Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Thomas Quinn, who patented Nintendo's Wii motion sensor technology, has a new invention that should allow drivers to fill up their cars at home instead of at the petrol station - and at much lower cost. In partnership with backyard fuel expert Floyd Butterfield, Quinn has launched a new company to sell the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler - a home ethanol plant that's about the size of a laundrette clothes dryer - designed to top up your tank before you leave the house for about 50p per gallon.

New Labour's plan for a centralised communications database is not best designed to help Mr Brown's floundering popularity fight-back. Privacy and security experts are attacking a scheme under consideration at the Home Office that would see the creation of a centralised database of all UK internet and telephony usage.

Google's recent decision to make its UK keyword bidding policy conform with the US practice of allowing competitors to bid on each other's brands in their pay-per-click advertising has drawn widespread anger from British businesses and threats of legal action. Last week brought more such news of potential legal action against Google from a range of travel companies and retailers in the UK.

Keirsun Scott has been digging into the goings-on at 23AndMe, the Web-based genetic research firm that Google invested some $4 million in last year. The company is the brainchild of Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google founder Sergei Brin. Wojcicki, Brin and Arthur Levinson (an exec on Google's Board of Directors and CEO of Genentech, also one of 23AndMe's investors) each own significant stakes in the genetic research firm. Scott wonders whether the shares count as a majority stake - and if so, whether that gives Google access to any of the genetic data being mapped and stored. Scott cites 23AndMe's privacy policy, which affirms that users' information won't be shared, but does acknowledge that the firm may enter into "partnerships with commercial and/or non-profit organisations that conduct scientific and/or medical research". Google CEO Eric Schmidt would not elaborate, but said that the investment would benefit Google. "If Google were able to combine the immense amounts of user data they collect right now with the health and medical data that could potentially be gathered from Google Health... and combine that with data potentially available to them through 23andMe, a person's Google profile could be a dangerous thing", Scott concludes.

A Dallas woman is taking Blockbuster to court, alleging the video rental company transmitted her personal information to Facebook.com. Cathryn Elaine Harris says Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by allowing Facebook to get information on her movie renting and buying habits using its Beacon marketing tool. Beacon works by tracking what people on Facebook purchase on other Web sites, including Blockbuster, then passing the information on to their Facebook friends in hopes that they'll want to buy similar products.

Sentry Lite is free monitoring software that claims to offer parents and computer administrators the ability to monitor both sides of instant message conversations and Web sites visited, without the user knowing. A "spy technology engine" keeps Sentry hidden from all users, anti-spyware, and firewall software.

Keep an eye on your competitors, or find out exactly when your Web developer finally gets around to making the changes you asked for, but hasn't got around to letting you know about. Page2RSS is a new service that creates feeds from any Web page, by including the new content and linking to a page that highlights differences.

PPC (pay per click) advertising watchdog services like ClickForensics, now a Yahoo! partner, provide businesses with evidence of fraudulent clicks to help them claim money back from the search providers who display their ads. Advertisers who lack hard evidence, but have long suspected they were short-changed by fraudulent clicks, will be watching an upcoming lawsuit with interest. Souvenirs and collectables retailer, Bigreds.com is suing Overture/Yahoo! for bad traffic it allegedly paid for during a $900,000 campaign between 2002 and 2005, claiming that a majority of the clicks came from affiliate Web sites that got revenue kickbacks from the Web giant for generating high volumes of clicks - not actual customers. "Affiliates of Overture used software programs, employed people, and/or directed people other than actual customers to click on plaintiff's links from keyword search results," says Bigreds.com, in a complaint filed with a court in New York. "These clicks were not actual traffic, but were fraudulent clicks". Google paid $90 million to settle a similar suit in 2006. Coincidentally, Information Week's report on the story provides an example of an advertising widget at work that's similar to the AOL acquisition, Sphere, referred to in our next but one story, 'Sphere Of Influence'.

Under the slogan "The Search That Pays You Back!" and employing the classic business tactic of spending money to make money, Microsoft is introducing Live Search Cashback - which will pay consumers who find and purchase products through its Live.com search service, currently listing more than 10 million products in the US. Microsoft's new search engine variant is similar to Google's Product Search engine. You use it primarily to search for the best price on something you plan to buy. When you type your query - "iPod," "Wii Fit", or whatever - into Google's version, you get back a list of online shops offering the item, organised by price. Microsoft's new search engine goes one better: It tells you who has the product in stock and the price, plus any additional charges (postage, shipping). On top of that, like a credit card rewards scheme, the engine offers a money back discount of up to 5 per cent, depending on the retailer you choose. Companies signing up to Live Search CashBack will be charged on a cost per acquisition model, rather than the cost per click model employed by most search engines. The technology involved is based on the Jellyfish comparison shopping site that Microsoft bought last October.

How would you like to create a blog widget and sell it less than three years later for millions? It does happen. Sphere, the small company that created the Sphere Related Content Widget has been acquired by AOL for a rumoured $25 million. You may not have heard of Sphere or know what the widget does - or why AOL values it so highly - but you may have run across Sphere in action. The company describes what it does as "connects articles to contextually relevant content from Blog Posts, Media Articles, Video, Photos, and Ads from across the Web". Translation: it's a pop-up generator, offering a selection of links, search engine style, in a mini page that floats into view when you're reading a Web page with what's deemed to be relevant content. As for AOL: “Our focus is providing consumers relevant content wherever they are on the Web, and Sphere's capabilities fit in perfectly with this effort. Not only will it let us enhance content on our own sites, it will let us distribute our content across Sphere's growing third-party publisher network,” said Ron Grant, President of AOL. “This acquisition provides AOL with access to advertising inventory across Sphere's network, while growing its reach to content publishers via the widget". It is calculated that as well as picking up thousands of small publishing partners, AOL will get its content popping up on high value sites like TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal at a bargain price.

