Internet Changes Everything

December 31, 2005

Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary

US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin SB2005 -- Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary

Information in the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin is a compilation and includes information published by outside sources, so the information should not be considered the result of US-CERT analysis. Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported; however, this does not mean that the vulnerability only affects the operating system reported since this information is obtained from open-source information.

This bulletin provides a year-end summary of software vulnerabilities that were identified between January 2005 and December 2005. The information is presented only as a index with links to the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin the information was published in. There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities.

Vulnerabilities

* Windows Operating System
* Unix/ Linux Operating System
* Multiple Operating System

#
Windows Operating Systems

* 1Two Livre d'Or Input Validation Errors Permit Cross-Site Scripting
* 3Com 3CDaemon Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* 3Com 3CDaemon Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* 3Com 3CDaemon Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* 3Com 3CServer FTP Command Buffer Overflows
* 3Com Network Supervisor File Disclosure
* 7-Zip Arbitrary Code Execution
* Aaron Outpost ASP Inline Corporate Calendar Permits Remote SQL Injection
* Absolute Image Gallery XE Cross-Site Scripting
* Absolute Shopping Package Solutions Shopping Cart Cross-Site Scripting
* Access Remote PC Password Disclosure
* Acidcat CMS SQL Injection Vulnerability
* ACNews Information Disclosure
* Acoo Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Acrobat Reader Invalid-ID-Handle-Error Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Active News Manager Username and Password SQL Injection
* ActiveBuyandSell SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting
* ActiveWeb Active Auction House SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* Acuity CMS Cross-Site Scripting
* Acute Website Incorporated PeerFTP_5 FTP Password Disclosure
* Adaptive Hosting Solutions ProductCart Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
* Adobe Acrobat and Reader File Discovery
* Adobe Acrobat and Reader File Discovery (Updated)
* Adobe Acrobat Reader Invalid-ID-Handle-Error Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Adobe License Management Service Elevated Privilege Vulnerability
* Adobe SVG Viewer Lets Remote Users Determine if Files Exist
* Advanced Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Advanced Communications Hosting Controller Lets Remote Users Create User and Host Accounts
* Adventia Chat Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* aeNovo Information Disclosure
* aeNovo SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting
* A-FAQ SQL Injection
* AhnLab V3 Antivirus Arbitrary Code Execution
* AhnLab V3 DeviceIoControl Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Allinta Cross-Site Scripting
* Altiris Deployment Solution AClient Security Bypass
* Alt-N MDaemon and WorldClient Denial of Service
* Alt-N MDaemon Directory Traversal and Arbitrary File Writing
* Alt-N Technologies MDaemon Denial of Service
* Alt-N WebAdmin Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* ALWIL avast! antivirus May Fail to Detect Certain Viruses
* ALWIL Software Avast! Antivirus Aavmker4 Device Driver Elevated Privileges
* ALZip Arbitrary Code Execution
* ALZip Unauthorized System Control
* AM Browser Javascript Spoofing
* AMAX Information Technologies, Inc. Magic Winmail Server Input Validation
* Amp II 3D Game Engine Remote Denial of Service
* AN HTTP Server 'cmdIS.DLL' Buffer Overflow Arbitrary Code Execution and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icon Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* AOL Instant Messenger Smiley Icon Location Remote Denial Of Service Vulnerability
* APG Technology ClassMaster Folder Access Vulnerability
* Apple Darwin Streaming Server Denial of Service
* Apple iTunes Arbitrary Code Execution
* Apple QuickTime for Windows Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Apple 'quicktime.qts' Error in Parsing 'qtif' Images Remote Denial of Service
* Ares Arbitrary Code Execution
* ArGoSoft FTP Server 'DELE' Command Remote Buffer Overflow
* ArGoSoft FTP Server 'DELE' Command Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* ArGoSoft FTP Server Discloses Username Status to Remote Users
* ArGoSoft FTP Server 'SITE COPY' Shortcut File
* Argosoft Mail Server Cross-Site Scripting and Script Insertion Vulnerabilities
* ArGoSoft Mail Server Directory Traversals
* ASP Fast Forum Cross Site Scripting
* ASP Knowledgebase SQL Injection Vulnerability
* ASP Nuke SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting
* Asp Press ACS Blog Access Vulnerability
* ASP Resources Forum SQL Injection
* ASPBB Information Disclosure
* aspclick.it ACNews Administrative Access Vulnerability
* ASP-DEV XM Forum Cross Site Scripting
* ASP-DEv XM Forum Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* ASPJar Guestbook Input Validation
* ASPjar Guestbook SQL Injection
* ASPMForum SQL Injection
* ASPNuke Cross Site Scripting
* ASPPlayground .NET Arbitrary Upload
* asppress ACS Blog Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* aspReady FAQ Manager SQL Injection
* ASP-Rider SQL Injection
* Asus VideoSecurity Online Directory Traversal or Information Disclosure
* atrium software Mercur Messaging Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Avant Browser Dialog Box Origin Spoofing
* Avast! antivirus Arbitrary Code Execution
* Avaya CMS FTP Daemon Wildcard Denial of Service
* AVIRA Antivirus Arbitrary Code Execution
* BakBone NetVault Buffer Overflows Permit Remote Code Execution
* Befriendly.com Einstein Password Disclosure
* BFCommand & Control Server Managers Multiple Vulnerabilities
* BisonFTP Server Denial of Service
* BitDefender Anti-Virus Arbitrary Code Execution or Privilege Elevation
* Bjornar Henden 'Yet Another Forum.net' Input Validation Errors Permits Cross-Site Scripting
* BK Forum SQL Injection Vulnerability
* Black Cactus Warrior Kings Denial of Service and Format String Vulnerabilities
* BlueCollar Productions i-Gallery Cross-Site Scripting & Directory Traversal
* BlueWhaleCRM SQL Injection
* Bontago Game Server Nickname Remote Buffer Overflow
* Brat Designs Breed Remote Denial of Service
* BrightStor ARCserve Backup Arbitrary Code Execution or Denial of Service
* BrightStor ARCserve Backup Discovery Service Buffer Overflow
* bttlxeForum Discloses Installation Path to Remote Users
* Bugtracker.NET Unspecified SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
* BulletProof FTP Server Privilege Escalation
* Bungie Studios Halo: Combat Evolved Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Captaris Infinite Mobile Delivery Input Validation
* Capturix ScanShare Password Disclosure
* CartWIZ Cross Site Scripting
* CartWIZ Cross Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* Centra Profile Script Insertion Vulnerability
* Centrinity FirstClass Bookmark Input File Execution Vulnerability
* Cerberus FTP Server Denial of Service
* Cerulean Studios Trillian Insecure Image Data Remote Buffer Overflow
* Cerulean Studios Trillian Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Cerulean Studios Trillian User Information Disclosure
* CF_Nuke Cross-Site Scripting or Information Disclosure
* Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship Arbitrary Code Execution
* CIS WebServer Remote Directory Traversal
* Cisco Security Agent Elevated Privileges
* CiscoWorks Information Spoofing or Disclosure
* Citrix MetaFrame Conferencing Manager Access Control Vulnerability
* Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager and NFuse Elite Cross-Site Scripting
* Citrix MetaFrame Security Restriction Bypassing
* Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent Two Vulnerabilities
* Citrix Program Neighborhood Client Information Disclosure
* ClearSwift MIMEsweeper Arbitrary Code Injection
* Clever's Games Terminator 3: War of the Machines Remote Buffer Overflow & Denial of Service
* Code Ocean Ocean FTP Server Multiple Connections Denial of Service
* Comersus BackOffice Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Comersus BackOffice Plus Cross-Site Scripting
* Comersus Cart Cross Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* Comersus Cart Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Comersus Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* Comersus Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* Community Server Cross Site Scripting
* Community Server Forums Cross Site Scripting
* Computalynx CProxy Directory Traversal & Remote Denial of Service
* Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus Integer Overflow in Processing Microsoft OLE Data Lets Remote Users Execute Arbitrary Code
* Computer Associates eTrust Intrusion Detection Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Computer Associates Unicenter Asset Management Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Computer Knacks, Inc. SendLink Password Disclosure
* Compuware DriverStudio Privilege Elevation or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Compuware Softice 'DbgMsg.sys' Remote Denial of Service
* CoolCafe 'login.asp' SQL Injection & Information Disclosure
* Cosminexus Collaboration and Groupmax Collaboration Cross-Site Scripting or Denial of Service
* Crazy Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Crob FTP Server Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
* Crystal FTP Pro Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Crystal Reports/ Business Objects Enterprise Server Denial of Service
* CSystems WebArchiveX Arbitrary File Access
* Cybration ICUII Password Disclosure
* DameWare Arbitrary Code Execution
* DameWare Mini Remote Control Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
* DameWare Password Disclosure Vulnerability
* Darrel O'Neil ASP Virtual News Remote SQL Injection Vulnerability
* Dead Pirate Software SimpleCam Directory Traversal Flaw
* DelphiTurk CodeBank (KodBank) Elevated Privileges
* DelphiTurk CodeBank Password Disclosure
* DelphiTurk FTP Information Disclosure
* DG Remote Control Server Denial of Service
* Digger Solutions Intranet Open Source SQL Injection
* DivX Player Skin File Directory Traversal
* DotNetNuke Script Insertion Vulnerabilities
* Doug Luxem Liberum Help Desk "id" SQL Injection Vulnerability
* DVBBS Cross Site Scripting
* DzSoft PHP Editor Denial of Service
* Early Impact ProductCart Input Validation Flaws in Lets Remote Users Inject SQL Commands
* Ecomm Professional Guestbook "AdminPWD" SQL Injection
* Ecomm Professional Shopping Cart SQL Injection Vulnerability
* ECW-Cart Cross-Site Scripting
* Elemental Software CartWIZ SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* EnCase Device Configuration Overlay Data Acquisition Vulnerability
* enVivo!soft enVivo!CMS SQL Injection and Privilege Escalation
* ePolicy Information Disclosure and Privilege Elevation
* E-POST SPA-PRO Mail @Solomon IMAP Directory Traversal and Buffer Overflow
* e-Quick Cart Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Eset NOD32 Arbitrary Code Execution
* Eternal Lines Web Server Remote Denial of Service
* Eternal Lines Web Server Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Eudora WorldMail Server Information Disclosure
* Eurofull E-Commerce 'mensresp.asp' Cross-Site Scripting
* exdwc NewsletterEz Input Validation Vulnerability Lets Remote Users Inject SQL Commands
* eXeem Password Disclosure
* ExoticSoft FilePocket Password Disclosure
* exploitlabs WebcamXP User Redirection and Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Fast Browser Pro Javascript Spoofing
* Fastream NETFile FTP/Web Server FTP Bounce Vulnerability
* Fastream NETFile Server File Creation Vulnerability
* FastStone 4in1 Browser Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* File Transfer Anywhere Passwords Disclosure
* FileZilla Server Denial of Service
* FileZilla Server Terminal Privilege Elevation or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Firefly Studios Stronghold 2 Remote Denial of Service
* FL Studio Arbitrary Code Execution
* Fortibus CMS SQL Injection & Information Modification
* forumKIT Cross-Site Scripting
* Foxmail 'MAIL FROM:' Remote Buffer Overflow
* Free SMTP Server As Open Relay
* Freeftpd Denial of Service
* freeFTPd Denial of Service
* F-Secure Anti-Virus for Exchange and Internet Gatekeeper Directory Traversal
* F-Secure ARJ Archive Buffer Overflow
* FTGate Denial of Service or Arbitrary Code Execution
* FTPshell Server Denial of Service
* FUN labs Games Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Funduc Search and Replace Buffer Overflow
* FutureSoft TFTP Server 2000 Directory Traversal & Buffer Overflows
* Gaim File Transfer Remote Denial of Service
* GASoft Gurgens Guest Book Discloses Database and Passwords to Remote Users
* GASoft Ultimate Forum Discloses Database and Passwords to Remote Users
* GD Software SD Server Directory Traversal
* Gene6 FTP Server Insecure Critical Functionality
* GeoVision Digital Video Surveillance System Authentication Bypass
* GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner Password Disclosure
* GFi MailEssentials Denial of Service Vulnerability
* GFI MailSecurity Arbitrary Code Execution or Denial of Service
* GlobalScape CuteFTP Multiple Command Response Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP Server Buffer Overflow Lets Remote Users Execute Arbitrary Code
* GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP Server Buffer Overflow Lets Remote Users Execute Arbitrary Code (Updated)
* GNU DC++ Arbitrary Files Modification Vulnerability
* GNU FileZilla Server Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
* GNU Maxthon Security ID Disclosure Vulnerability
* GNU MyServer Directory Listing and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* Golden FTP Server File and Path Disclosure
* GoodTech Systems GoodTech SMTP Server "RCPT TO" Denial of Service Vulnerability
* GoodTech Systems Telnet Server for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 Remote Buffer Overflow
* GoodTech's SMTP Server Arbitrary Code Execution
* Google Talk Denial Of Service
* GoSurf Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Gracebyte Network Assistant Remote Denial of Service
* GraphOn GO-Global For Windows Denial of Service or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Groove Virtual Office / Workspace Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Halocon Remote Denial of Service
* Handy Address Book Server Cross-Site Scripting
* Handy Address Book Server Cross-Site Scripting (Updated)
* Hauri Arbitrary Code Execution
* Hitachi Multiple Hibun Products Security Restriction Bypass
* Home FTP Server Arbitrary File Access
* Hosting Controller Credit Modification or Account Creation
* Hosting Controller Error.ASP Cross Site Scripting
* Hosting Controller Information Disclosure
* Hosting Controller Multiple Information Disclosure
* Hosting Controller Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Hosting Controller 'resellerresources.asp' SQL Injection
* Hosting Controller 'UserProfile.asp' Authentication Bypass
* HP VCRM Password Disclosure
* HTMLJunction EZGuestbook Discloses Database to Remote Users
* Hyper Estraier Information Disclosure
* IA eMailServer Denial of Service
* Iatek PortalApp Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* Iatek PortalApp SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* Iatek SiteEnable SQL Command Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* IBM DB2 Denial of Service & Information Disclosure
* IBM Rational ClearQuest Multiple Cross-Site Scripting
* IBM WebSphere Application Server File Servlet Source Code Disclosure
* IBM WebSphere Application Server JSP Engine Source Code Disclosure
* IceWarp Web Mail Cross Site Scripting or Directory Traversal
* IceWarp Web Mail Multiple Remote
* IceWarp Web Mail Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* iCMS Cross-Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* IISWorks ASPKnowledgeBase Cross-Site Scripting
* IISWorks.com ASP KnowledgeBase Database Disclosure
* IISWorks.com ASP Webmail Database Disclosure
* IISWorks.com Fileman Database Disclosure
* IISWorks.com ListPics Database Disclosure
* IMRadio Password Disclosure
* INCA nProtect Gameguard Unauthorized Read/Write Access
* INCA nProtect Gameguard Unauthorized Read/Write Access (Updated)
* India Software Solution Shopping Cart 'signin.asp' SQL Injection
* Indiatimes Messenger Denial of Service
* InnerMedia DynaZip Arbitrary Code Execution
* Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Intersoft NetTerm Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Ipswitch IMail Server IMAP EXAMINE Command Remote Buffer Overflow
* Ipswitch IMail Server Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Ipswitch IMail Server Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Ipswitch IMail Server Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Ipswitch IMailMailEnable Denial of Service
* Ipswitch WhatsUp Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Ipswitch WhatsUp Professional SQL Injection Vulnerability
* Ivory.org Whisper 32 Password Disclosure
* IVT BlueSoleil Directory Traversal Vulnerability
* Jeuce Personal Web Server Directory Traversal & Denial of Service
* Jeuce Personal Web Server Remote Denial of Service
* JiRo's Upload System Input Validation Vulnerability Lets Remote Users Inject SQL Commands
* JoWood Chaser Remote Buffer Overflow
* JoWood Productions Soldner Secret Wars Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* JView Profiler Arbitrary Code Execution
* KarjaSoft Sami HTTP Server Input Validation Holes
* Kaspersky Anti-Virus Klif.Sys Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
* Kerio Personal Firewall Access Vulnerability
* Kerio Personal Firewall and Server Firewall Denial of Service
* Kerio Products Password Brute Force and Denial of Service
* Kerio WinRoute Firewall Security Restriction Bypassing
* Keyvan1 ImageGallery Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* KF Web Server Directory Listings Disclosure
* KillProcess Arbitrary Code Execution
* K-Meleon Denial of Service
* K-Meleon Denial of Service (Update)
* Kmint Software Golden FTP Server 'USER" Remote Buffer Overflow
* KMiNT21 Software Golden FTP Server RNTO Command Buffer Overflow
* KMiNT21 Software Golden FTP Server RNTO Command Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* LeapFTP Arbitrary Code Execution
* Lightspeed Technologies DeluxeFTP Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* LionMax Software Chat Anywhere Password Disclosure
* livingmailing Input Validation Hole Lets Remote Users Inject SQL Commands
* LocazoList Classifieds Cross-Site Scripting
* LogiSphere Denial of Service
* Loki Download Manager SQL Injection
* LS Games War Times Denial of Service
* M. Dev Software ZipGenius Remote File Creation Vulnerability
* Macallan Mail Solution Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Macromedia Breeze Communication Server Denial of Service
* Macromedia Breeze Information Disclosure
* Macromedia Contribute Publishing Server Information disclosure
* Macromedia Products eLicensing Function Escalated Privilege Vulnerability
* Magnus Lundvall Yawcam Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* MailEnable Arbitrary Code Execution
* MailEnable Arbitrary Code Execution
* MailEnable Arbitrary Code Execution
* MailEnable Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* MailEnable Arbitrary Code Execution or Denial of Service
* MailEnable Denial of Service
* MailEnable Denial of Service
* MailEnable Denial of Service Vulnerability
* MailEnable HTTPMail Vulnerability
* MailEnable IMAP "LOGIN" Command Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
* MailEnable Professional Arbitrary Code Execution
* MailEnable Standard SMTP Format String Vulnerability
* MailEnable Unspecified SMTP Authentication Denial of Service
* MailSite Express Arbitrary Code Execution
* Mall23 SQL Injection
* Mall23 SQL Injection (Updated)
* Massimiliano Montoro Cain Abel Buffer Overflow Causes Remote Code Execution
* MaxWebPortal Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection
* MaxWebPortal Input Validation Hole in 'password.asp' Permits SQL Injection
* MaxWebPortal SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* MaxWebPortal SQL Injection and Privilege Escalation
* McAfee Internet Security Suite Elevated Privilege Vulnerability
* McAfee IntruShield Security Management System Cross Site Scripting & Information Disclosure
* McAfee Security Management System Elevated Privileges or Cross Site Scripting
* Media Online Store Portal SQL Injection Vulnerability
* Media2 CMS Shop SQL Injection
* Merak Mail Server Arbitrary File Access
* Mercury Mail Arbitrary Code Execution
* MercurySteam Scrapland Game Server Remote Denials of Service
* Metalinks MetaBid Three SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
* Metalinks MetaCart Multiple SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft ActiveSync Information Disclosure or Denial of Service
* Microsoft Agent Could Allow Spoofing
* Microsoft Agent Could Allow Spoofing
* Microsoft ASP.NET Canonicalization (Updated)
* Microsoft ASP.NET Canonicalization (Updated)
* Microsoft ASP.NET Canonicalization (Updated)
* Microsoft ASP.NET Canonicalization (Updated)
* Microsoft ASP.NET Unicode Character Conversion Multiple Cross-Site Scripting
* Microsoft ASP.NET ViewState Denial of Service and Security Bypass
* Microsoft Client Service for NetWare Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Client Service for NetWare Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Collaboration Data Objects Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft DirectX DirectShow Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Excel Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Denial of Service
* Microsoft Exchange Server Nested Subfolders Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft FrontPage 2000 DAV File Upload
* Microsoft FrontPage Denial of Service
* Microsoft HTML Help Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft IIS Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer AddChannel Cross-Zone Scripting
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Denial of Service (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer DHTML Edit Control Script Injection (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer DHTML Edit Control Script Injection (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer DHTML Edit Control Script Injection (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Dialog Origin Spoofing Vulnerability
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Dialog Origin Spoofing Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Dynamic IFRAME Security Bypass
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Favorites List
* Microsoft Internet Explorer FTP Download Directory Traversal
* Microsoft Internet Explorer HREF Tag Mouse Event
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Information Disclosure
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Information Disclosure
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer JavaScript OnLoad Handler Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Lets Remote Users Hide Scripting Code
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Malformed 'File:' URI Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer MSHTML.DLL CSS Handling Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Remote Information Disclosure
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Restricted Sites Malformed URI Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Script-initiated Pop-up Windows Spoofing
