikely to deploy YouTube on their pages unless they can make some money in the process, Cuban says, Google suddenly "goes from not being able to generate more than trivial revenue on YouTube to being able to generate limitless revenue on third party sites".

Spokeo is a new kind of profile aggregator. It gathers information from social networking sites, but instead of aggregating information from your various profiles, such as on MySpace, it scoops up details about all your contacts from a wide variety of sites. The people at Spokeo call their service a friend tracker. Here's how it works: You provide the tracker with your AOL, Gmail, HotMail or Yahoo! Mail address and password. Within minutes, Spokeo finds recent updates and items from the people on your contact list on all kinds of social networking sites.

Spammers have cracked the captcha mechanism that Google's Gmail uses to make sure you are a human before you can open an e-mail account, leading to a huge increase in the amount of spam sent via Gmail, security firm MessageLabs says. Google claims to "take abuse of its services very seriously", but doesn't make reporting easy. You can try http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=9b2 or http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=9b1 and, if all else fails, forward a copy to gmail-abuse@google.com.

We usually think of e-mail as a way to instantly communicate, but what happens if you want to delay pre-prepared messages to send much later? Taking its inspiration from the time capsule idea of surprising future generations with selected ancestral artifacts, MailFreezr is a Web site that stores your mail until the date you want it delivered - which can be up to 100 years in the future!

If you want a more sophisticated service than mailfreezr offers, try FutureMe.org. Here you can choose precisely the date you want your e-mail to be sent on. The site is not intended as a reminder service, however. If that's what you're looking for, you need an e-mail scheduler. There are several available, mainly in the form of plug-ins to your existing e-mail applications or office suite. One standalone application is LBE Email Scheduler, which requires payment after a trial period. Another option is Eudora - the free e-mail client that rivalled Outlook Express for many years - which has an infinitely variable 'send in the future' facility built-in.

Frequent flyers who restrict themselves to Google Maps when they zoom around the planet might like to try the FlashEarth alternative. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it does let you switch seamlessly between Google maps and the competing offerings from Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! and others. If necessary, use the back-up links that appear at the bottom left of the page.

Staff at PC World stayed in holiday mood after the Easter break to investigate 17 Google-integrated Easter eggs, spoofs, jokes and surprise events including early morning sightings of the Loch Ness monster scheduled to make regular appearances on the search engine's home page.

McAfee's siteadvisor.com is a free facility that offers automatic alerts to Web sites that use or have links to spyware, adware, spam and other nasties. If you have suspicions about a Web site that's not already covered in the company's database, there's a simple online reporting mechanism: just type in the address and McAfee will check it for you.

Launched eight weeks ago, Stumpedia.com is a new social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organise, and review the World Wide Web. You can submit links to your social bookmarks, social profiles, blogs, news stories, articles, images, videos, and Web pages and, as Stumpedia puts it, "share your knowledge and interests with the world".