AT&T is joining forces with some 10-15 telecom carriers, including British Telecom, to build a Skype competitor, according to ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman. He thinks that the carriers will soon offer a voice-over-Internet Protocol client that runs over broadband/3G wireless piping and uses a backend platform that allows users to make free calls to anyone logged into the VoIP network. Each of the carriers involved would make money from calls made outside the network to one of the standard landline phone services. "We believe they will have to use a common client and common software platform in order to make this work," Wahlman said, forecasting that the new service might launch in 2009 and eventually extend to mobile phones.

Text messaging isn't just kid's stuff anymore. There are some amazing online tools to turn any SMS-capable phone into a productivity powerhouse, says Rick Broida at PC World.

After combing through some 1,788 submissions, Google has named 50 winners in the first round of its contest to create new applications for the open Android mobile platform. The applications run the gamut from public safety to music to cooking, but the search giant is so far showing favour - not to mention $25,000 in prize money - to developers who concentrated on social networking or building services based on location. Several winners are social-networking applications with a location-based tweak. Commandro, for example, gives social networkers an almost Big Brotherish awareness of what their friends are up to and where they are 24 hours a day. GolfPlay uses GPS to supply relevant golfing information based on wherever the player is. The contest's second round, which may coincide with the release of the long-rumoured Gphone by Google, will see ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards given out.

Last month, Storybids announced the launch of a new product placement marketplace where online video content creators can get paid to feature physical products in pre-production user-generated videos, serial mini-dramas, videoblogs and the like. Advertisers can use Storybids' searching capabilities to seek out video creators that meet their demographic criterion such as viewership, subscriptions, and ratings or by genre or age demographic. Video creators seeking funds for their independent or professional film projects can look for product placement advertising opportunities by targeting specific advertisers that might be a good storyline fit for their future content. Storybids also works as a social media marketplace for filmmakers seeking advice and collaboration on film projects.

Last month, Microsoft unveiled "Microsoft Advertising", a new brand for its group of advertising products, including the ad platform adCenter, the ad exchange AdECN, the ad serving technology provider Atlas, and the in-game ad services provider, Massive. Speaking at the company's "advance08" conference in its Redmond, Washington corporate headquarters, Brian McAndrews, head of Advertiser and Publisher Solutions, said the new brand was meant to "bring order amidst the chaos" of advertising and marketing services products that the software giant now owns. Separately, the company also announced that it would begin running display ads on its Windows Live mobile services, which include Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail.

Microsoft's new Live Mesh is a platform that enables PCs and other devices to ‘come alive' by making them aware of each other through the Internet, allowing users to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices. It is designed to avoid ‘that file is on my work machine' or ‘that photo is on my SmartPhone' or ‘I can't access it because I'm offline' situations for people who have work laptops, a home PC, a SmartPhone, and a collection of devices where different files and documents can be stored.

If you mourned the death of Polaroid instant film, you're not alone, but now the company hopes to redeem itself with impatient photographers. Their new product may not get the brand-as-noun back in daily language but, later this year, Polaroid will be releasing a hand-held printer that lets you create 2 x 3-inch prints in one minute. It's small enough to carry in your pocket, "so you can turn your camera phone or digital camera into a mobile print shop". Flipping through digital pics is ok, but sometimes you just have to have a print that you can hold in your hand.

A controversial new competition will ask researchers to come up with ways of evading the brand-name anti-virus products that protect the PCs of most business and home users. The contest at DefCon (code hacker convention) in Las Vegas in August hopes to prove that signature-based anti-virus checkers are obsolete, a move that one leading anti-virus researcher suggests is "not a good idea". The goal of the 'Race to Zero' event at the convention is simple: Develop confusing malicious code so that it evades all the best known anti-virus engines. The first team or individual who manages to evade all the software security guardians lined up for the challenge takes the prize.

Even criminal hackers want to protect their intellectual property it seems, and they've come up with a new copyrighting idea. Virus writers are selling Internet software with an unusual attachment: a detailed licensing agreement that promises penalties for redistributing their malicious code without permission. Researchers at Symantec noticed a Russian-language example recently in software that's designed to infect computers and control them remotely. The resulting zombie machines can be used to pump out spam, launch more attacks, or steal personal information from their owners. Networks of zombie machines — known as "bot nets" — can be extremely lucrative, sometimes making millions for their authors and their distributors, which makes such people quick to worry about any kind of theft that affects their own income stream.

The Daily Telegraph's Web site has overtaken The Guardian's guardian.co.uk for the first time as the UK's most-visited online newspaper. According to ABCe data, telegraph.co.uk visitors jumped by 150 per cent in the year ending last month. Dailymail.co.uk posted the second biggest year-on-year rise, almost doubling its unique users to 18 million per month.

Northern Light is shining again. You have to go back five years, to June 2003 and Issue 28 of the newsletter, to find our last mention of Massachusetts-based Northern Light, once the biggest search engine on the Web with an index twice the size of Google. Last month, the company re-surfaced in the Web-sphere, announcing "the only free search engine of business news and industry authority blogs that also offers powerful, automated meaning extraction capabilities and collaborative social computing features". The social computing features include a Market Intelligence Wiki and a series of widgets that leverage the search activity of Northern Light's community of business users to provide tag clouds of the most popular search terms and lists of the most accessed articles.