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Unauthorized Access
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Unauthorized Access (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Unauthorized Access (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Unauthorized Access (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Folder Behaviors Information Disclosure or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Internet Information Server HTTP Response Smuggling
* Microsoft IPV6 TCPIP Loopback LAND Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft ISA Access and Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft ISA Server in SecureNAT Configuration Denial of Service
* Microsoft Jet Database Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft Jet Database Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Jet Database Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft JView Profiler Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Log Sink Class ActiveX Control
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing (Updated)
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing (Updated)
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing (Updated)
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing (Updated)
* Microsoft Media Player & Windows/MSN Messenger PNG Processing (Updated)
* Microsoft MSN Messenger / Internet Explorer Application Crash
* Microsoft MSN Messenger Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft MSN Messenger Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft MSRPC Information Disclosure
* Microsoft NetDDE Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Network Connection Manager Denial of Service
* Microsoft Network Connection Manager Denial of Service (Updated)
* Microsoft Office Denial of Service
* Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* Microsoft Office RC4 Stream Cipher
* Microsoft Office URL File Location Handling Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Office URL File Location Handling Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Office URL File Location Handling Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Office URL File Location Handling Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Outlook 2002 Connector For IBM Lotus Domino Policy Bypass Vulnerability
* Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web Access Email Spoofing Vulnerability
* Microsoft Outlook Express Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Outlook Express Could Allow Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Outlook Express Could Allow Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Outlook Express Information Disclosure or System Crash
* Microsoft Outlook Web Access for Exchange Server 5.5 Could Allow Cross-Site Scripting Attacks
* Microsoft Outlook Web Access URI Redirection
* Microsoft Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution or Elevated Privileges
* Microsoft Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution or Elevated Privileges (Updated)
* Microsoft Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution or Elevated Privileges (Updated)
* Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol Denial of Service
* Microsoft Server Message Block Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft SMTP Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft SMTP Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Step-by-Step Interactive Training Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Telephony Service Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Telnet Client Could Allow Information Disclosure
* Microsoft Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4
* Microsoft Web Client Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows 2000 Group Restriction Bypass
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows ANI File Parsing Errors (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Color Management Module Buffer Overflow or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows Color Management Module Buffer Overflow or Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows CreateRemoteThread Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows Drag and Drop
* Microsoft Windows EMF File Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows EMF File Denial of Service Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Explorer Preview Pane Script Injection Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Explorer Preview Pane Script Injection Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows FTP Client Arbitrary File Control
* Microsoft Windows FTP Client Arbitrary File Control (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Graphics Rendering Engine Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows HTML Help ActiveX Control
* Microsoft Windows HTML Help ActiveX Control (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Hyperlink Object Library Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Windows Hyperlink Object Library Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Hyperlink Object Library Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Image Rendering Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Indexing Service Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Windows Indexing Service Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Kerberos PKINIT Information Disclosure or Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows Kerberos PKINIT Information Disclosure or Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows Kernel Denial Of Service
* Microsoft Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows LAND Attack Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows License Logging Service Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Windows License Logging Service Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows License Logging Service Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows License Logging Service Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows License Logging Service Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows LoadImage API Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows LoadImage API Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows LoadImage API Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Local Denial Of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Media Player May Allow Redirection
* Microsoft Windows Message Queuing Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Message Queuing Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Message Queuing Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows MSDTC and COM+ Privilege Elevation, Arbitrary Code Execution, or Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows MSDTC and COM+ Privilege Elevation, Arbitrary Code Execution, or Denial of Service (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows MSDTC and COM+ Privilege Elevation, Arbitrary Code Execution, or Denial of Service (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows MSDTC and COM+ Privilege Elevation, Arbitrary Code Execution, or Denial of Service (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Network Connections Manager Library Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows NTFS File Block Initialization
* Microsoft Windows OLE / COM Remote Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Plug and Play Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Print Spooler Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows Privilege Elevation
* Microsoft Windows Privilege Elevation (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Protocol Private Key Disclosure
* Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Protocol Server Private Key Disclosure
* Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop 'TSShutdn.exe' Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Resource Kit 'w3who.dll' Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Local Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Cross-Site Scripting & Spoofing
* Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Cross-Site Scripting & Spoofing (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Shell Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Windows Shell Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Shell Remote Code Execution (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows Shell Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Microsoft Windows Shell Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows SMB Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Windows SMB Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows SMB Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows SMB Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Windows USB Driver Buffer Overflow
* Microsoft Windows 'User32.DLL' Icon Handling Remote Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows XP Named Pipe Information Disclosure
* Microsoft Windows XP Windows Management Instrumentation Denial of Service
* Microsoft Windows XP Wireless Zero Configuration Service Information Disclosure
* Microsoft WINS Name Validation (Updated)
* Microsoft WINS Name Validation (Updated)
* Microsoft Word Buffer Overflow or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Microsoft Word MCW File Handler Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
* Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution & Escalation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution and Escalation of Privilege Vulnerabilities
* Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution and Escalation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution and Escalation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution and Escalation of Privilege Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* MindAlign Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Miranda IM PopUp Plus Plugin Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Miranda IM PopUp Plus Plugin Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* Mozilla Bugzilla Internal Error
* Mozilla Firefox Download Dialog Spoofing Vulnerabilities
* MS ASP.NET Denial of Service
* MSN Messenger Protocol Denial of Service
* Multi-Computer Control System Denial of Service
* Multiple Vendor Arbitrary Code Execution
* Multiple Vendor ZoneAlarm Denial of Service
* Multiple Vendors Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browser Modal Dialog Spoofing
* Multiple Vendors Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browser Modal Dialog Spoofing (Updated)
* Musicmatch Jukebox Elevated Privilege and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* My Album Information Disclosure
* MyInternet Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Mysoft Technology Maxthon "m2_search_text" Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* MyTemplateSite Cross-Site Scripting
* NateOn Messenger Arbitrary Code Execution or Denial of Service
* Naxtor e-Directory Cross-Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* Naxtor Shopping Cart Cross-Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* Neslo Desktop Rover Denial of Service Vulnerability
* NetAuctionHelp Auction Software Cross-Site Scripting
* NetCaptor Browser Javascript Spoofing
* NetCPlus BusinessMail Server SMTP Command Validation Error Remote Denial of Service
* NetLeaf Limited NotJustBrowsing Discloses Application Passwords
* NetManage RUMBA Profile Handling Multiple Buffer Overflow
* NetManage RUMBA Profile Handling Multiple Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* NetObjects Fusion Information Disclosure
* Netscape Browser Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* Netscape Denial of Service
* Netscape IDN Implementation URL Spoof
* NetWin DMail Errors Let Remote Users Bypass Authentication and Execute Code
* NetworkActiv Web Server Cross-Site Scripting
* Network-Client.com FTP Now Local Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* Newmad Technologies PicoWebServer Remote Buffer Overflow
* NEXTWEB (i)Site Discloses Database and Passwords to Remote Users and Permits SQL Injection
* NodeManager SNMPv1 traps Buffer Overflow
* NodeManager SNMPv1 traps Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Nortel Contivity VPN Client Password Disclosure Vulnerability
* Nortel Contivity VPN Client Password Disclosure Vulnerability (Updated)
* Nortel VPN Client Privilege Elevation
* Notify Technology NotifyLink Enterprise Server Multiple Vulnerabilities
* NotJustBrowsing Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Novell eDirectory Can Be Crashed With Requests Containing MS-DOS Device Names
* Novell eDirectory Denial of Service or Unauthorized File Access
* Novell eDirectory Security Bypass
* Novell GroupWise Arbitrary Code Execution
* Novell GroupWise Client Local Password Disclosure
* Novell Nsure Audit Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Nullsoft Winamp Malformed MP4 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Nullsoft Winamp Multiple Unspecified Vulnerabilities
* Nullsoft Winamp Variant IN_CDDA.dll Remote Buffer Overflow
* OASYS Lite Cross-Site Scripting
* Ocean12 Calendar Manager Pro Authentication Bypassing
* Ocean12 Calendar Manager SQL Injection Vulnerability
* Ocean12 Mailing List Manager Remote SQL Injection
* Ocean12 Membership Manager Pro Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection Vulnerability
* OKBSYS Lite Cross-Site Scripting
* Oleh Yuschuk OllyDbg Error in Loading Causes Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Omni Browser Javascript Spoofing
* OneWorldStore Denial of Service Vulnerability
* OneWorldStore Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* OneWorldStore Multiple Vulnerabilities
* OpenConnect Systems WebConnect Remote Denial of Service and Information Disclosure
* OpenConnect Systems WebConnect Remote Denial of Service and Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Opera 'data:' URI Handler Spoofing
* Opera Web Browser Download Dialog File Manipulation
* Optimal Desktop Javascript Spoofing
* Orenosv HTTP/FTP Server Buffer Overflows
* Orvado ASP Nuke SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
* OS4E 'LOGIN.ASP' SQL Injection
* Painkiller Buffer Overflow Remote Denial of Service
* Panda Software Antivirus Library ZOO Archive Heap Overflow
* pcAnywhere Authentication Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Peer2Mail Password Disclosure
* Peer2Mail Password Disclosure (Updated)
* Pegasus Mail Arbitrary Code Execution
* Perception LiteWeb Protected File Access Vulnerability
* Piotr Kowalski LANChat Pro Remote Denial of Service
* PlatinumFTPServer Malformed User Name Connection Remote Denial of Service
* PMSoftware Simple Web Server Buffer Overflow Permits Remote Code Execution
* PMSoftware Simple Web Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Updated)
* PowerArchiver Arbitrary Code Execution
* PPP Infotech netMailshar Professional Two Vulnerabilities
* Pragma TelnetServer Lets Remote Users Hide Log Entries
* Prevx Pro File Modification & Driver Spoofing
* PrivaShare Denial of Service
* Process Explorer Arbitrary Code Execution
* ProRat Server Arbitrary Code Execution
* PY Software Active Webcam Webserver Remote Denials of Service & Information Disclosure
* Qualcomm Eudora E-mail, Stationary/Mailbox Files Remote Code Execution
* Quick 'n Easy FTP Server Denial of Service
* RaidenHTTPD Directory Traversal
* RaidenHTTPD Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* Randy Wable datatrac Denial of Service Vulnerability
* RARLAB WinRAR Directory Traversal
* Raysoft Video Cam Server Multiple Vulnerabilities
* RealArcade Vulnerabilities
* RealNetworks Realplayer Enterprise Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
* RealPlayer Enterprise Arbitrary Code Execution
* RealPlayer Security Zone Bypass
* Rebrand P2P Share Spy Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* Rediff Bol Window's Address Book Disclosure
* Reflection for Secure IT Multiple Vulnerabilities
* RhinoSoft Serv-U FTP Server Remote Denial of Service
* RockLiffe MailSite Express WebMail Multiple Vulnerabilities
* RSA ACE/ Agent for Web Cross Site Scripting
* RSA Authentication Agent for Web Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
* RSA Authentication Agent for Web Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (Updated)
* RSA Authentication Agent for Web for IIS Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* RSA Authentication Agent for Web for IIS Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability (Updated)
* Runtime GetDataBack for NTFS Local Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* rwAuction Pro Cross-Site Scripting
* SafeNet Sentinel License Manager Remote Buffer Overflow
* SafeNet Sentinel License Manager Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* SafeNet SoftRemote VPN Client Key Disclosure
* Savant Web Server Remote Buffer Overflow
* Savant Web Server User Information Disclosure
* SecureOL VE2 Security Restriction Bypass
* SecureW2 Information Disclosure
* SecureW2 Information Disclosure (Updated)
* ServersCheck Directory Traversal
* Serv-U FTP Server Denial of Service
* Sights 'n Sounds Streaming Media Server Denial of Service
* Sigma ISP Manager SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
* SiteBeater MP3 Catalog Cross-Site Scripting
* SiteBeater News System Cross-Site Scripting
* Skype for Windows Security Bypass
* Slim Browser Javascript Spoofing
* SlimFTPd Arbitrary Code Execution
* SlimFTPd Denial of Service
* Small HTTP Server Arbitrary File Writing
* SmarterMail Cross-Site Scripting
* SnugServer FTP Service Directory Traversal
* soft3304 04WebServer Directory Traversal
* software602 602LAN SUITE HTML Log File Processing Flaw Lets Remote Users Hide Log Entries
* Software602 602LAN SUITE Input Validation
* Software602 602LAN SUITE Input Validation (Updated)
* Software602 602LAN SUITE Local File Detection and Denial of Service
* Software602 602LAN SUITE Local File Detection and Denial of Service (Updated)
* Softwin BitDefender Insecure Program Execution Vulnerability
* Solupress News Cross-Site Scripting
* Sony SunnComm MediaMax Insecure Directory Permissions (Updated)
* Sophos Anti-Virus Denial of Service
* SpeedProject Arbitrary Code Execution
* SSH Secure Shell and Tectia Server Key Disclosure
* SSH Secure Shell and Tectia Server Key Disclosure (Updated)
* StoneGate Firewall and VPN Engine Denial of Service
* Storage Exec/ StorageCentral Arbitrary Code Execution
* Storage Exec/ StorageCentral Arbitrary Code Execution
* StorePortal Multiple SQL Injection High
* Stormy Studios KNet Remote Buffer Overflow
* StumbleInside GoText Discloses Users Configuration Data
* Sukru Alatas's Guestbook Database Disclosure
* Sun Java System Web Server Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Sybari Antigen for Exchange Security Bypass
* Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise Unspecified Vulnerability
* Symantec Anti Virus Arbitrary Code Execution
* Symantec Anti Virus Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Symantec Anti Virus Password Disclosure
* Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition and Client Security Privilege Elevation
* Symantec AntiVirus Products RAR Archive Virus Detection Bypass
* Symantec AntiVirus SMB Scan Detection Bypass
* Symantec 'CcErrDsp.ErrorDisplay.1' ActiveX Buffer Overflow
* Symantec Discovery Unauthorized Access
* Symantec Multiple Products AutoProtect Errors Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Symantec Multiple Products AutoProtect Errors Denial of Service Vulnerability (Updated)
* Symantec Norton GoBack Lets Local Users Bypass Authentication
* Symantec pcAnywhere Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
* TAC Vista Directory Traversal
* TCP Chat Denial of Service
* TCP-IP Datalook Denial of Service
* Team JohnLong RaidenFTPD Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* Techland Xpand Rally Remote Denial of Service
* Techland XPand Rally Remote Format String
* Techno Dreams Multiple Product SQL Injection
* ThePoolClub iPool Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* ThePoolClub iSnooker Information Disclosure Vulnerability
* ToCA Race Driver Arbitrary Code Execution
* TrackerCam Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* TrackerCam Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Trend Micro OfficeScan Information Disclosure
* Trend Micro PC-cillin Privilege Elevation
* Trend Micro ServerProtect Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Typsoft FTP Server Denial of Service
* Uapplication Products Password Disclosure
* Uapplication Ublog Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
* Ubisoft The Settlers: Heritage of Kings Player Logging Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
* Ublog Reload SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting
* UR Software W32Dasm Remote Buffer Overflow
* UStore Cross-Site Scripting or SQL Injection
* VERITAS Backup Exec Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Veritas Backup Exec Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Veritas Backup Exec Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* VERITAS NetBackup Arbitrary Code Execution
* VERITAS NetBackup Arbitrary Code Execution (Updated)
* Veritas NetBackup Denial of Service
* Virtools Web Player Arbitrary Code Execution or Arbitrary File Control
* VLAIBB 'sig2dat' Integer Overflow & Remote Denial of Service
* VP-ASP Shopping Cart Cross-Site Scripting
* VP-ASP SQL Injection
* vxFtpSrv Arbitrary Code Execution
* vxTftpSrv Arbitrary Code Execution
* vxWeb Denial of Service
* Walla! TeleSite SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting
* War FTP Daemon Remote Denial of Service
* Watchfire AppScan Arbitrary Code Execution
* Web Vulnerability Scanner Denial of Service
* Web Wiz Forums Information Disclosure
* WebEOC Multiple Vulnerabilities
* WebInspect Cross Site Scripting
* Webroot Desktop Firewall Authentication Bypassing or Arbitrary Code Execution
* Webroot Software My Firewall Plus Arbitrary File Corruption Vulnerability
* WebWasher Classic HTTP CONNECT Unauthorized Access
* WebWasher Classic HTTP CONNECT Unauthorized Access (Updated)
* WhatsUp Small Business Directory Traversal and Information Disclosure
* WheresJames Webcam Publisher Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
* Wichio 27Tools-in-1 Browser Javascript Spoofing
* Winace Remote Directory Traversal
* Winamp Arbitrary Code Execution
* WinHKI Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* Winmail Server Multiple Vulnerabilities
* WinRAR Arbitrary Code Execution
* WMailserver Information Disclosure
* WMR Simpson BookReview Input Validation Holes Permit Cross-Site Scripting & Path Disclosure
* Woodstone Servers Alive Help Function Escalated Privilege Vulnerability
* Woppoware PostMaster Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Working Resources BadBlue MFCISAPICommand Remote Buffer Overflow
* WSW ShowOff! Digital Media Software Two Vulnerabilities
* WWWeb Concepts Events System Input Validation Vulnerability
* WWWguestbook SQL Injection
* XcClassified Cross-Site Scripting
* XcPhotoAlbum Cross-Site Scripting
* Xinkaa WEB Station Directory Traversal
* X-Ways WinHex Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Yager Denial of Service and Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
* Yahoo! Messenger Custom Message Buffer Overflow
* Yahoo! Messenger Download Dialogue Box File Name Spoofing
* Yahoo! Messenger Insecure Default Installation
* Yahoo! Messenger URL Handler Remote Denial Of Service Vulnerability
* Yaosoft COOL! Remote Control Denial of Service
* YusASP Web Asset Manager Unauthorized Access
* ZipGenius Arbitrary Code Execution
* ZipGenius Multiple Directory Traversal Vulnerabilities
* ZipTorrent Password Disclosure
* ZixForum SQL Injection
* Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Vet Antivirus Engine Buffer Overflow
* ZonGG Input Validation Hole in 'ad/login.asp' Permits SQL Injection

