Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet has been awarded 'ISP of the Year' at the 2008 Custom PC Awards held on October 16th, which are voted on by the magazines readers. Other finalists in Zen's category included PlusNet and Eclipse Internet. Richard Tang, Managing Director, Zen Internet, said: "We are delighted to have won this prestigious award for the first time and we are grateful to all the readers of Custom PC who took the time to vote. Winning this award is a real testament to the fantastic job done by all our employees. It is their adoption of our principle of continual improvement that ensures we achieve our mission to provide the best ISP service in the UK". This year has also seen Zen Internet awarded PC Pro 'Best ISP' for the fifth year and Which? 'Best Broadband'.

Zen Web Solutions is the specialist division of Zen Internet dedicated to online business development and the production and promotion of company Web sites. The team also produces a quarterly e-mail newsletter - available on free subscription - with useful business tips and how-to information. The current issue includes "Content Google will love" - a guide to effective copywriting - and "Is your company ready for SEO" - what you need to know about successful search engine optimisation. Whatever your business, you'll always find something useful and interesting when this newsletter drops into your mailbox. See a full copy of the latest edition and quick sign-up form here:

If you get e-mail messages that you know you should reply to, but would rather handle at another time, you might appreciate HitMeLater.com, which lets you delete a message but have it sent back to you again later - when you think you might be up to dealing with it. Send any message to 12@hitmelater.com, and it'll come back 12 hours later. Send it to Saturday@hitmelater.com, and you can read it again at the weekend. The service is free and there's no signing-up to do. There's a similar service at iwantsandy.com with more options. You do have to register, but it covers a wider range of dates and customisation free of charge. You can write or copy any message you like, as long as it begins with "remember" or "remind", such as "Remember to look at this in 7 days" or "Remind me about this on 11/12/08".

The £300m plan to provide broadband access to a million disadvantaged homes, first suggested by the Prime Minister in his Labour Party Conference speech, will begin after Christmas. Details have been released explaining how the scheme will be implemented across the UK. 20,000 children between 7 and 18 from disadvantaged families in Suffolk and Oldham will be invited to take part in trial runs next February. If all goes well, the scheme will become available nationwide in Autumn 2009. To qualify for the grant handed out to pay for a computer, software, one years broadband access and ongoing technical support families must earn less than £15,500 per year or be on Income Support. If the scheme is a success, it has been estimated that 150,000 children could benefit.

The names of the beneficiaries of the 10 billion or so of grants and other forms of support, awarded by the EU Commission every year, are revealed for the first time by a new Web site, described as "one of the building blocks in the Commission's wider European Transparency Initiative (ETI)". It provides a search engine with access to 28,000 entries on Commission-run programmes in policy areas like research, education and culture, energy, transport and aid to non-EU countries.

The EU Commission is planning to enforce an initiative to make online shopping across EU countries easier and cheaper. The commission wants online stores to give clear information on price - including additional charges and fees - to consumers before they commit to buying a product. It hopes to increase consumer confidence towards online shopping within the EU, and encourage consumers to cross borders with their spending. Currently around 150 million consumers in the EU shop online, but only one fifth of them buy from companies outside their home countries. The commission wants to encourage consumers to cross borders with their spending, giving businesses a bigger market to target - as well as more competition - which should mean lower prices for shoppers.

Search engines allow pay-per-click advertisers to promote almost anything, but have consistently refused ads that promoted any kind of gambling. Google has maintained a long-standing US and worldwide ban preventing bookmakers, casinos and others in the gambling industry getting into its paid-for search results. Now, following recent policy reversals by Yahoo! and Microsoft, Google UK is allowing gambling advertising on its sites in England, Scotland and Wales. The decision came a day after figures were released showing a 25 per cent increase in people in Britain seeking help with gambling problems and was condemned as "irresponsible" by MPs and church leaders. A Church of England spokesman said: Whatever people are searching for on Google, it probably is not the chance to risk developing a serious problem that could have a hugely negative effect on themselves and their family. As people are facing more financial uncertainty, the fantasy of instant wealth could become particularly attractive and the consequences of losses correspondingly serious". MPs of all parties warned Google not to exacerbate the problems of online gambling. Peter Kilfoyle, the former Labour Defence minister, said: "It's the height of stupidity. It seems probably the worst of times for people to be encouraging gambling... after we have been facing a financial crisis built on reckless gambling in the markets". The move will also allow non-UK companies, such as Gibraltar-based 888.com and PartyGaming to enhance their push into the British market. James Cashmore of Google said: "We've decided to amend our policy to allow text ads to appear against search queries related to gambling in Great Britain. We hope this will enhance the search experience for users and help advertisers connect with interested consumers".

