Zen Monthly Newsletter

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The Government has introduced a new Annual Investment Allowance to encourage more small businesses to invest in new technology and equipment. The allowance, which enables businesses to write-off up to £50,000 of plant and machinery purchases (including IT) against that year's taxable profits, was launched three weeks ago and a promotional mass mailing to business owners is planned this month. Jane Kennedy, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said: "This new allowance is aimed at the majority of UK businesses and provides a major incentive for them to expand or improve their operation when they invest less that £50,000 a year. It demonstrates the Government's commitment to supporting the efforts of small firms. Providing tax relief on all of their expenditure in the year they invest will give firms a cash flow boost".

Every house, building and plot of the land in the country has a National Land and Property Gazetteer Unique Property Reference that charts its ownership and value. After seven years of legal wrangling, this official, complete and constantly updated list of addresses in England and Wales is about to become available for commercial use. The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), compiled from data supplied by local councils, is being promoted as the best list of property addresses since the Domesday Book.

Are black Web sites really greener? If you want to be green, you should give your site a black background. True or false? ZDNet's Dialogue Box investigates.

This is a companion Web site to a US TV documentary that looks at the failure of the Bush administration to join climate change agreements adopted by most of the rest of the world. Features include investigative reports, a timeline of scientific and political developments, interviews, readings and links, a teacher's guide, and more. The full documentary from PBS, America's non-commercial channel, is available for immediate viewing online.

A new search engine promises to benefit the planet by planting trees on behalf of its users. Ecocho is the brainchild of four Australians and has been launched in 14 countries, including the US and the UK. The company will divert 70 per cent of its income to buy carbon offset credits via tree planting schemes in New South Wales, a long-time preserve of native forest conservation. Tim Macdonald, founder of Ecocho, says that two trees will be planted every time 1,000 searches have been clocked up on the search engine, which was set up to deliver results from Google and Yahoo! The default search setting is Yahoo! - favoured, Ecocho says, because searches via Google were producing less income and enabled only half as many plantings. Last week, Google responded by saying that Echoco was breaking its rules by compensating users and stopped its search results and pay-per-click ads appearing on the site.

It appears that domain registrar and hosting company Network Solutions has been taking advantage of its customers by hijacking their inactive site pages or broken Web addresses and profiting from them without the domain owners' knowledge. A paragraph in the company's 59,000-word Service Agreement allows that "any domain name directory, sub-directory, file name or path that does not resolve to an active page on your Web site may be used by Network Solutions to place a 'parking' page or other temporary page that may include promotions and advertisements for, and links to, Network Solutions' Web site, Network Solutions product and service offerings, third-party Web sites, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines". Network Solutions isn't the first registrar to use their customers' domains in this way and will likely not be the last unless ICANN makes some policy changes, says Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica.

The e-mail security gurus at Alt-N Technologies have been shoehorning cutting edge e-mail security into their MDaemon mail server software for over a decade. A steady stream of canny users have been quietly buying the software for its security features alone, to protect their expensive Microsoft Exchange systems. Outing the closet MDaemon purchasers this week, Alt-N went head to head with the likes of Microsoft, GFI and MailMarshal, launching a new e-mail security product, SecurityGateway for Exchange. Designed from the ground up for Exchange users, SecurityGateway boasts the same array of anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-abuse tools found in MDaemon, but now introduces gateway features such as individual user or domain configurations, real-time reporting, remote access and powerful e-mail content filtering. You can download a 30-day SecurityGateway trial today, courtesy of UK and Ireland distributor, Zen Software.

Nothing provokes panic in the recording industry more than the rise and rise of peer-to-peer file sharing networks. To combat the ongoing problem, Warner Music Group has charged industry veteran Jim Griffin with getting a monthly fee bundled into consumers' Internet service bills. The proposal demonstrates the desperation of the recording industry, which has seen its business shrink by $5 billion in recent years.

The European Parliament has voted to outlaw the kind of anti-piracy legislation favoured in the UK and France. The European Parliament bill claims that "Criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution", and that individual countries should "avoid adopting measures... such as the interruption of Internet access". In France and the UK, recent proposals have placed the responsibility on users' shoulders. Last year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy introduced a policy that warns consumers three times before disconnecting them for illegal downloading. The UK is mulling a similar policy that would hold ISPs accountable for warning and then disconnecting users. The European Parliament proposal would protect consumers from these disconnection policies. "The repressive measures are dictated by industries that have been unable to change their business models to meet the needs imposed by the information society," said French socialist, Guy Bono, who drafted the proposal.

Chinese search engines Baidu and Sohu face millions in penalties as Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music demand satisfaction over links to songs they control. Big music labels will try to slay the Chinese dragon of song piracy by forcing major Chinese search sites to cut their links to pirated music. The Beijing First Intermediate People's Court faces the task of deciding the case. If it opts to penalise Baidu a suggested $9 million in damages and Sohu $7.5 million, the notion that search engines are liable for linking to content hosted by third parties will have ramifications beyond China.