[back to top]

#
Unix/ Linux Operating Systems

* 4D WebSTAR Grants Access to Remote Users and Elevated Privileges to Local Users
* 4D WebStar Remote IMAP Denial of Service
* 4D WebStar Tomcat Plugin Remote Buffer Overflow
* 4D WebStar Tomcat Plugin Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Abuse Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Adobe Acrobat Reader mailListIsPdf() Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Adobe Acrobat Reader mailListIsPdf() Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Adobe Acrobat Reader UnixAppOpenFilePerform Buffer Overflow
* Adobe Acrobat Reader UnixAppOpenFilePerform Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Adobe Reader / Acrobat Arbitrary Code Execution & Elevated Privileges
* Adobe Reader For Unix Local File Disclosure
* Adobe Version Cue for Mac OS X Elevated Privileges
* Adobe Version Cue for Mac OS X Elevated Privileges (Updated)
* ADP Elite System Max 9000 Series Shell Access
* Adrian Pascalau GIPTables Firewall Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Alexander Barton ngIRCd Remote Buffer Overflow
* Alexander Barton ngIRCd Remote Format String
* Alexander Palmo Simple PHP Blog Remote Directory Traversal
* Alexis Sukrieh Backup Manager Information Disclosure
* Alexis Sukrieh Backup Manager Information Disclosure (Updated
* Alkalay.Net Multiple Scripts Arbitrary Remote Command Execution & Directory Traversal
* AlmondSoft Almond Classifieds SQL Injection
* ALSA Stack Protection Weakness
* AltantForum Multiple Cross-Site Scripting
* Andrew Church IRC Services LISTLINKS Information Disclosure
* Andrew W. Rogers pcal Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Apache Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Apache mod_include Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apache mod_include Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apache Mod_Proxy Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apache mod_ssl Denial of Service (Updated)
* Apache mod_ssl Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Apache Mod_SSL SSL_Util_UUEncode_Binary Stack Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apache mod_ssl SSLCipherSuite Access Validation (Updated)
* Apache mod_ssl SSLCipherSuite Access Validation (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache 'Mod_SSL SSLVerifyClient' Restriction Bypass (Updated)
* Apache SpamAssassin Lets Remote Users Deny Service
* Apache SpamAssassin Lets Remote Users Deny Service (Updated)
* Apache SpamAssassin Lets Remote Users Deny Service (Updated)
* ApacheTop Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Appfluent Technology Database IDS Buffer Overflow
* Appfluent Technology Database IDS Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apple ColorSync ICC Header Remote Buffer Overflow
* Apple iSync mRouter Buffer Overflow
* Apple iSync mRouter Buffer Overflow
* Apple Keynote 'keynote:' Lets Remote Users Access Local Files
* Apple Mac OS X AirPort Card Automatic Network Association
* Apple Mac OS X AppleFileServer Remote Denial of Service
* Apple Mac OS X 'at' Utility Information Disclosure
* Apple Mac OS X 'at' Utility Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Apple Mac OS X Default Pseudo-Terminal Permission
* Apple Mac OS X Finder 'DS_Store' Insecure File Creation
* Apple Mac OS X Font Book Font Collection Buffer Overflow
* Apple Mac OS X Java Update
* Apple Mac OS X Kernel searchfs() Buffer Overflow
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Arbitrary Code Execution Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Apple Mac OS X NetInfo Setup Tool Buffer Overflow
* Apple Mac OS X NetInfo Setup Tool Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Apple Mac OS X 'parse_machfile()' Denial of Service
* Apple Mac OS X Perl Privilege Dropping
* Apple Mac OS X Security Update
* Apple Mac OS X Security Update
* Apple Mac OS X Security Update
* Apple Mac OS X Vulnerabilities
* Apple MacOS X Vulnerabilities
* Apple Mail EMail Message ID Header Information Disclosure
* Apple QuickTime Quartz Composer File Information Disclosure
* Apple QuickTime Quartz Composer File Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Apple Safari Data URI Memory Corruption
* Apple Safari Dialog Box Origin Spoofing
* Apple Safari IDN Implementation URL Spoof
* Apple Safari IDN Implementation URL Spoof (Updated)
* Apple Safari Input Validation
* Apple Safari Input Validation (Updated)
* Apple Safari Open Windows Injection (Updated)
* Apple Safari Web Browser HTTPS Denial of Service
* Apple Safari Web Browser JavaScript Remote Denial of Service
* APSIS Pound Remote Buffer Overflow
* APSIS Pound Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Arc Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Arc Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* ARJ Software UNARJ Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* ARJ Software UNARJ Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* ARJ Software UNARJ Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* ARJ Software UNARJ Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Astaro Security Linux HTTP CONNECT Unauthorized Access
* Astaro Security Linux HTTP CONNECT Unauthorized Access (Updated)
* Astaro Security Linux ISAKMP IKE Traffic Denial of Service
* Astaro Security Linux PPTP Server Unspecified Remote Denial of Service
* Asterisk Voicemail Unauthorized Access
* Atlant Pro Cross-Site Scripting
* Avaya Labs Libsafe Multi-threaded Process Race Condition Security Bypass
* Backup Manager File Permissions
* BackupNinja Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Bacula Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Bacula Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* BeMoore Software News2Net SQL Injection
* Benchmark Designs WHM AutoPilot 'server_inc' Include File Flaw
* Berlios GPSD Remote Format String
* Bidwatcher Remote Format String
* Bidwatcher Remote Format String (Updated)
* Binary Board System Multiple Cross-Site Scripting
* Black List Daemon select() Remote Buffer Overflow
* Black List Daemon select() Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Blog Torrent Password Disclosure
* Blue Coat Reporter Multiple Vulnerabilities
* BlueZ Arbitrary Command Execution
* BlueZ Arbitrary Command Execution (Updated)
* BlueZ Arbitrary Command Execution (Updated)
* BlueZ Arbitrary Command Execution (Updated)
* BMC Control M Agent Insecure File Permission
* BMV Buffer Overflow
* Brooky CubeCart Multiple Vulnerabilities
* BrT CopperExport 'XP_Publish.PHP' SQL Injection
* Bugzilla Private Summary Disclosure or Flag Modification
* BZip2 File Permission Modification
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* BZip2 File Permission Modification (Updated)
* bzip2 Remote Denial of Service
* bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* Bzip2 Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup UniversalAgent Backdoor Account
* Cadsoft.de VDR Daemon Remote File Overwrite
* Caolan McNamara & Dom Lachowicz wvWare Library Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon Cyrus IMAP Server Off-by-one Overflow (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus IMAP Server Multiple Remote Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Carnegie Mellon University Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Carsten Haitzler imlib Image Decoding Integer Overflow (Updated)
* Carsten Haitzler imlib Image Decoding Integer Overflow (Updated)
* Carsten Haitzler imlib Image Decoding Integer Overflow (Updated)
* CartKeeper CKGold Cross-Site Scripting
* CDRTools Unspecified Privilege Escalation (Updated)
* Centericq Empty Packet Remote Denial of Service
* Centericq Empty Packet Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* CenterICQ Insecure Temporary File
* CenterICQ Insecure Temporary File (Updated)
* CenterICQ Insecure Temporary File (Updated)
* Cheetah Elevated Privileges
* Cheetah Elevated Privileges (Updated)
* Christoph Dalitz abctab2ps Buffer Overflows (Updated)
* Citadel/UX select() System Call Remote Buffer Overflow
* Clam Anti-Virus ClamAV Mac OS X Command Execution
* Clam Anti-Virus ClamAV OLE2 File Handling Denial of Service
* Clam Anti-Virus ClamAV Remote Denials of Service
* Clam Anti-Virus ClamAV Remote Denials of Service (Updated)
* Clam AntiVirus Denial of Service
* Clam AntiVirus Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Clam AntiVirus Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Clam AntiVirus Remote Denial of Service& Arbitrary Code Execution
* ClamAV UPX Buffer Overflow & FSG Handling Denial of Service
* ClamAV UPX Buffer Overflow & FSG Handling Denial of Service (Updated)
* ClamAV UPX Buffer Overflow & FSG Handling Denial of Service (Updated)
* ClamAV UPX Buffer Overflow & FSG Handling Denial of Service (Updated)
* Cmd5checkpw Poppasswd Disclosure
* Cocktail Admin Password Disclosure
* Common-lisp-controller Elevated Privileges
* Common-lisp-controller Elevated Privileges (Updated)
* Conectiva netpbm Privilege Escalation
* Courier Mail Server Remote Denial of Service
* Courier Mail Server Remote Denial of Service (Updated)
* cPanel Cross-Site Scripting
* cPanel 'User' Parameter Cross-Site Scripting
* Crip Helper Script Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Crip Helper Script Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* cURL / libcURL URL Parser Buffer Overflow
* cURL / libcURL URL Parser Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* cURL / libcURL URL Parser Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* CVS 'Cvsbug.In' Script Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* CVS 'Cvsbug.In' Script Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* CVS 'Cvsbug.In' Script Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* Cyphor Cross-Site Scripting & SQL Injection
* Cyphor SQL Injection
* Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* Cyrus SASL Buffer Overflow & Input Validation (Updated)
* D. J. Bernstein QMail Remote Denials of Service
* Dada Mail Archives HTML Injection
* Darryl Burgdorf Webhints Remote Command Execution
* Darwin Kernel Denial of Service
* David Gay F2C Multiple Insecure Temporary File Creation
* David Gay F2C Multiple Insecure Temporary File Creation (Updated)
* David Mischler Linux IPRoute2 'Netbug' Script Insecure Temporary File
* DCP-Portal Cross-Site Scripting & SQL Injection
* DCP-Portal Input Validation
* Debian Apt-Cacher Remote Arbitrary Code Execution
* Debian CVS-Repouid Remote Authentication Bypass & Denial of Service
* Debian CVS-Repouid Remote Authentication Bypass & Denial of Service (Updated)
* Debian File Permission
* Debian Horde Default Administrator Password
* Debian Lintian Insecure Temporary File
* Debian Linux Firewall Loading Failure
* Debian Module-Assistant Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Debian Pam Radius Auth File Information Disclosure
* Debian Reportbug Multiple Information Disclosure
* Debian Toolchain-Source Multiple Insecure Temporary File Creation
* Denial of Service & IRC Protocol Plug-in Arbitrary Code Execution
* dhcpcd Denial of Service (Updated)
* Dick Copits PDEstore Cross-Site Scripting
* Dillo 'a_Interface_msg()' Format String
* DNA MKBold-MKItalic Remote Format String
* Dnsmasq Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
* Dnsmasq Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Dnsmasq Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Domain Name Relay Daemon Arbitrary Code Execution
* Dropbear SSH Server Buffer Overflow
* DRZES HMS Cross-Site Scripting & SQL Injection
* Easy Search System Cross-Site Scripting
* Easy Software Products CUPS Access Control List Bypass
* Easy Software Products CUPS Access Control List Bypass (Updated)
* Easy Software Products CUPS HTTP GET Denial of Service
* Easy Software Products CUPS HTTP GET Denial of Service (Updated)
* Easy Software Products CUPS HTTP GET Denial of Service (Updated)
* Edgewall Software Trac Arbitrary File Upload/Download
* Edgewall Software Trac Search Module SQL Injection
* Edgewall Trac SQL Injection
* EKG 'LIbGadu' Multiple Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Elm 'Expires' Header Remote Buffer Overflow
* Elm 'Expires' Header Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Elm 'Expires' Header Remote Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Elmo Arbitrary File Overwrite
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail 'fetchmailconf' Information Disclosure
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail 'fetchmailconf' Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail 'fetchmailconf' Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail 'fetchmailconf' Information Disclosure (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated)
* eric3 Unspecified Vulnerability
* eric3 Unspecified Vulnerability (Updated)
* eric3 Unspecified Vulnerability (Updated)
* Eskuel Unauthorized Administrator Access
* ESMI PayPal Storefront SQL Injection & Cross-Site Scripting
* ESRI ArcInfo Workstation s Buffer Overflows and Format String
* Ethereal Multiple Dissector Vulnerabilities
* Ethereal Multiple Dissector Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Ethereal Multiple Dissector Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Ethereal Multiple Remote Protocol Dissector Vulnerabilities
* Ethereal Multiple Remote Protocol Dissector Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Ethereal Multiple Remote Protocol Dissector Vulnerabilities (Updated)
* Ethereal Multiple Remote P

December 31, 2005 at 11:47 AM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (525) | Top of page | Blog Home

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The Daily Paper Of Tomorrow

It won't look the same. But with reimagining, the local daily ain't dead yet

The boss walks into your office and shuts the door. Sits down. Looks you solemnly in the eye. "We're buying a bunch of newspapers from Knight Ridder (KRI )," he says. Tilts back in his chair. "We know there's something to be done with them, but we don't know what. Your new job is to figure that out. Which functions can go, which stay, what must be expanded, where the new revenue is. We -- well, you -- will remake the local newspaper for this century." He holds your gaze, nods twice, and exits.