What's wrong with the Internet? It's a "cesspool", apparently, a festering sea of bad information, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He was talking to a group of visiting magazine executives at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The solution, he said, was brands. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool". When questioned, Schmidt declined to advise the magazine executives on how to rank higher in Google's search results. "We don't actually want you to be successful", he said. But the CEO did concede that Google depended on magazines and their old-media brethren in some fairly significant ways. "We don't do content", he said. "You all create content. It's a natural partnership".

Google has added a fighter jet to its fleet of aircraft. The new purchase is a Dornier Alpha Jet from Germany, described by its manufacturers as a twin-engine strike aircraft. Google's other planes include a Boeing 757 and a Boeing 767.

All the most important English-language Web search engines Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask are in American hands. With the recent demise of the all-British veteran, Mirago, there is only one European-owned major search engine left on this side of the pond: Exalead. The Paris-based search engine is a top quality resource (and the best for advanced Boolean searching) but the companys development focus is on enterprise search, and it is not well known outside the EU. At a search engine seminar held in Seville last month by the EU Commission, delegates expressed concern about the US domination, citing Google in particular, partly because the company "has too much power" and is "not to be trusted" (in areas like privacy protection and search result bias), but also because its near-monopoly makes it impossible for European alternatives to succeed.

Microsoft is opening new search technology research centres in London, Munich, and Paris at an estimated cost of $1,500 million. "Europe is second only to the United States in the number of engineers and researchers we have working on creating innovative products and services", said CEO Steve Ballmer. The company's search engine, Live Search (www.live.co.uk) - also known as MSN Search (http://search.msn.co.uk), has been hampered in its struggle against Google dominance throughout Europe by mixed-message branding - and still puts a London veterinary college at the top of its UK results for searches on the "Live" brand name.

Google's Eric Schmidt has joined Democratic nominee Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail, a job he calls a "natural evolution" from his role as an adviser to the campaign. Google could use a friend in the White House. Congress is considering several measures that would have an adverse impact on Google's business, including laws limiting the company's ability to deliver personally targeted online advertisements and rules that would allow telecommunications companies to charge different prices for different levels of Internet service - not to mention the investigation into Google's proposed ad-sharing agreement with Yahoo! On the other side of the fence, former EBay CEO Meg Whitman, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina have all advised and stumped for John McCain.

The new 'leader of the free world' will be elected in the US next Tuesday. In the closing weeks of their campaigns, Barack Obama and John McCain have talked about the global credit crunch, their country's off-balance budget, spiralling health-care costs, and a failing education system. Analyst Jon Oltsik thinks the candidates are forgetting another set of problems - Information Security, the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative and the Personal Data and Privacy Act - all waiting in the White House wings and needing urgent attention from its next occupant.

Rest assured, weary taxpayers of America, your money is in safe hands. Your elected representatives, fresh from funding a $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street firms, is set to invest what little money of yours is left in the kitty into something that will truly improve the state of the union: iPhones for everyone. Everyone in Congress, that is. Up to now, the congressional cell phone of choice has been the Blackberry. Switching to a new device will mean a costly reconfiguring of the House and Senate e-mail system - on top of the cost of the phones themselves. And the new phones won't just be for elected officials; thousands of Blackberries used by government employees will also be replaced. But it's not that they don't have a good reason for making the change: "The reason we're trying them out is because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them", said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the Chief Administrative Office.