New research shows that it's possible to produce music files using compression that makes them 1,000 times smaller than MP3. In a quest to find "the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music", researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have digitally encoded a 20-second clarinet solo into a file that's less than a kilobyte in size - and some 1,000 times smaller than the same thing produced with standard MP3 compression.

Press reports about the risks children face online seem to be based more on unfounded fears about Web weirdos than on hard facts, thinks Spiked columnist Tim Black. But Dr Tanya Byron’s government-sanctioned report, Safer Children in a Digital World, says that "many parents seem to believe that when their child is online it is similar to them watching television. In fact, it is more like opening the front door and letting them go outside to play unsupervised". It seems certain that what many parents thought was a "fun and leisurely activity" for their children, to cite the Byron report, will be subject to increasing regulation - and Dr Byron proposes solutions that include a UK council for child Internet safety. It might be wrong to suggest that parents ought to leave children entirely to their own devices, but perhaps it should be up to them, and not a panel of experts and "neurotic bureaucrats", to draw the line, says Tim Black.

A new report from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), commissioned in part by the British Library, counters the common assumption that the 'Google Generation' - young people born or brought up in the Internet age - is the most adept at using the Web.

'Computer Tutorials Based on Pictures' is a collection of free, easy-to follow illustrated tutorials for software and computer subjects such as Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Photoshop Elements, HTML and CSS, My SQL, PHP, and Perl. Originally developed as part of a US Department of Education study to help people with learning disabilities to learn computer skills, CTBP is now an excellent learning or teaching resource for almost anyone.

Without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010. In London for a series of meetings with government officials, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that current Internet systems will not be able to cope with increasing traffic for much longer unless someone can find $130 billion to invest in new infrastructure.

Computerworld Malaysia is reporting that Broadband over Powerline (BPL) provider Velchip has finalised partnerships in Kuala Lumpur to begin the world’s biggest BPL project. Announced last month, the scheme will offer 60 million people in Indonesia unlimited high speed Internet connections up to 224Mbps (megabits per second) at a cost of only RM5 (less than £1) per month. That will make it the fastest - and certainly the cheapest - broadband connectivity in the world.

What do John Cleese, Roger Moore, the cast of 'MASH' and Captain James T. Kirk have in common? They all endorsed PCs in the 1980s - and PC World magazine has been digging in its archive of arcane ads to prove it.

With around half the world's population expected to be carrying a mobile phone by Christmas, it's hard to believe that it's been 35 years since the first ever public phone call from a mobile. This week marks the anniversary of the historic communication, made on the streets of New York by portable cell phone inventor Martin Cooper, then general manager of Motorola's Communications Systems Division.

Google is making it easier for media owners to earn more from their mobile sites, by linking its AdSense for Mobile platform with a range of mobile ad networks. Like its parent company Google, DoubleClick this week announced the launch of DoubleClick Mobile, a new solution to extend digital advertising to mobile. DoubleClick says it enters the market with a solution that meets mobile-specific needs including automatic matching of ads to the screen size and capabilities of different devices, ensuring that the ad with the best fit is delivered. Juniper Research - juniperresearch.com - predict mobile ad spending at over $1 billion this year and $7.6 billion in 2013.

A new visual search engine from Evolution Robotics called ER Search is designed for camera phones and works by allowing consumers to find information on products by simply taking a photo of the product - or something related to it, like a magazine advert - and using the image as a query. An iPhone demo captured on YouTube illustrates the potential.

Veveo has a new search engine that they say can help you find the video content you're after, no matter where it is on the Web. With over 150 million online videos already indexed, they may be right. The search engine can be accessed via PC or an Internet-enabled mobile device. Murali Aravamudan, founder of Veveo, believes video is the future of the mobile Internet. "Consumers will soon turn to video, not text, for the majority of their entertainment and information needs. Just as mobile e-mail is now an everyday habit for many users, we believe they will soon develop a daily mobile video habit", he said.

Search marketing entrepreneur Andy Beal has released a new online reputation management tool for anyone needing more than monitoring services like Google Alert can provide. It's named Trackur and there's a useful video introduction and free demo online, so that you can try it out immediately. Trackur was created for “individuals and companies concerned that they may be the subject of an online onversation, but don't have the time or knowledge needed to set up their own online monitoring tools". It's also aimed at businesses and PR firms that want to add online reputation monitoring to their existing 'clipping' services. The new tool scours blogs, news sites, images, and videos to track your name, company brands, industry trends, or even news about your competitors.

Twing recently announced the debut of its new online community and forum search engine. Claiming to be the Internet’s "best resource" for helping users search and discover opinions, information and conversations that match their interests, Twing.com includes its own blogs and forums and also caters to forum owners by enabling them to submit their sites to the Twing Forum Directory, a resource designed to generate traffic and enhance the quality of discussion taking place on forums.

SearchMe is a search engine that shuffles through postcard size replicas of Web pages to provide results, giving users clear previews of what to expect from the sites they choose to visit. In addition, there are refinements for results that help to focus broad queries. Users can narrow down "HDTV" searches, for example, by looking within categories such as "sales and bargains", "online forums" and "auctions." SearchMe is currently in an open beta testing phase and looking for user feedback to help improve search results.