At which point, judging from the reactions of those to whom this scenario was suggested, you put your head down and weep. Even among other still-profitable-yet-challenged media, newspapers have an especially bad case of cooties. "The components of what we historically know as the newspaper have become unbundled," says Warburg Pincus managing director Mark Colodny. Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ) can offer sharply targeted local ads, craigslist has free classifieds, news is free everywhere, and next-generation news aggregators such as topix.net and inform.com are creeping in.

What's to be done? One recent blogger notion involves seeking federal assistance, but PBS can tell you how well that works. Absent extracting newspapers from investors' profit demands, your to-do list likely includes the following:

STEAL FROM GOOGLE. Make your ads hyper-accountable. Identify the top advertisers in your local market and figure out what it would take to grab 100% of their ad budgets. Give them unlimited pages, on paper and online, until they reach their goals. You're the biggest guy in town. Your per-page cost of newsprint is cheap -- and your per-impression cost online is even cheaper. Leverage that to cut off your rivals' oxygen.

BIFURCATE. Take what the The Washington Post (WPO ) and Chicago Tribune (TRB ) are doing a step further: Offer a free news-digest daily aimed at your least committed readers. Then price up a more elite daily newspaper, so the old $1 ceiling becomes the new floor for single-copy prices. Goodbye, daily paper. Hello daily papers -- one mass (free) and one premium. And given the elite daily's audience, charge more for its ads.

REDEPLOY MERCILESSLY. Save pages and dollars: Put all stock and TV listings online. Rethink everything and ask hard questions: Do you need a Washington bureau if you're not The Washington Post or The New York Times (NYT )? How much international news do your readers want -- can you pick it up from other sources, or run it online? Do you need a Saturday edition? Send a blogger, not a phalanx of reporters, to the news-free Republican and Democratic conventions. Which critics and columnists are crucial, and which won't be missed? Can you outsource the phone sales of your classifieds?

INCREASE LOCAL COVERAGE. An old saw, but local is newspapers' last unique attribute. It also provides the lens through which you view the larger world. What foreign reportage matters most to your readers? Find out which countries receive the most money from local residents.

REDESIGN YOUR PREMIUM PRODUCT. Production values for other media are higher than they've ever been. Do your pages have to look so newspaperish? A classier environment attracts richer advertisers.

USE YOUR READERS. Building communities and businesses around community-created content was not invented by MySpace.com. One bright spot for the Reader's Digest Assn. (RDA ) is Reiman Publications, which runs a host of homey, ad-free titles that lean heavily on reader-written contributions. Is there a sufficient subcultural pulse in your city to pull off a mini-myspace? Are locals writing hobbyist blogs that you can build about.coms around? There have always been more talented content creators than full-time jobs for them; the platform of the Net makes them visible. Do you want them inside your tent as partners or outside it as competitors?

To discuss the daily paper of tomorrow, go to Fine's blog at www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia

December 31, 2005 at 10:35 AM in Journalism | Permalink | TrackBack (60) | Top of page | Blog Home

Web services thrive, but outages outrage users

Web services thrive, but outages outrage users - Yahoo! News

By Adam Pasick Fri Dec 30, 1:20 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Web sites that share blogs, bookmarks and photos exploded in popularity in 2005, but in recent weeks a number of major outages left users stranded and frustrated.

The new breed of Web site includes blogging services such as TypePad, the photo site Flickr, the shared bookmark site del.icio.us and many others. They are sometimes known collectively as "Web 2.0": hosted online, relying heavily on users' submissions, and frequently updated and tweaked by their owners.

Their growth in the last year has been huge. Flickr and del.icio.us were high-profile acquisitions for Internet giant Yahoo, and there are now at least 20 million blogs in existence, according to some estimates, with tens of thousands being added every day.

But the surge in Web-based applications hasn't come without some serious hiccups as several notable services have crashed.

Six Apart, whose TypePad service is used by many high-profile bloggers, experienced nearly an entire day of downtime on December 16, when it suffered a hardware failure. Del.icio.us had a major power failure on December 14. Services including Bloglines, Feedster and WordPress have also experienced problems.

Nothing underlines the importance of these "social media" services as much as the outcry of users when the sites crash. While the services were usually back up and running within a few days at most, the outages prompted much consternation from users who were temporarily unable to share their blogs and bookmarks with the world.

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino wrote on their blog MobHappy (http://mobhappy.typepad.com/) that waiting for TypePad to be fixed was like "waiting for a train to arrive, when you're sitting on a cold, damp platform. It's mildly irritating for the first 5 minutes, but then annoyance levels start to rise exponentially."

"TypePad has been growing so rapidly that it is finding the hard way that scale and scalability matter," Business 2.0 technology writer Om Malik wrote on his blog (http://gigaom.com/). "Are they the only ones? Not really -- over (the) past few days Bloglines, Feedster and Wordpress.com have been behaving like a temperamental 3-year-old."

The usefulness of Web 2.0 services -- which also include the collaborative Web pages known as Wikis and RSS feeds that deliver customized information to users -- is highlighted when they are abruptly taken away.

"You need those services to be 'on.' I have come to expect 99.9 percent uptime, and when a service crashes there is significant frustration," said David Boxer, director of instructional technology and research at the Windward School in Los Angeles, where he runs workshops on subjects like podcasting and photoblogging.

"When those services go down, then we are stuck in a ditch," he said.

Boxer's students have worked on projects aimed at making them "citizen journalists" via publishing their own blogs, podcasts, documentaries and photo essays. But when those services suffer outages, everything grinds to a halt.

When the Blogger Web site went down, Boxer's students lost some of their work. And when del.icio.us crashed recently, "it left me personally in a lurch," he said.

"I knew that eventually a machine or software application will crash, but I always expect a third-party provider like del.icio.us will build enough redundancy into the infrastructure that it will never go down," Boxer said.

It is still early days for Web 2.0, and some of the recent difficulties are likely just teething problems as companies adapt to their new popularity. However, the outages may make it harder to convince businesses and investors that blogging is ready for primetime.

Boxer, for one, is willing to ride out a few outages to take advantage of the new services.

"They allow for elements of personalization, content delivery and information pushing unlike any previous incarnation of the Net," he said.

WEB 2.0 LINKS

TypePad (http://www.typepad.com/): A paid-for service for publishing blogs and photo albums. Competitors include Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) and Google's Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com).

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/): An online service for sharing and managing photos.

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us): A site for storing and sharing bookmarked Web pages.

Computer book publisher Tim O'Reilly's essay on Web 2.0 (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/wha t-is-web-20.html)

December 31, 2005 at 10:31 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (40) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 30, 2005

How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

Wired 14.01: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

Pay-per-click advertising is big, big, big business. So are bogus hits on Internet ads. It's search giants against scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy.

Stuart Cauff launched a charter-jet service in Miami Beach back in 2002. Being a 21st-century business, JetNetwork advertised on the Internet, especially on search engines. Anyone who Googled, say, "air charter Miami" would be greeted with the familiar list of search results and, in a separate place, a plain box of text with a blue hyperlink to JetNetwork's Web site.

Search ads were perfect for Cauff's business. His potential customers - a diverse group of celebrities, photojournalists, medical evacuees, and people who just needed to get away from or to Miami in a hurry - were scattered across the country. To reach this audience with traditional advertising, he would have had to buy time on scores of television and radio stations and space in just as many newspapers and magazines, something that only wealthy, established companies could afford. Even if Cauff could pay for the ads, the vast majority of people exposed to them wouldn't care about charter jets, so most of his money would be wasted. But with search-based ads, JetNetwork's name would appear, at least in theory, only before people who were actually interested in Miami charter flights.

Still, the ads were expensive. This kind of advertising is known as pay-per-click, because advertisers shell out money to a search engine every time a surfer clicks on their links. The price and placement depend mainly on how much the advertiser wants to bid for the search term - also known as the keyword in ad jargon. As other charter-air companies began PPC advertising, the cost of a click on a top-ranked ad rose to about $10 - in some cases as high as $30 - and there could be hundreds of clicks a month.

Which is why Cauff was infuriated when he discovered that up to "40 percent, maybe more" of the clicks on his keyword ads apparently came not from potential customers around the nation but from a single Internet address, one that belonged to a rival based in New York City. "If we get clicked fraudulently, it uses up our ad budget," he says. Advertisers usually set limits on how much they will spend, and search engines drop ads once they hit that limit. As a result, fraudulent clicking "literally pushes us off the page," Cauff explains. "And then our competition buys in at a lower price when we're not there."

Cauff was a victim of "click fraud," the illicit manipulation of keyword-based advertising. In this case, the scam appeared straightforward - one company clicked on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs. More complex is a second type of bogus ad click that exploits a second form of PPC advertising: ads fed to Web sites - anything from personal blogs to the sites of major corporations - by search providers like Google, Yahoo!, LookSmart, and, soon, MSN. The search engine indexes the content of the Web site and matches it with a group of relevant ads. (The most familiar form is Google's AdSense program - the sets of links labeled ads by goooooogle that show up on pages across the Internet. The advertisements that appear on Google itself are part of a separate but related program called AdWords.) Thus, bloggers who write about their air-travel experiences and choose to host such ads may find links on their pages for JetNetworks and its brethren. If a blog visitor clicks on the ad, the search engine splits its fee with the blogger. Although these "affiliate" ads have been hugely successful for advertisers, search engines, and the host Web sites, the system creates an incentive for affiliates to cheat. "All you have to do to make some money is find a way to click the ad sent by Google or Yahoo! to your own Web page," says search marketing consultant Joseph Holcomb. "Click! - there's 10 bucks. Click! - there's 10 bucks. It goes on all the time."

Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company's search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn't break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company's estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. PPC is even more lucrative for Google. According to Noto, Google will end 2005 with $6.1 billion in revenue. About 99 percent of that revenue comes from keyword ads (over 56 percent from AdWords, according to the company's most recent quarterly financial statement, and 43 percent from AdSense), making Google a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any television network or newspaper chain. All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US - unless click fraud ruins it.

If that occurs, the consequences will be felt throughout the Net. By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet's venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them - PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet's fabulous cacophony of voices.

The amount of click fraud is difficult to quantify; estimates of the proportion of fake clicks run from as low as 1 in 10 to as high as 1 in 2. In a widely cited recent study, MarketingExperiments.com, an online marketing research outfit, reported that "as much as 29.5 percent" of the clicks in three experimental PPC campaigns on Google were fraudulent. Whatever the exact figure, click fraud has become pervasive, and Google, Yahoo!, and the other major PPC firms have found themselves caught in a game of cat and mouse with its perpetrators. Even as the search engines shore up their defenses, click scammers are becoming more sophisticated, increasingly deploying complex software to disguise the origins of clicks. For now, the search companies and many of their clients maintain that the problem on their networks is under control. But some observers, like Holcomb, believe that click fraud is "a billion-dollar mess" that "has the potential of destroying the entire industry."

Last October, Boris Elpiner noticed something odd about the Web traffic coming to his company from its PPC ads. As vice president of marketing for RingCentral, an online telecommunications firm in San Mateo, California, Elpiner is in charge of its affiliate-ad program, which hired Yahoo! to distribute RingCentral's ads onto Web sites with compatible content. Poring over his records, he discovered that a keyword term ("fax software download") that had previously generated almost no clicks was suddenly pulling them in. The total cost to RingCentral for the clicks - $2,500 over about four weeks - "was significant, but not immediately noticeable."

Puzzled by the sudden change, Elpiner investigated further. When users visit a Web site, the site server notes the URLs from which they came, the visitors' IP addresses, and other data. Cauff, the charter-jet executive, had used such information to conclude that a competitor was clicking repeatedly on his ads. In this case, Elpiner didn't see an obvious pattern. At the same time, the URLs and IP addresses associated with the suspect clicks "didn't make any sense," he says. "Some of the URLs were error 404 messages, and a lot of the addresses didn't exist."

Elpiner took the matter to Yahoo!, whose analysts "figured it all out quickly," he says. One or more Yahoo! affiliates may have generated deceptive clicks on ads served to their sites, using special software to disguise the source. The scammers, he says, "were clever enough not to take a whole lot from [the ads on] one site, but must have been trying to siphon off a little from many advertisers." Yahoo! gave Elpiner full credit. But it did not, as far as he could tell, try to identify the perpetrators. Instead, Yahoo! and other PPC companies are responding to click fraud by deploying new antifraud technologies. For example, Yahoo! analysts have created click fraud filters - algorithmic screens that sift through the sea of incoming clicks to find patterns suggesting fraud and then discard phony clicks without regard to source or motive.

Although Google and Yahoo! will not, for security reasons, discuss their methods in detail, the advertisements themselves offer some clues. When affiliates sign up for a box of, say, Google ads, they are essentially hosting within their own Web page a small, separate page with its own, very long URL. According to Joseph Tierney, an Internet marketer in central Florida who describes himself as a repentant click frauder, that URL is embedded with a string of information including the time, in milliseconds; the last time the host Web page was updated, also in milliseconds; and other data used to track customer behavior. Analysts could use this material to match the various time stamps against one another, as well as other information provided by server logs. "If someone from such-and-such IP address clicks on the same ad four times in a second," says Elias Levy, a security architect at Symantec, "you can know that at least three of those clicks don't mean anything. It's inconceivable that Google wouldn't be looking at this."

The company won't confirm it, though. "We don't discuss our techniques," says Shuman Ghosemajumder, a Google business product strategy manager. Nor will Google disclose whether invalid clicks are common or whether it has "a lot" or "just a few" researchers working on click fraud. "We have recognized invalid clicks as a serious problem from the beginning," Ghosemajumder says. "We've done a good job at being effective with these issues in the past, and we believe we will be effective in the future." In his view, PPC companies should be judged not by whether they have succeeded in stamping out click fraud but by whether their advertisers are satisfied.

By that standard, Google and company seem largely successful, at least for now. Google is "very good at detecting multiple clicks from the same computer," says Ash Nallawalla, a former search engine advertising consultant in Melbourne, Australia. "I am not likely to be charged for any of those clicks, not even the first one." (Marketers contacted by Wired say much the same about Yahoo!) Google typically knocks about a third off the Chase Law Group's bill to discount for click fraud, according to James Butler, IT director for the Los Angeles-based firm, which draws about 60 percent of its clients through Internet advertising. "If we get 500 clicks from their ads," he says, "they bill us for 320 or so."

Not every customer comes away satisfied, though. Last summer Nathan McKelvey, president of the rent-a-jet firm CharterAuction.com in Quincy, Massachusetts, discovered an old server in his office with records of every visitor to his company's Web site since 2002. Many of the visits came through Google's and Yahoo!'s PPC programs. But a substantial number of those clicks came from Denmark, a country where CharterAuction did "exactly zero" of its business. When McKelvey asked Google and Yahoo! precisely which clicks he'd been billed for, neither company would tell him. All they'd reveal was how many clicks he'd paid for - not which ones or where they originated. Feeling stonewalled, he had his lawyer send a letter demanding refunds from both. "I have the strong suspicion," he says, "that we spent more than a quarter of a million dollars over a couple years on invalid clicks." According to McKelvey, the two companies have refused to refund his money or divulge further information. Google won't comment on specific actions with clients; Yahoo! says it is investigating the charges.