Apple is mocking Microsoft's $300 million ad campaign spending in a series of Mac vs PC TV commercials. Last month, they poked fun at the amount of money Microsoft spends on advertising rather than fixing Vista's problems. This week, they're trying it again, showing one supposed employee's attempt at off-campus fundraising with a stall selling home baking to passers-by to rake in the cash needed to fix Vista. You can catch the ad here.

Mozilla has launched the first beta version of Firefox 3.1, which it hopes will match and even surpass the performance of Google's recently released Chrome browser. Microsoft has announced the second version of its Web multimedia platform, Silverlight and decided - ahead of the first-taste release of its new Windows 7 operating system - that its official name will be... Windows 7.

Despite its low-profile, Opera offers a host of features that set it apart from the browser pack, argues TechRepublic's Jack Wallen.

Norwegian browser company Opera (version 9.61 out last month) has been working on MAMA - a new search engine that indexes the structural information of Web pages. It will be available in beta form at the end of the year. The search engine was developed as part of the testing that Opera does to make sure its browsers are compatible with published Web pages that make use of the most commonly used technologies. "We realised that we needed to be able to find lots of live sites out there that used technologies in certain combinations so we could test our browser on them", said Snorre Grimsby, vice president of quality assurance at Opera in Oslo. The result was a search engine that crawls the Web and indexes pages by the types of technologies being used. When released, it will allow users to find out such information as how many sites are using CSS, the average size of a Web page and whether a particular site passes mark-up validation. Grimsby said that in Opera's own use of MAMA, they were finding that the average Web page has 47 W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) related discrepancies.

When search engine users look for Comcast, the giant US cable TV and Internet Service Provider, and find a YouTube video showing one of its engineers sleeping on the job in a subscriber's living room, it's time for businesses to start taking social media marketing seriously, says a top analyst. The Altimeter Wiki is an easy to join gathering of social media consultants and agencies offering help. It isn't yet time to abandon older strategies, however. E-mail marketing is still likely to be more productive than social network marketing according to a new study from ExactTarget and Ball State Universitys Center for Media Design.

Google is so confident that its new overlay ads on YouTube videos are effective that the company is turning to a brain wave research firm, NeuroFocus, to prove it. NeuroFocus specialises in measuring individuals brain responses by placing sensors on their heads, as well as checking other factors like pupil dilation and skin temperature. The research will explore how users respond to InVideo ads and how well those ads complement traditional banner advertising. Why go to such lengths to prove that InVideo ads are effective? Google believes that the way the ads function, by popping up at the bottom of a video while the viewer watches, is so different, that it warrants special examination. "Standard metrics don't tell the whole story," said Leah Spalding, Google's advertising research manager. "This is an innovative company, and we want to embrace innovative technology". In a recent survey, InVideo ads scored above average on a scale of one to ten for measures like "attention" (8.5), "emotional engagement" (7.3) and "effectiveness" (6.6).

Brand Asset Digital launched its P2P advertising platform P2Pwords last week, promising to bring pay-per-click advertising to file-sharing networks like Limewire, Gnutella and Emule. The New York and Florida based company compares its P2Pwords platform to Googles Adwords service. Whereas major search engines attract about 10 billion Web searches per month, the company argues, P2P networks can attract over four times as many - up to 1.5 billion searches per day. In fact, Brand Asset Digital also claims that 70 per cent of all upstream bandwidth is consumed by P2P. It's worth remembering, though, that most of that traffic is accounted for by BitTorrent transfers and BitTorrent clients dont offer search networks. P2Pwords, meanwhile, works only on networks with search, like Limewire.

Mostly impractical for everyday use, but visually fascinating as it builds before your eyes, Search Cube is a graphical search engine that presents search results as preview screenshots on a three-dimensional interface. It's reminiscent of the Rubik's Cube puzzle invented in the 1970s. More practical, and ultimately more impressive, Cool Iris - formerly known as PicLens - takes a 'gallery wall' approach to displaying previewed results that can be seen in action via the Guided Tour on its Web site, but requires installation as a browser plug-in before you can try it for yourself.