PPC companies may have to become more transparent to retain customer confidence, because click fraud has mutated into new, more complex forms. Responding to the demand for fake clicks, shady firms in India created click farms, facilities in which marginally employed people click on advertisements round the clock (these seem to have diminished in number or gone underground since 2004, when the Times of India revealed their existence). Companies also have begun attacking rivals with "impression fraud" - repeatedly reloading a search engine page where the rival's ad appears, without clicking on it, in order to eliminate it. (Google and Yahoo! routinely take steps to drop nonperforming ads.) In 2004, a programmer named Michael Bradley allegedly wrote click fraud software that disguised clicks' origins. He was arrested by the Secret Service and charged with attempting to extort $100,000 from Google by threatening to release the software on the Internet; a trial is pending. The action did not eliminate this kind of software - it is now readily available on the Net.

Other enterprising scammers manipulate the affiliate system by creating phony blogs - spam blogs, or splogs - that automatically generate content by continually copying bits from other Web sites, mixing in popular keywords, then signing up the resulting mélange as a Google or Yahoo! affiliate. By using software to link themselves repeatedly to well-known real blogs, splogs trick search engines into listing them high on their results list, thus generating traffic, which in turn generates ad clicks. When unsuspecting Internet searchers visit splogs, they end up clicking the ad links in a frustrated attempt to find some coherent text. Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere - and the search engines that index it - in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.

Probably the most worrisome emerging threat is zombie networks - hordes of linked machines controlled by rogue software. Without their owners' knowledge, these boxes continuously send spam, transmit worms and viruses, participate in denial-of-service attacks, and execute a host of other antisocial tasks. These zombie networks can be enormous. In October, Dutch police charged three young men with controlling an incredible 1.5 million computers. In recent months, the owners of zombie networks have begun turning to click fraud - with "very effective" results, according to Tierney, the former click frauder. The robot machines create clicks from all around the world at apparently random intervals, making them difficult to identify.

But even if zombie click fraud becomes common, the damage can probably be contained as long as its targets are limited to individual advertisers. As Symantec's Levy points out, PPC firms can always give the victims their month's service free - reducing click fraud to a type of overhead, a cost of doing business. But the impact would be much larger, he notes, if someone decided to attack not single companies but the PPC system itself. "It would not be difficult to construct a worm that would go through the Net, clicking on every Google or Yahoo! affiliate ad that it saw," Levy says. "If enough of these were loose, you'd swamp the entire system in noise - millions or even billions of extra clicks. It would be very hard to defend against."

Is this likely to happen? "I would like to be able to say that people aren't that stupid or greedy or aggressive or mindless," says Chase Law's Butler. "But I can't say any of those things. That is definitely the threat - a threat to the entire system by somebody who is just doing it for the hell of it."

Type "click fraud" into a search box and you get links to more than 30 million Web sites and ads for the dozens of companies that have sprung up to help victims track the practice. Down the right-hand side of the page march the ad links: Click Defense, Clicklab, Clickrisk, ClickAssurance, VeriClix, Authenticlick, WhosClickingWho. Stoking advertisers' fears by claiming that the system is drowning in click fraud, these outfits nonetheless solicit clients with … keyword ads on Yahoo! and Google. Indeed, a recent Google search for "click fraud" turned up more than 30 companies. (One outfit, Click Defense, has matched its actions to its words; it sued Google in June, claiming it was getting click-frauded on its "click fraud" keyword ads.)

Most of these firms simply provide ways for advertisers to outsource the tedious task of examining internal logs for fraud. Among those trying to do more is Visitlab, in Santa Cruz, California. According to CEO Vikas Kedia, Visitlab's clients channel incoming clicks through his company, which screens them with software tailored for each customer. The software, now in beta, consists of modules that look for telltale behavior - the use of a proxy server, say, or clicks coming from geographic areas that are unlikely to have customers. By amassing data on click behavior and constantly adjusting the software, Kedia believes, it should eventually be possible to detect even a single fraudulent click. "Google could do all this," he says. "But nobody is sure whether to trust them. We're a third party."

Bill Gross, the man who invented PPC back in the late '90s when he presided over the startup incubator Idealab, has argued that, despite the cleverness of the various methods used to fight it, click fraud will continue to cast a shadow over PPC advertising. Ultimately, he believes, advertisers will switch to another model, which he calls cost-per-action (others use terms like cost-per-transaction or cost-per-acquisition). Whatever the name, though, advertisers pay only when a click results in a specified action, such as a sale or a Web site registration. Gross started a CPA search engine, Snap.com, in late 2004. When customers enter the term "airline tickets" on the site, ads for airlines appear. But those airlines don't pay Snap a penny until someone who clicks the ad actually buys a ticket. Even if scammers used zombie networks, the system would ignore them, because it charges only for clicks that lead to an action. Snap, still in beta, is not exactly roaring ahead: According to its own statistics, the firm has 2,300 CPA advertisers. That's roughly 2 percent of Google's or Yahoo!'s advertising base.

Yahoo! is not looking into cost-per-action, Egan says, because such a system requires businesses to share sensitive cost data with their advertising partners. "We start having to ask how much they've sold and what their margins are," he says. "And if we carry ads for their competitors, we know about them, too. This is not information that businesses like to share with third parties, and for good reason." For the near future, he says, "I don't believe PPC is going to be supplanted, which is one reason we take click spam" - Yahoo!'s preferred term - "so seriously."

A possible answer to the privacy worries may be something called Google Wallet. This new initiative, not yet unveiled as of early December, is believed to be a payment scheme that surfers would use, for example, when they bought something after clicking on a Google ad. In theory, at least, Google could process the payment to the advertiser without having to know anything about its costs, profit margins, or other sensitive data. Like Gross's cost-per-action, Google Wallet would be immune to click fraud - zombie machines could click away, and the system would simply ignore them.

Nobody thinks that these measures will eliminate click fraud. Keyword advertising - especially on affiliates - will continue to grow, making it an ever more inviting target to the Net's legion of bad actors. All the while, PPC will continue to be vulnerable to attacks by blackhats who want to disrupt the system as a whole, rather than defraud the individual companies that use it. In consequence, PPC providers seem doomed, at least for the near future, to an endless race against the scammers, spammers, and network jammers. "If you'd told me five years ago that I would be talking about 'fake clicks,' I would have told you that you were crazy," says John Slade, who leads Yahoo!'s click protection efforts. "Now it's all I spend my time on."
Contributing editor Charles C. Mann (www.charlesmann.org) is the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas

December 30, 2005 at 11:44 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (70) | Top of page | Blog Home

A system to make Jove proud

A system to make Jove proud | Economist.com

Dec 29th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
Europe has launched the first of the satellites of its Galileo navigation system. Will it be a huge waste of money, a boost for the economy or a friend to Big Brother?

BY GIOVE, they’ve done it. On Wednesday December 28th, the Giove-A satellite was launched into space from Kazakhstan, kicking off the biggest-ever European space project. The Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element (the acronym is also Italian for Jove, the king of the Roman gods) is a crucial first step in the roll-out of Galileo, a satellite-based navigation system. Giove-A will test several key technologies for Galileo. If all goes well, the system will be operational in 2008.

European boosters are celebrating a technological leap forward that they say will give them economic and strategic independence from America’s Global Positioning System. GPS, a project of the American military begun in the 1970s, is provided as a free service worldwide, causing some to say that the €3.6 billion ($4.3 billion) Galileo project is unnecessary—it has even been dubbed “the common agricultural policy in space”. Projects like this tend to run over their estimated costs, and once the system is in place, Europe will feel bound to maintain it, whatever the cost.

But Galileo’s backers make several arguments in its favour. One is that GPS service is patchy, particularly in urban areas, and is accurate only to about ten metres. (The American military’s enhanced and exclusive service brings this down to three, and some 60% of air-to-ground bombs in the 2003 Iraq war were guided by GPS.) Galileo’s atomic clocks, which make the system work by triangulation of signals between satellites, are more accurate than those of the GPS system. They will give accuracy to about one metre for those with free access to the system, and down to centimetres for paying commercial users. The GPS system is being upgraded, but the new version won’t be ready until 2012.

Galileo, meanwhile, could have all kinds of nifty uses. It would allow easier and more widespread use of road-charging. Mobile-phone users could use it to find a restaurant or the nearest cash-dispensing machine. Emergency services could find people in distress more quickly and easily. People with precarious medical conditions could wear locators that make them easy to track down. Airline pilots could set their own routes (and separations from other aircraft), rather than relying on ground-based air-traffic controllers.
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Another rationale is economic. Galileo is a joint project of the European Union and the European Space Agency, with backing also from China, Ukraine, Israel and India. In a year when “political Europe” suffered from the collapse of the proposed EU constitution after referendums in France and the Netherlands, Galileo can be rightly counted as a big step forward for pan-European economic efforts. A rainbow of European engineering and aerospace companies are involved, including EADS, France’s Thales and Alcatel, Britain’s Inmarsat, Italy’s Finmeccanica and others. Though user fees will not, by themselves, pay for the project, it is hoped that Galileo will create jobs and economic growth (including tax revenues) as industries develop new services based around the satellite system. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001 estimated that Galileo could produce a benefit-to-cost ratio of 4.6 to one.

America, naturally, is uneasy. Galileo will be interoperable with GPS, and also with Russia’s ageing GLONASS system. But American defence chiefs fret that Galileo’s signals could interfere with GPS. More worrying, from the superpower’s point of view, is the possibility that Galileo could be used as America uses GPS—to guide missiles, perhaps those aimed at America itself. Why, the Americans wonder, is China backing it?

But the Europeans fire similar arguments back at America in supporting Galileo. Those of a Gaullist bent, including France’s president, Jacques Chirac, want strategic insurance against the possibility that America might switch GPS off or restrict or degrade its service. Mr Chirac has said that European companies could be American “vassals” without their own navigation system. For him, a grand projet like Galileo accomplishes several treasured goals: creating jobs in France, reducing its reliance on America, and bringing glory to European (including French) technology. The cost, in this calculation, is well worth it. (Despite the comparison made by Galileo’s critics, it will consume only a fraction of the funds taken by common agricultural policy, France’s favourite European project, which gobbles up tens of billions of euros each year.)

But there is another worry. Civil-liberties enthusiasts see the possibility that Galileo would allow unprecedented tracking of ordinary citizens’ movements. In an unrelated story, the Chicago Tribune reported this week that CIA agents lazily left their mobile-phone batteries in when abducting a terror suspect in Italy before “rendering” him to Egypt. This allowed the Italian police to retrace the agents’ movements during the incident. In future, systems such as Galileo and GPS could make it increasingly easy for police to track ordinary criminals (at least, those that are as sloppy as the CIA was in Milan). But as with every tool that can be used to keep tabs on people, it could be abused. Jove, after all, used his divine power not only to punish the wicked, but sometimes for his own capricious and selfish ends.

December 30, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (49) | Top of page | Blog Home

How Women and Men Use the Internet

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Women and Men Online

Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes.

12/28/2005 | MemoReport | Deborah Fallows

A wide-ranging look at the way American women and men use the internet shows that men continue to pursue many internet activities more intensively than women, and that men are still first out of the blocks in trying the latest technologies.

At the same time, there are trends showing that women are catching up in overall use and are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on deepening connections with people.

Some highlights from a new report show how men’s and women’s use of the internet has changed over time.

# The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men. Women under 30 and black women outpace their male peers. However, older women trail dramatically behind older men.

# Men are slightly more intense internet users than women. Men log on more often, spend more time online, and are more likely to be broadband users.

# In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up.

# More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role email plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal emails. Men use email more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations.

# More online men than women perform online transactions. Men and women are equally likely to use the internet to buy products and take part in online banking, but men are more likely to use the internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, trade stocks and bonds, and pay for digital content.

# Men are more avid consumers than women of online information. Men look for information on a wider variety of topics and issues than women do.

# Men are more likely than women to use the internet as a destination for recreation. Men are more likely to: gather material for their hobbies, read online for pleasure, take informal classes, participate in sports fantasy leagues, download music and videos, remix files, and listen to radio.

# Men are more interested than women in technology, and they are also more tech savvy.

Still, our data show that men and women are more similar than different in their online lives, starting with their common appreciation of the internet’s strongest suit: efficiency. Both men and women approach with gusto online transactions that simplify their lives by saving time on such mundane tasks as buying tickets or paying bills.

Men and women also value the internet for a second strength, as a gateway to limitless vaults of information. Men reach farther and wider for topics, from getting financial information to political news. Along the way, they work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women.

Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a “glut” and to penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest, including health and religion. Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process – one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges.

December 30, 2005 at 10:34 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 29, 2005

Online Ad Growth Accelerates, Outpacing Newspaper, TV Spending

Bloomberg.com: U.S.

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The move to online advertising is happening faster than analysts anticipated as companies devote more of their budgets to the Internet than traditional media.

The market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion next year, fueling growth at companies including Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Heath Terry said in a research report. He had previously forecast 21 percent growth.

Sales of online ads that have animation, sound or interactive features will jump 66 percent next year to become the fastest growing area of Web ads, Credit Suisse predicts. Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, and No. 1 search-engine Google are winning business at the expense of publishers and broadcasters.

``We're seeing a shift to a more diverse set of media choices,'' said Mary Baglivo, chief executive officer of the New York office of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. ``Certainly a move away from what had traditionally over the years been the vast majority television and print.''

Saatchi & Saatchi's clients include Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. and Detroit-based General Mills Inc. The agency is a unit of Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA, the world's fourth- biggest advertising company.

Almost half of the ad executives in a Credit Suisse survey intend to increase Internet spending by almost 30 percent in the next year, according to the brokerage's Dec. 9 report. The study, conducted by New York-based market researcher TNS Media Intelligence for Credit Suisse, included 90 companies and 10 ad agencies, with average accounts of $22 million.

Rising Shares

Shares of Mountain View, California-based Google have more than doubled this year and are worth five times their August 2004 initial public offering price of $85. They gained 24 cents to $424.88 at 10:28 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Shares of Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo climbed 13 cents to $40.07 and had risen 6 percent this year before today. They gained 67 percent in 2004.

Sponsored links next to search results, the main source of sales for Google, and graphical display ads, like the banners seen on Yahoo's site, will remain the two most popular types of online ads in 2006, Credit Suisse's Terry forecasts.

Still, display ads will be the slowest growing ad type next year as spending on animated, or so-called ``rich media'' ads, increases, according to Credit Suisse. Terry forecasts that group will overtake banner ads in 2008.

``Video is the most compelling and emotive creative medium available for advertisers,'' said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research in London. ``It does the best job of creating emotion.''

Doritos Video

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's biggest printer maker, last week placed animated spots for its Photosmart photo printer on Yahoo's home page, and 30-second spots that roll before music videos on Yahoo Music. Other video advertisers on Yahoo included PepsiCo Inc.'s Doritos, and Detroit-based General Motors Corp. PepsiCo is based in Purchase, New York.

Ad executives in the Credit Suisse survey last month slated the biggest part of their budgets for Internet ads, compared with a No. 3 ranking behind magazines and broadcast TV in a survey conducted during the previous quarter.

Animated and video ads command a premium over static graphics. Companies paid an average of $10.81 for every 1,000 people that saw animated ads in November, compared with $2.85 for banners, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, which tracks Web use. Spending on animated ads rose 23 percent from a year earlier, while banner ad spending more than doubled.

30-Second Spot

Most Internet video ads are still just duplicates of 30- second spots made for television as companies aren't willing to invest in both formats, Elliott at Jupiter Research said.

That's changing as companies find cheaper ways to make online video spots and link them to TV campaigns, said Rosemarie Ryan, president of the New York office of J. Walter Thompson Co., an advertising agency whose clients include New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co. and Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Co.

The agency, founded 140 years ago and owned by London-based WPP Group Plc, added a digital video production studio to its New York office that can make 10 online video or animated ads for the price of one TV ad, Ryan said.

Advertisers including Johannesburg-based De Beers are now also linking their offline and online campaigns.

De Beers, the world's No. 1 diamond supplier, this year developed a campaign with a 30-second commercial on television that set the scene of a man struggling to get home to his wife for the holidays. The story continued through 13 extra video clips on the Web. The final episode then followed on television.

``It's a seismic shift for our business,'' Ryan said. ``Advertisers know they have to find new and interesting ways to get to people.''

To contact the reporter on this story:
Jonathan Thaw in San Francisco at jthaw@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 28, 2005 10:31 EST

December 29, 2005 at 01:40 PM in Online Marketing | Permalink | TrackBack (141) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 27, 2005

Yahoo and Google go mobile

Telecoms, telecom news, Times Online

By Rhys Blakely

Mobile phones may yet fulfil the potential foreseen during the dot-com boom, following reports that Yahoo and Google are to roll out services through wireless networks.

To date mobile internet - or "3G" - services have proved a disappointment for users, who have had to contend with patchy network coverage and lengthy download times.

Telecoms companies paid £22.5 billion in 3G license fees in the UK alone, hoping to cash in on the new market. But half a decade later a study by Ofcom, the telecoms watchdog, found that 85 per cent of the British population did not know what "3G" meant.

That could change with the news that two of the internet's largest players are renewing their attack on the mobile market.

Yahoo is planning to form is partnership with SBC Communications of the United States, to launch a mobile telephone, the Wall Street Journal said. Such a model could then be extended to the UK. The service will link mobile phone services to Yahoo users’ accounts and personalised features such as address books.

SBC executives said the SBC-Yahoo phone, which will be manufactured by Nokia, is expected to be ready early in the new year.

Google has already launched internet services for mobile devices in the UK. From today, users of some mobile phones will be able to use the internet advertising giant's satellite map service.

Last year, Google began allowing US consumers to get search results by sending text messages from mobile phones. In June it began letting users get search results from an index of web sites optimised for mobile phones.

Yahoo and Google are not alone in wanting to put themselves in their customers' hands. Last week Microsoft said that its new web-based services, which include online versions of its most popular software packages, would be available from mobiles supporting windows software.

Television and music companies are also keen to reach customers who will watch TV or listen to music on the move through their phones.

Sony has already teamed up with Orange to offer a Walkman phone in a bid to revive the iconic 1980s music player. Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes software, the market leader in online music, is now found in some Motorolla phones.

In Britain, Vodafone and BSkyB, which is 37.2 per cent owned by News Corporation, the parent company of Times Online, recently announced that they would work together to offer television content through telephone handsets.

Mobile operators O2 and Orange have already launched trial mobile TV services in the UK and France, but the Vodafone-Sky package is the most advanced offering yet in an area viewed by television and mobile executives as ripe for expansion.

Hollywood studios and television producers have also tuned into the idea and have begun to pilot "mobisodes" specially developed for small handset screens.

December 27, 2005 at 10:08 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (31) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Revamps Search Ad Plans

RED HERRING | Yahoo Revamps Search Ad Plans

The media giant’s search marketing business wants to be numero uno in the field it helped create.
December 26, 2005

Yahoo Search Marketing’s getting an extreme makeover.

Earlier this year, Yahoo re-branded its online marketing unit. What was once called Overture became Yahoo Search Marketing in a move to more closely identify the group with its corporate parent. Next step: the unit moved from Pasadena, California, into fancy new offices in Burbank, California, home of Walt Disney and other high-profile media companies.

And now, its executives are launching an aggressive assault to regain some ground lost to search leader Google in an area they had once pioneered.

Among the key moves this year, the Yahoo unit in August expanded its Publishers Network, the network of sites that it serves up ads on, to include small-sized publishers (see Yahoo Treads on Google Turf). Until then, Yahoo had primarily worked with large publishers like CNN, The Washington Post, and ESPN to display ads on their sites.

By opening up the network to the wider publishing community, it hopes to expand its reach to rival that of Google’s. In the four and a half months since the network opened up to small publishers, blogs have rapidly grown into the most common publisher category.

Yahoo’s moves come of course as the Internet media company seeks to carve a bigger piece of the online advertising pie, which is expected to amount to $19 billion by 2010, according to JupiterResearch. Search advertising will make up about $7.5 billion of that, the research firm estimates, and Yahoo wants to build its share.

Willan Johnson, vice president and general manager of the Publisher Network, says his team is looking to work with publishers to give them a say in picking ads that would show up on their web pages.

Under the new program, publishers of blogs and other web sites can give Yahoo the categories of industries for which they think their audience would want to see ads. Of course, Yahoo’s systems would also continue to generate ads based on the content of their sites.

“They’re trying to do a lot of different things to provide for a variety of needs out there,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group. “They’ve had mixed success. But there’s a lot of creativity and they’re striving to capture more advertisers.”

Waiving Fees

Casting a wider net for publishers isn’t the only step Yahoo has taken. The online marketing unit has also waived its requirement for advertisers to spend a minimum of $20 per month for sponsored search, a move that makes it more competitive with Google, which doesn’t charge minimums. In sponsored searches, businesses pay to have their names come up when users input certain key words in a search box.

Steve Mitgang, senior vice president of product marketing at Yahoo search marketing, says he knows he’s got a huge opportunity in front of him.

“I don’t think we’re short on vision or opportunity,” said Mr. Mitgang. “It’s being able to take advantage of that and being able to lead the market.”

That may be what investors are looking for. Yahoo’s stock has declined recently, trading on Friday at $40.65, off the $42 range it reached in late November.

Beating Google

Yahoo clearly has its challenges. In the past, analysts have said Yahoo isn’t as nimble as Google at executing services and applications. Until very recently, Yahoo’s new services and products would often hit the market without much fanfare, analysts say.

In many cases, Yahoo managed to launch key products before its rival, which is located just a few miles away in Mountain View, California. But the media and the blogging communities have overlooked Yahoo’s innovation as soon as the search giant launches the same service.

That was the case in November, when Google said it would allow people to bid for ads on content sites separately from bids for search-based ads. Yahoo’s advertisers have had that option for more than a year, according to Mr. Mitgang.

YSM’s Longish History

Yahoo Search Marketing has been around for eight years—though with a different name. Overture was born at startup incubator Idealab in 1997. A year later, it came up with the concept of sponsored search, which refers to the practice of a search engine pulling up paid-for listings in response to a query.

It also developed the model of having advertisers bid on keywords to figure out where the ads would be placed. Yahoo, formerly a client of Overture, bought the Pasadena, California-based company in 2003 for $1.63 billion.

Search companies like Yahoo and Google, which grossed revenue of $3.6 billion and $3.2 billion respectively last year, have built their fortunes on search-based advertising.

Google is clearly the search leader, getting more than a third of all search queries, according to comScore Media Metrix. That means it has a wider audience when it comes to search.

And as Google continues to grow its revenue, which is almost completely advertising-based, with each passing quarter, Yahoo needs to go on the offensive.

On the plus side, Yahoo has extensive global reach. In the United States alone, it had 125 million unique visitors in November, up from 116 million a year ago. It has a lot of information on its users, due to the fact that most of them have to register—and even subscribe—for some of the services.

Integrated Media Campaigns

For Yahoo to really take on Google, it will need all the help it can get from its search marketing unit, which is the foundation its revenue stream is built upon. And as it comes up with innovative ways to capture ad dollars, it needs to look to solutions like integrated media campaigns, which refer to campaigns that blend the offline and online worlds.

That Yahoo is a portal that offers search as well as various consumer-oriented vertical niches, such as travel bookings, auto sales, and health information, to name a few, works to its advantage.

Honda, for example, used YSM to run an integrated media campaign when it launched the Ridgeline truck in January. In addition to TV spots, print ads, and direct mail, the ad agency bought a bunch of keywords that would pull up Honda’s Ridgeline at the top of search results.

People don’t use the web to buy cars in droves—less than 1 percent of all auto sales take place online—but using search helped Honda increase the number of visits to its site.

Online ad budgets at offline industries are beginning to increase as businesses realize the web can help them generate buzz and do what traditional print and TV ads used to do.

But no matter how you look at it, search-based advertising is in many ways still in its infancy. And it will evolve over time as advertisers increasingly come on board.

“These are still very early days,” says Mr. Mitgang. “A lot of marketers still have to start to participate [even as] a lot are moving beyond experimentation into optimization.”

December 27, 2005 at 09:48 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 26, 2005

Apple to Zundel, the year in tech law

TheStar.com - Apple to Zundel, the year in tech law

Dec. 26, 2005. 01:00 AM
MICHAEL GEIST

As 2005 comes to a close, my annual A to Z review of the year in Canadian law and technology reveals a remarkably busy 12 months. From legislative proposals involving copyright, network surveillance, and Internet pharmacies to case law focused on popular consumer products such as the Apple iPod and the Lego brand of toy blocks, there were few dull moments this past year.

A is for the Apple iPod, which the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed in July would not be subject to the private copying levy when it declined to hear an appeal of a case involving copyright levies on digital audio players. In response to concerns that the decision rendered consumer copying of music from store-bought CDs to iPods unlawful, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) undertook not to launch any lawsuits over such copying.

B is for Paul Bryan, a British Columbia resident who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the Canada Election Act's prohibition on Internet disclosures of election results before polls close nationwide. In December, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear an appeal of the decision sometime in 2006.

C is for a handful of technology law bills introduced in 2005 in the House of Commons including Bill C-60 (digital copyright), Bill C-74 (lawful access), and Bill C-83 (Internet pharmacies). All three bills died on the order paper with the late November election call.

D is for the do-not-call list, legislation which the Senate passed just minutes before closing down for the election. Critics expressed skepticism about the bill's effectiveness after lobby groups succeeded in obtaining a broad range of exceptions.

E is for education and copyright, the source of a heated public relations battle between education groups and copyright collectives. The government had promised a fall public consultation on the issue that never materialized.

F is for file-sharing litigation, which continued with CRIA's appeal of a lower court decision denying a demand to compel five Internet service providers (ISPs) to disclose the identity of 29 alleged file sharers. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the denial, though it opened the door to future lawsuits.

G is for the Gomery Report and the failed publication ban on Jean Brault's testimony. Within hours of his inquiry appearance, details on the testimony were posted on the Internet by a U.S. blogger.

H is for Harry Potter and the Raincoast Books injunction that ordered 13 purchasers to return their copies of the latest J.K. Rowling book and prohibited reading it before its official distribution date.

I is for Internet telephony and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's May decision that left software-based services such as Skype unregulated, yet determined that incumbent telecommunications providers would be subject to regulatory oversight. Several providers asked the government to review the decision.

J is for a threatened lawsuit by the Jehovah's Witnesses' Watch Tower Society against a Toronto-based website owner who posted excerpts of religious texts online. The group claims copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that the postings were meant to embarrass the society.

K is for keystroke logging, an invasive technology that enables employers to track their employees' computer use. In June, Alberta Privacy Commissioner Frank Work established limits on the use of the technology after a library employee filed a complaint.

L is for Lego, which lost a Supreme Court of Canada decision over whether it could use trademark law to stop Mega Bloks Inc., a Canadian toy manufacturer, from replicating its toy building blocks. The Canadian high court rejected Lego's arguments, warning against over-protective intellectual property laws.

M is for Member of Parliament domain names, several of which were scooped up by a group opposed to same-sex marriage legislation. The development generated discussion in the House of Commons and also a new political awareness of the need to renew domain name registrations.

N is for the New York Post, which found itself on the losing end of a legal fight with former Vancouver Canucks general manager Brian Burke. Burke sued the tabloid for Internet defamation in the B.C. courts, which asserted jurisdiction over the matter despite the objections of the paper.

O is for Online Rights Canada, a new grassroots Canadian online civil liberties group formed in December by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic and the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

P is for Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who was stunned to find herself on the front cover of a national newsmagazine after a reporter was able to access her detailed phone and cellphone records from a U.S. online data broker. The matter remains the subject of a cross-border investigation.

Q is for Quebec v. Produits Metalliques CMP, a February Quebec court case that held a company liable for failing to provide a French version of its website. The court ruled that French language laws can be broadly interpreted to cover online content and that the company had ignored the law for seven years despite repeated requests to comply.

R is for Sony BMG's rootkit, a copy-control technology that was inserted into dozens of CDs and then secretly installed in more than 500,000 computers worldwide. Sony recalled millions of CDs after a security researcher discovered that the technology posed a significant security risk.

S is for the Spam Task Force, which released its final report in May. The report called on the government to introduce tough anti-spam legislation backed by significant new financial penalties.

T is for the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, which conducted a comprehensive review of Canadian telecommunications law. The panel is scheduled to release its report early next year.

U is for a University Affairs editorial published by National Science Adviser Arthur Carty that promoted a "culture of sharing" within the scientific community. Carty urged funding agencies to embrace open-access models to better ensure that scientific results are widely disseminated.

V is for the Voices for Change website, which was blocked by Telus during a contentious labour dispute. The Telus blockage also eliminated access to more than 600 additional websites that shared the same IP address.

W is for the Washington Post, which successfully appealed a lower court decision involving a defamation claim over an article first published in the mid-1990s. The plaintiff argued that Ontario was a suitable jurisdiction to hear the case since the article remained available online.

X is for XM Radio, one of three successful bidders for satellite radio licenses. The CRTC decision, including the establishment of media-specific Canadian content requirements, led to a flurry of lobbying activity as the government briefly contemplated asking the commission to reconsider its decision.

Y is for Yukon as well as other northern Canadian communities that stand to benefit from a broadband initiative unveiled in the fall. The initiative seeks to provide high-speed Internet access to dozens of remote towns and villages.

Z is for Ernst Zundel, who was deported to Germany in February following a lengthy battle over Internet hate content.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online at http://www.michaelgeist.ca.

Additional articles by Michael Geist

December 26, 2005 at 06:52 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (175) | Top of page | Blog Home

Hacker cracks police force network

TheStar.com - Hacker cracks police force network

RCMP, OPP and Toronto service may be among victims
Thieves raid database favoured by law enforcement agencies
Dec. 26, 2005. 01:00 AM

OTTAWA—Major police forces across Canada, including the RCMP, OPP and the Toronto force, are among thousands of law enforcement agencies and forensic investigators whose private and financial information may have been stolen this month in a hacker attack, a published report says.

Guidance Software, Inc., a private Pasadena, Calif., firm, said in a letter sent out to law enforcement agencies last week that thieves had raided its database sometime in November, stealing credit card numbers and in certain cases information such as addresses and telephone numbers for 3,800 customers.

Guidance makes EnCase, a suite of forensic investigation software that has become the standard tool used by computer crime units of police, insurance companies, banks and private computer forensics specialists.

The RCMP, the OPP and the Toronto police are among Canadian agencies that say they received letters from Guidance informing them that their units' confidential information had been exposed. Guidance became aware of the breach Dec. 7, the Ottawa Citizen reports.

Toronto Police Service spokesman Mark Pugash told the Star's Betsy Powell yesterday the matter will be investigated to see what, if anything, the breach means to Canada's largest municipal force.

EnCase products are used, among other things, to extract and analyse digital evidence from computers to identify hacker attacks.

Guidance's own software "certainly should have set off some alarms that `someone is downloading our entire database,'" said Ryan Purita, an EnCase-certified investigator with Totally Connected Security Ltd. in Vancouver. He is one of a handful of Canadian computer forensics experts authorized to testify in court.

"It highlights that intrusions can happen to anybody."

John Colbert, head of Guidance Software, Inc.

"Something fell apart here."

John Colbert, chief executive of Guidance, said the attack "is ironic, but it highlights that intrusions can happen to anybody. It's not a matter of if, but of when, so nobody should be complacent about their (computer network) security."

The Los Angeles Electronic Crimes Task Force is leading an investigation, along with the U.S. Secret Service and FBI, Colbert said. He said the breach has led to "a few instances of fraud" involving stolen credit card numbers.

Colbert admitted Guidance broke the rules of credit card issuers by storing in its database the card value verification (CVV) codes — a security feature meant to stop the cards from being used in Internet or telephone fraud. The company could face fines for keeping CVVs permanently on file.

OPP spokesman Supt. Bill Crate said the computer investigation unit's credit card information had been kept on file by Guidance, but that despite concerns over the breach of confidentiality there is no evidence the agency has suffered any financial loss.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Paul Marsh said the breach of confidentiality "is of concern."

CANADIAN PRESS

December 26, 2005 at 06:51 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 24, 2005

2005 New year - stocks

Pushing the world onto the Net to be a focus in '06 - Internet Hardware - Internet Services - Internet Software - Computer Hardware - Internet - Markets/Exchanges - Market News

In 2006, the Net industry is focused on that mantra and variations of it: more individuals going online, staying online, communicating online, creating and mixing their own videos and blogs online.

That shift in consumer behavior helped the winners in 2005 as they
attracted advertising dollars from marketers seeking to all manner of
customers. And the No. 1 one place to find them has been Google (GOOG:

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, one of the main reasons the search-engine's stock has stayed in the stratosphere more than a year since going public.

Google shares more than doubled this year. The stock soared nearly
400% since going public in August 2004 at $85 apiece. Although Yahoo (YHOO:

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is also one of the leading search engines, it hasn't been able to make
as much money as Google on its audience base. Shares of Yahoo are set
to end the year at $40, up 5%. Amazon.com (AMZN:

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, which is positioning itself to enter the local advertising market, saw its shares gain 10%.

But two other Net titans stumbled. EBay (EBAY:

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shares fell 24% and InterActiveCorp (IACI:

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is trading around $28, down from $30.67.

One of the reasons eBay lost ground was because buyers no longer saw
it as the main location to do transactions. The Web as a whole became
the marketplace, thanks to search engines, especially you-know-who.
About 40% of online shoppers started their shopping at Google, 21%
started at Yahoo while only 23% started at eBay, according to a 2005
holiday retail survey.

Big deal-making

But 2005 was a year marked by significant investment strategies by
the Internet's big guns. EBay pulled off the $4.1 billion purchase of
Skype, the provider of phone calling over the Internet. Google raised
$4 billion in a secondary offering, spurring awe and fear about the
growth opportunities it will invest in for 2006.

One big bet is that Google and others will do what they can to get
everybody onto the Internet. To that end, the likes of Google and
EarthLink (ELNK:

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want to bring WiFi to cities across the land, to allow for even greater
Internet activity as more people get high-speed access via free or
low-cost connections.

As the experience improves, and the online community grows larger,
more people will find the Internet useful and stay online longer. Or so
the Internet business world hopes.

Teenagers are already spending more than one and sometimes two hours
a day to socialize on social-networking sites, like Facebook and
MySpace. In July, News Corp. (NWS:

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acquired MySpace's parent for $580 million.

Advertisers targeting teenagers and adults will continue to shift ad
dollars onto the Web, making next year a turning point in television's
dominance. It's estimated that television advertising spending will
plateau in 2006, at which time it will account for 38% of all worldwide
ad spending, according to ZenithOptimedia. By comparison, online
advertising continues to ramp up and is estimated to grow by 22% in
2006, and reach $30 billion by 2008, according to the research company.

Additionally, more people will want Web content on the go, helping to sustain the popularity of Apple's (AAPL:

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iPod line of products. It's estimated that sales of MP3 players will
rise 29% next year to 20.5 million units, and mobile phones are
expected to jump 23% to 104.5 million units, according to the Consumer
Electronics Association. Many of the handheld devices out next year are
expected to have video capability.

Download controls

Copyrighted video will also become more accessible in 2006 because
content companies will want to recoup lost dollars from consumers'
recording shows with their digital video recorders to watch them later
or consumers illegally downloading videos. NBC Universal President Jeff
Zucker told an interviewer earlier this year there are 436,000 illegal
downloads of "Battlestar Galactica." But with NBC's deal with Apple to
sell shows at $1.99, he hopes consumers will choose to buy the show as
opposed to stealing it.

Time Warner's AOL and Google announced an expanded strategic
alliance, consisting of a $1 billion investment by Google for a 5%
stake in AOL. Additionally, AOL will provide certain video content to
Google.

NBC Universal, as well as Walt Disney (DIS:

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and Viacom (VIA:

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,
or video aggregators, like Yahoo and Google, will increasingly be
testing ways to get content onto devices or online in order to make
video available to the consumer on demand and a la carte. Google stated
that it will soon introduce a service whereby consumers can pay to
download video content, according to Bear Stearns.

Additionally, Internet companies or media companies will experiment
with ways to tap into user-generated content. Yahoo is launching "Wow
House," a reality TV show that will be part of its Interactive
technology channel.

Just like music singles drove online content sales to nearly $1
billion in the first half of 2005, according to the OPA, video sales
will catch on. In 2006, sales of video content, like music videos or
shows, for 99 cents apiece on Comcast or DirecTV, or $1.99 purchase on
Apple's iTunes music store, will begin to slowly ramp up and catch on.

And now comes another year of changes in technology and consumer behavior. In that vein, here are some key stocks to watch.

EBay

In 2006, Skype, the Internet-based phone service eBay purchased for
about $4 billion, is expected to generate $200 million in sales from
selling voice services, such as SkypeOut. With more than 50 million
Skype members, this shouldn't be difficult to achieve, says Walter
Price, portfolio manager of the Allianz RCM Global Tech fund. If the
pay-per-calling model begins to emerge, eBay and Skype will be among
the first that will have a chance to test this new way of getting
marketing or advertising fees from local merchants or professional
service providers.

Netflix

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had a significant run this year, because even though Wal-Mart (WMT:

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have entered its market, the upstart is still the place to rent DVDs.
That's not likely to change soon. Even though more people will
experiment with downloading movies from the Internet, that content will
be limited by Hollywood's nervousness about the Internet and by a
paucity of affordable devices on which to play Internet-derived content
on television.

Yahoo

If consumers begin to spend more time entertaining themselves rather
than informing themselves on the Web, Yahoo - with its budding media
unit -- is better positioned than Google to offer that type of content.
Moreover, Microsoft and Yahoo may forge a greater alliance now that AOL
has embraced Google through its $1 billion stake. Microsoft's MSN and
Yahoo's instant messaging clients are to be integrated in 2006. Any
investment by Microsoft might help Yahoo's shares.

Despite Yahoo's position as a beneficiary of the shift in
advertising dollars toward search and media properties, Yahoo's market
cap is half that of Google's. Its share price was practically flat,
compared to Google's in 2005. Yahoo is expected to generate revenue of
$4.7 billion next year, up 29% from this year. Google, however, is
estimated to grow sales twice as quickly, or by 60%, to $6.4 billion.
Google is also growing profits quicker than Yahoo. But Yahoo's
management team is sharp as a whip. If anything, Yahoo's stock is safe
compared to Google's.

Google

That said, growth investors will still look to Google for returns.
Given Google's serious run-up this year, there may be some tax-related
selling at the start of 2006. After the stock comes under pressure,
investors might want to take a long position in Google and short
Microsoft, according to Peter Thiel, fund manager of Clarium Capital.

December 24, 2005 at 09:13 PM in Internet evolution, eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (58) | Top of page | Blog Home

Writely QuickNote Bookmarklet

Quick Note Bookmarklet

The WQNB allows you to create a bookmarkable link which can be used to quickly add notes to any of your current Writely documents. This bookmarklet can be placed in your browsers quick launch bar for ease of use. With one mouse click you can add whatever text you want to any document. Its that easy

December 24, 2005 at 02:51 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 23, 2005

Washington Mutual beefs up Web banking security

Finextra: Washington Mutual beefs up Web banking security

Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation's leading banks for consumers and small businesses, announced today that it will be adding a risk-based multi-factor authentication solution to provide enhanced security for its online banking users.

As a result, Washington Mutual will continue to provide an online banking tool that is not only easy to use but also provides best-in-class authentication, fraud detection and prevention to its customers.

"Washington Mutual is once again taking a proactive approach to protecting our customers by securing their accounts and personal information with superior, flexible, cutting-edge technology. By doing so, Washington Mutual customers will continue to benefit from the convenience and ease of online banking with the utmost confidence," said Dave Cullinane, chief information security officer at Washington Mutual and International President of the Information Systems Security Association.

Washington Mutual's enhanced security will analyze every online login and transaction behind the scenes and score the potential risk based on a broad range of criteria, including the user's IP address, geographic location, prior transaction behaviors and much more. When a potential risky situation is detected, it can invoke additional authentication methods in real-time. In addition, because online fraud crosses international boundaries, WaMu is further protecting its customers by joining a real-time world-wide fraud detection network.

Of the many multi-factor authentication solutions analyzed, it was determined that Cyota's eSphinx offered one of the strongest authentication measures available with minimal impact to the comfortable and easy online experience that customers have come to expect from Washington Mutual.

"By proactively helping to protect their online channel against fraudulent activity, Cyota is helping Washington Mutual stay one step ahead of today's and tomorrow's online threats," said Naftali Bennett, Cyota's chief executive officer.

December 23, 2005 at 10:28 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 21, 2005

The Men Who Came

WSJ.com - Portals

December 21, 2005; Page B1

The three programmers spend their days developing what each hopes will be the world's best email program -- and trying to beat the pants off each other. They spent an evening last week at my dinner table, talking about it all.

Email is one of the liveliest niches in tech right now. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all view it as a key to winning new customers and making money off current ones. And so they are innovating with new email programs and services all the time.

Since all three companies' email teams are in my neck of the woods, I thought it would be fun to have the heads of each team come over one night for dinner and conversation. The three companies were good sports and agreed, in part because I said I wasn't interested in a shouting match.

As it happened, Google's Paul Buchheit, 29 years old; Kevin Doerr, 39, of Microsoft (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Ethan Diamond, 34, of Yahoo were all on their best behavior. Whatever they may say about their competitors at work, at my table they were gracious and complimentary. Gentle teasing was about as far as they would go.

The evening began with even the Microsoft and Yahoo delegates agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail. The program had a fast user interface with a fresh new look, along with a then-remarkable gigabyte of free storage.

Mr. Buchheit said he started working on Gmail after observing that other email programs were getting worse, not better. Microsoft's Mr. Doerr said that at his company, Gmail was a thunderbolt. "You guys woke us up," he told Mr. Buchheit. Yahoo's Mr. Diamond, then at a startup with its own hot, new email program, said Gmail was the final impetus that Yahoo needed to buy his company.

Mr. Buchheit responded with a victory lap. "We were trying to make the email experience better for our users," he said. "We ended up making it better for yours, too."

The evening wasn't all a Gmail love-in, though. The Microsoft and Yahoo representatives said their many millions of users might not accept some of Gmail's departures from email norms, such as the way the program groups messages into "conversations." The two men also razzed Mr. Buchheit a bit, saying that it had been easy for Google to promise a lot of storage to its users because it carefully controlled how many users Gmail would have by requiring an invitation to get an account.

Indeed, more than 18 months after its unveiling, Gmail is still a beta, or "test" product. But so are the new email versions the Microsoft and Yahoo programmers are working on. And no one is saying when any of the beta periods will be over.

Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up. I wondered out loud to Mr. Buchheit if Gmail, the pioneer, might now be falling behind. "There is a lot more we want to build," he responded.

I asked each to say what in his product he was most proud of. Mr. Diamond noted that in Yahoo's mail program, users can see their entire inbox in a single screen, rather than having to page through it screenload after screenload. It was a hard feature to add, he said. The other two men nodded their heads in agreement; neither has yet matched it.

Mr. Buchheit said what he most liked about Gmail is the ease and fluidity with which it lets him work with his messages.

Mr. Doerr noted the powerful desktop-like features of his Microsoft product, such as the on-the-fly spell checking of messages as they are typed.

The men reported similar pressures: cranky users of Web browsers with tiny market shares demanding that their browsers be supported, while not appreciating how much work is involved. And the struggle to find a way to innovate with a product -- but not so much that existing customers will be alienated.

At one point, Mr. Doerr wondered when the new Yahoo mail program would have the whimsical touch of other Yahoo products. "It's not Yahoo yet," he said to Mr. Diamond. "It's not fun."

The latter concurred, replying, in effect, "Just you wait."

While all three talked about the pressure of having to present the product to the big boss, Mr. Diamond had the best such story. He told of nervously showing his software to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who at the time was pacing around the room gripping a golf club. Mr. Diamond said that all the while he kept thinking of a similar scene in "The Untouchables," but one involving a baseball bat and, in the end, considerably more violence.

When the end of the evening came, everyone seemed sated with good food and pleasant company, to the point where there was talk about gathering again in a year to look back on the email events of 2006.

Who knows? Maybe the three products will be out of beta by then. And maybe a glove or two will come off as a result.

Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com

December 21, 2005 at 10:41 PM in email | Permalink | TrackBack (67) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 17, 2005

When e-mail becomes tool for reporting

The Seattle Times: Personal Technology: When e-mail becomes tool for reporting

By Charles Bermant

Special to The Seattle Times

As e-mail has evolved into the preferred communication path, fewer people need the handholding and guidance that was necessary a few short years ago. Most occupations have customized the platform to suit their peculiar needs. Spies always use encryption, and lawyers add a little paragraph on the end threatening a lawsuit if you divulge this information. And if we are still making some of this up as we go along, instinctive behavioral decisions are generally correct.

Which is why I was a little surprised to see a lengthy piece in the current issue of American Journalism Review that examined the ethical and procedural issues that face journalists who use e-mail as a reporting tool. Author Kim Hart tackles the subject in some detail, taking more than 3,000 words to present various case studies and opinions about the topic.

Considering the source, it is all rather technical, and no one other than a journalist could wade through all this detail. What rises to the top for people who don't work in the field, from my perspective, is the notion that an article that relies on e-mail interviews lacks spontaneity and warmth. Another pertinent question — which Hart doesn't really answer — is whether readers need to be alerted whether a quote originates from a standard conversation or an e-mail message.

Additionally, there are several peripheral issues and questions: If someone sends along an e-mail as an interview answer that rambles on or misspells words do you edit and correct or quote them "exactly" and make them look stupid? And how do you know, receiving one of these messages, whether it originates from the source or someone else, such as an angry spouse?

I hadn't thought about these questions for a while. I'll admit to a low tolerance for rules; the only journalistic guidelines I regularly follow are tell the truth and check the spelling. Beyond this, it's all instinct. I usually indicate when a quote comes from an e-mail message, unless to do so would seriously impair the flow of the story. Perhaps this displays a certain conceit, that journalism is an art form that will suffer if there are too many distractions.

This piece tried to achieve a consensus but ended up all over the map. In fact, journalists don't all think and act alike. A skilled writer covering a compelling story using only e-mail interviews may get killer results, while someone else with the same tools will need to meet their source for lunch in order to pull it together.

The Internet has also democratized the "art" of journalism. Anyone with a keyboard and a connection can "report" on events. Any good writer can get his or her message and viewpoint across, and the public can only benefit. That is, if they don't blindly believe everything they read.

Where it concerns e-mail, journalism is like any other occupation. The technology is only a tool. Some reporters can adequately "cover" a meeting by reading an online transcript — a story about a city-council action doesn't always need color or compassion. But a reporter — or a lawyer, or a spy — needs to use the right tools for the right job. Which in most cases, requires a certain degree of variety.

If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at cbermant@seattletimes.com. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

December 17, 2005 at 01:39 PM in email | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

LaSalle says mortgage information is missing

Chicago Tribune | LaSalle says mortgage information is missing

By Becky Yerak
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 16, 2005, 9:11 PM CST

In the latest incident to fuel concerns about identity theft, Chicago-based LaSalle Bank Corp. said a computer tape containing the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of 2 million residential mortgage customers, including more than 100,000 in the Chicago area, was lost en route to a credit reporting bureau.

A LaSalle division, ABN Amro Mortgage Group Inc., said shipping company DHL picked up the computer tape from its Chicago data processing center on Nov. 18.

But the tape never arrived at its destination, an Experian credit bureau in Allen, Texas, and is "missing and presumed lost," Thomas Goldstein, chairman and chief executive of ABN Amro Mortgage, said in a conference call Friday.

Besides names and Social Security numbers, the data include mortgage payment histories of the 2 million consumers, which is all of the unit's residential mortgage holders. Of those 2 million, nearly 200,000 are in Illinois and about 320,000 are in Michigan.

ABN, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., said there have been no reports of the data being misused.

The November security lapse came just weeks before ABN was to begin transmitting the tape's data electronically.

"As you can imagine, I personally am just sick that we missed this thing by one month," Goldstein said.

ABN shipped the tape on Nov. 18, a Friday. The following Monday, as is customary, ABN tried to confirm that the tape arrived safely in Texas.

"We discovered the tape missing," Goldstein said.

ABN investigated, but ended its search a few days ago.

"You look for something until the point where you determine it's absolutely gone and missing," Goldstein said. "We worked with DHL and Experian until we concluded there was no further point in searching and declared the package lost."

For its part, DHL said its shipping practices exceed industry standards, but "regrets that, despite diligent search efforts, it has been unable to locate the shipment," the company stated.

"DHL security and operations teams have conducted a thorough investigation and search of our network and facilities," it said. "Although we've not yet closed our investigation, at this time we have uncovered no error in protocol, indications that this package was stolen, or evidence that the contents of the shipment have been disclosed or used for any improper purpose."

The accident comes about six months after United Parcel Service Inc. lost the financial data of nearly 4 million Citigroup Inc. customers.

In an interview earlier this month with trade publication FleetOwner, a UPS official said the packages broke open in transit and the contents were inadvertently thrown away.

According to a Dec. 15 report by FleetOwner, Citigroup said it still hasn't received any reports of unauthorized activity related to the lost tapes. In July, he added, Citigroup began sending that data electronically in encrypted form.

Indeed, since ABN's tape went missing, the lender has stopped physically shipping mortgage tapes to credit bureaus, instead choosing to transmit the data electronically from its Chicago data processing center "by secure and encrypted means," Goldstein said.

ABN has begun sending first-class letters--enough to fill six trucks--to its residential mortgage customers and is offering them free credit monitoring for 90 days.

"The letters just started going out in the last day or so. Up until today, we still see no signs of misuse of the data," Goldstein said. "Had we discovered earlier that the data was being misused, we would have come out with an announcement much faster."

The bank also has established a special Web site, info.mortgage.com, to provide information about the incident.

One consumer advocate said an increasing number of companies are reporting security breaches that put millions of Americans at risk for identity theft, but that rise is partly due to tougher reporting requirements.

"The reason we're starting to learn about these gaps is laws on the books that force companies to tell consumers when information has been compromised," said Beth McConnell, director of the Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group.

Illinois, for example, passed an identity theft law in June that requires customer notification, a spokeswoman for the state said Friday.

The tape contained no data on any LaSalle personal or business accounts. ABN has alerted law enforcement and regulatory agencies.

---

byerak@tribune.com

December 17, 2005 at 12:32 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 16, 2005

AOL to stick with Google

AOL to stick with Google | CNET News.com

By Stefanie Olsen and Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 16, 2005, 2:39 PM PST
update Google may pay $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in America Online as part of an exclusive deal with Time Warner that would strengthen ties with the search giant instead of dumping Google for Microsoft.

As part of the current negotiations with Google, AOL would be able to sell additional ads for its search engine also powered by Google on top of those provided by Google, according to a report Friday in The Wall Street Journal Online. Google also could promote AOL Web sites among sponsored links in search results, according to an unidentified source in the report. The report said the deal would not be finalized until after Time Warner's board meets on Wednesday.

Representatives at AOL parent company Time Warner, AOL and Google did not return calls seeking comment. A Microsoft representative declined to comment.

AOL was in talks with Microsoft this year about forming a strategic partnership, with negotiations at one point touching on a potential buyout or a Microsoft investment in AOL, a person familiar with the negotiations, who asked not to be identified, told CNET News.com.

The talks escalated in recent months to focus on a broad, long-term partnership that News.com's source described as a "game-changing deal for the media business." Under the proposal, Microsoft and AOL would have combined their advertising forces to form a massive global advertising network, selling multimedia, brand- and search-related ads for their own Web sites and third-party sites on the Internet. The deal also would have included joint promotions and content-sharing between the sites.

Then, AOL suddenly told Microsoft early on Friday that the deal was off the table, opting to forge stronger ties with its current advertising partner, Google. The Dulles, Va.-based media company has been interested in selling its own search-related ads, which are currently provided exclusively by Google, the source said.

The shifting negotiations apparently put an end to a heated and closely watched contest between Google and Microsoft over a key source of Google's advertising revenue. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google derives as much as 10 percent of its advertising revenue and traffic from its partnership with AOL through sponsored listings within its search engine. And although that percentage has dropped from 12 percent a year ago and will likely continue to fall, the estimated $400 million in revenue isn't likely easy for Google to give up.

The reported Google-AOL deal would give AOL a valuation of $20 billion. Time Warner shares closed at $18, giving it a market capitalization of nearly $84 billion, compared with Google's $430.15 a share close and more than $127 billion market cap. Microsoft, meanwhile, saw its stock close at $26.90, giving it a market cap of more than $286 billion.

Google had 48 percent search market share in October, compared with 22 percent for Yahoo, 11 percent for Microsoft's MSN and 7.2 percent for AOL, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan predicted the deal would have a slightly positive or no impact on Google's earnings and would make it harder for MSN to have a strong advertising network.

"We believe this deal makes it more difficult for MSN to develop a strong advertising network as scale is very important in order to attract (advertisers)," he wrote in a research report. "By tying up AOL, Google has made it more difficult for MSN's ad network to reach critical mass."

Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy said the proposed deal delivers the most benefit to Google, as opposed to AOL. If the deal goes through, Google will retain its search relationship with AOL, as well as its revenue source, and stave off Microsoft in its quest to acquire AOL as a partner. Finally, Google will be able to use AOL's network as a test lab for new services, such as its banner and display advertising sales. Google, for example, could sell a display ad for AOL pages and maintain its search engine's signature spare look.
In other news:

* Merging the laptop with a cell phone
* Theater owners think digital
* Shedding light on Flickr
* New 'Kong' monkeys with game industry

In contrast, the deal doesn't necessarily help AOL greatly, Rashtchy said.

"AOL's biggest challenge is still to reposition the company" as a player in the Web content business, he said. "This would be more of a cash infusion for that than anything else."

Yahoo and Comcast reportedly were in talks with AOL at one point too, but dropped out of the race, leaving heavyweights Google and Microsoft to duke it out.

AOL was initially a huge success, bringing millions of Americans online with its ubiquitous subscriber CDs and Internet-made-easy campaigns. After Time Warner and AOL's $109 billion merger in 2001, AOL began weighing on the old media company's stock as AOL lost dial-up Internet subscribers to faster broadband connections.

AOL recently had a makeover and a huge shift in its business model, launching a new AOL.com portal and opening up its formerly walled-off content to the Internet at large. The move was designed to help grab some of the dollars going toward Google and others in the fast-growing Internet advertising market.

The changes weren't fast enough to suit billionaire Carl Icahn, who directly and indirectly controls 3 percent of Time Warner shares. Icahn has been organizing a proxy battle for control of the company and wants to split AOL off.

December 16, 2005 at 05:54 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (80) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Northern Irish approach to IT commercialization

IT Business

A Belfast research centre provides some strategic blueprints that Canadian universities could learn from. Experts discuss the "spin-in" concept, partnerships with industry and the role of government
12/16/2005 5:00:00 PM
by Neil Sutton

The pride of Belfast’s research community is right next door to the former home of one the world’s better known disasters.

The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology is the brainchild of Queen’s University, based in Belfast. The facility, known as ECIT, is located just outside the city and overlooks the dry dock where the Titanic was built.

“(The Titanic) was fine when it left Belfast” is a common local phrase, says Godfrey Gaston, ECIT’s operations director. Gaston and his team are attempting to launch a series of projects – hopefully with happier endings than the infamous vessel – by increasing the level of collaboration between Queen’s University and industry in order to successfully turn research into actual marketable products.

The facility, which opened earlier this year, focuses on digital communications, high-frequency electronics, speech and language processing, and imaging systems.

ECIT follows a set of guidelines designed to make sure all interested parties are getting what they want out of projects. In the past, the private sector tried to tip the scales in its favour, according to Gaston.

“There’s a tendency to say, ‘Let’s go to the university, they’re cheap,’” he says. “There’s a mindset around some companies that they want to own everything and pay nothing.”

ECIT takes on companies on a case-by-case basis and determines the ownership of any resulting IP depending on the level of funding and participation they bring to the table. ECIT employs 130 staff, including 20 full-time engineers with real-world experience. “It’s not normal you’d have so many engineers in an academic institution,” says Gaston.

Research could result in spin-off companies, but it is just as likely that companies could “spin in,” i.e. small firms would become part of ECIT on a contract basis in order to share research with the institution. ECIT is also open to working with other universities to collaborate on projects. One of those is Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

David Gough, president of GINI University Services, visited ECIT in Belfast earlier this year. GINIus is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dalhousie and is mandated to help support the university’s faculty of computer science. One of its goals is to help the university commercialize IP.

What Gough learned from ECIT is that Dalhousie and other universities across Canada could be doing more to support commercialization efforts.

“I think the main thing that they showed is that we could do better over here is the co-operation between universities and the private sector in a tangible form,” he says. “There’s applied research versus basic research, which doesn’t produce what is needed these days.

“What we’re finding here is that there’s very little commercialization going on. A lot of the professors can’t get over the fact that 10 per cent of something is a lot more than 100 per cent of nothing.”

The onus should also be on businesses to seek out academic partners, says James Milway, executive director of the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, based in Toronto.

“True commercialization is done by business people who have to figure out, ‘How do I connect market needs with what’s going on in academia?’ That’s where we need to think about how to get businesses more compelled to innovate.”

The situation is improving in Canada, says Gough. The creation of organizations like Springboard – a government-supported effort to commercialize research in Atlantic Canadian universities – is a step in the right direction. But what Canadian universities should focus on is ties to business. Queen’s and neighouring institution Ulster University “could show the majority of our universities here a better way of doing things because of their aggressive and proactive linkages with industry,” he says, adding that ECIT is helping to attract industry participation by focusing on very specific areas of technology research.

Industry partnership is not a sure thing when it comes to turning research into products, says Ron Venter, interim executive director of Toronto’s Innovations Foundation, but is a good place to start.

The Innovations Foundation is affiliated with the University of Toronto and recently moved into the MaRS Centre (Medical and Related Study), a new research facility located in the heart of the city.

Venter says that the Innovations Foundation is currently revising its approach to industry partnerships to avoid what he calls a “disconnect” between university and private sector interests.

A lot of private sector companies thumb their noses at university research since it’s often raw and a long way from a marketable product, he says.

“Industry would love to have products with bows on them where there’s no risk. They would love us to give them the best stuff we have,” he says. “They would like to get it as cheap as possible. There’s always got to be this tug of war. The real truth lies in: what is the real value of this product?”

In a sense, pairing university research with business savvy “isn’t rocket science” says Gaston, but ECIT is still figuring out the right mix to make it all work properly. ECIT currently relies on public sector funding to keep its operation and up running. Assuming it can it hit upon a winning formula, Gaston wants the facility to be funded entirely through the proceeds of its commercialization efforts by 2008.

Most universities are looking for the same formula, but it can be elusive and change over time, said Ventive.

“Belfast may have all these good ideas, but they’re no different from U of T or McMaster or Waterloo,” he says. “The key thing is, nobody is right in this business.”

And after all, before she set sail for New York, even the Titanic was thought to be unsinkable.

December 16, 2005 at 05:42 PM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (53) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spears Most-Searched for Item on the Web

Spears Most-Searched for Item on the Web - Yahoo! News

hu Dec 15, 7:09 PM ET

NEW YORK -
Britney Spears didn't release an album of new material this year, but the new mom is still No. 1 on Yahoo's annual list of the most-searched for terms on the Internet.

Spears, who has topped the list for three of the last four years, lost out to "American Idol" in 2004.

Although the 24-year-old pop star released an album of remixes, "B in the Mix, The Remixes," in November, it was the birth of her son, Sean Preston Federline, on Sept. 14 that brought her the most attention, Yahoo said Thursday.

Following Spears were, in order, 50 Cent, the Cartoon Network,
Mariah Carey, Green Day,
Jessica Simpson,
Paris Hilton, Eminem, Ciara and
Lindsay Lohan.

The list of overall top searches, all of which were entertainment related, "shows us that people are fixated on the activities of pop culture icons," Yahoo "Buzz Index guru" Erik Gunther said in a statement.

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) has claimed that its search index spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, though that figure is virtually impossible to verify because there is no official auditing system.

Of the top news searches, "tsunami" led all other stories, followed by "
Iraq" and "
Michael Jackson trial."

December 16, 2005 at 03:02 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Will U.S. carriers switch mobile standards?

Will U.S. carriers switch mobile standards? | CNET News.com

North American telecom operators may end up shifting to the GSM mobile standard from the rival CDMA system, according to senior executive at Siemens.

"Latin America is already moving from CDMA technologies to GSM," Christoph Catselitz, the head of Siemens' mobile networks business, told Finnish business daily Taloussanomat in an article published Thursday.

"I would not bet on North America continuing with CDMA."

CDMA (code division multiple access) technology was invented by San Diego-based Qualcomm, and the company delivers virtually all chips needed in CDMA networks and mobile phones used by some 500 million consumers mostly in the Americas and Asia.

The rival European-invented GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) has 1.6 billion users globally, according to the GSM Association.

"CDMA is losing market share globally as the new mobile phone users live mostly in the areas where GSM is the leading technology," Catselitz said.

Catselitz said Siemens aims to expand its network infrastructure services operation faster than the market grows. It has 80 deals with operators in 50 countries.

China is among the markets where the company is active. Catselitz expects China to issue third generation (3G) licenses in several stages, starting early next year.

"I believe China's 3G licenses will be given in the early part of 2006; it could be the first quarter," he said.

China is expected to spend more than $10 billion to set up its 3G networks after licenses are awarded.

Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

December 16, 2005 at 02:53 PM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (57) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 14, 2005

Sainsbury's Bank grows online financial sales

Finextra: Sainsbury's Bank grows online financial sales

UK supermarket bank Sainsbury's says the percentage of financial products sold via its Web site has more than doubled over the last two years to 40%.

Fewer than one in five (18%) purchases were made via the Sainsbury's Bank Web site two years ago. This rose to 30% in January this year and has since increased again to around 40%.

The bank is also reporting a 73% increase in vistors to its Web site over the past 12 months. The site receives more more than 23,000 visits each day.

The most popular financial products purchased online are life insurance, car insurance and pet insurance.

Sainsbury's says it expects the upward trend for purchasing financial services online to continue and cites research from GfK Financial, which predicts that during the 12 months to June 2006, 4.8 million people will have completed a financial application online, compared to 3.9 million during the same period 2004-2005, signifying a 23% increase of almost one million.

Kevin Barrett, director of e-commerce, Sainsbury's Bank, says: "The general acceptance of buying goods or services online means that the Web is now a mainstream and vital channel for businesses to interact with and sell to customers. Web sites act as a 'shop front' and are increasingly the customers' primary contact with a brand."

Barrett says broadband technology is a possible driver behind the growth of online financial services, along with greater customer awareness of Internet payment security systems.

"We believe that consumers' confidence is on an upwards curve and once an individual makes one successful transaction, they are more willing to repeat the experience," he adds.

December 14, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 13, 2005

Come to the Edge and Fly...How to create a brief that sets creativity free

Ogilvy.com

f the Pope had simply asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling, it is unlikely he would have gotten this.

Pope Julius II directed Michelangelo in his paining of the Sistine Chapel ceiling by explaining that he wanted a creation that would sanctify and celebrate the glory of the Lord. The Pope did not tell him to simply paint the ceiling.

Likewise, the best creative comes from a clear, focused brief. A strong brief states a clear objective, and defines a target audience and its needs in attitudinal rather than demographic terms.

For example, the Tiger Woods Green Card work addresses the 'driven' attitude of AmEx customers rather than their merely focusing on age-income grouping.

A brief should also define the role of the brand in meeting those needs, leading to a clear, relevant, and well-supported proposition that suits the customer.

A brief can give creatives inspiration, as it appeals to the strategic impulses all good creatives share. Involve them from the start. Furthermore, a full, face-to-face briefing can make the written brief more vivid and actionable. Finally, it's the tight, focused brief that gives the courage and the time to think beyond the ordinary.

The agony and the ecstasy.
A lot has been written about the creative brief, but the debate drags on. How important is it? What is its role? What should it contain? Who is it for? Is anyone going to pay any attention anyway?
The reality is that the debate is largely semantic. Whereas fine art is about unfettered self-expression, commercial art always has to start with an objective and a strategy. What do we need to achieve? How are we going to do it? And at some point, this challenge needs to be brought to life for the benefit of the people who have the not inconsiderable task of turning a sound strategic idea into a captivating creative one.

When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, he didn't just ask him to paint whatever he fancied. If he had, he might have ended up with a nice landscape or a handsome still life, but that wouldn't have delivered against his objective of wowing the blase Roman churchgoer. Instead he asked Michelangelo to create something that would sanctify and celebrate the glory of God. Which led to an image that has awed millions, believers and heretics alike, for generations.

Whatever we call it, whether written or verbal, a meeting or an ongoing dialog, every creative journey has to start with an understanding of where we are and where we want to get to. In other words, it has to start with a creative brief. The example of the Sistine Chapel makes several other important points.
Firstly, great creative ideas are media-agnostic. The Church was an early and effective proponent of 360 Degree Branding. Get the brief right and it should act as a springboard to creative ideas that can be executed across every medium and, indeed, every touchpoint between the consumer and the brand.
Secondly, everyone remembers the ceiling but no one remembers the brief. No one ever built a great brand by writing great briefs. The truth is that there is no such thing as a great brief -- only a brief which leads to a great creative idea.

There are no rules that guarantee a brief can do this. But there are some principles that, if followed, maximize the chances of getting to an outstanding creative solution. Before we look at these principles, let's review the ingredients of a good creative brief.

The essential elements of a good brief.
There are many different styles and formats, but most briefs ask the same essential questions:
-- What is the objective and role of communications? What do we want people to do differently and why? How do we expect communications to impact attitudes and behavior? What are people doing now instead? What are the category conventions we can challenge? What do competitive communications look like and how can we avoid imitating them?
-- Who precisely is the target audience and what is the shared emotional need or desire the brand can best address? Get this right and the rest of the brief should fall into place around it. Demographics are important, particularly when it comes to media, but the key is to define the audience by shared attitudinal characteristics rather than demographic similarities. For example, when developing a new campaign for American Express, qualitative research suggested that many Card members have the same restless and driven attitude towards life as golf star Tiger Woods, an insight that led directly to a powerful new campaign for the Green Card.
-- What is the role of the brand? Once we understand the emotional need, we can define the role the brand plays in addressing it. We can then use this "brand promise" as the lens through which to define the whole of the brand experience, including but not limited to communications. In the case of Procrit, a drug for the treatment of anemia in chemotherapy patients, behavioral research conducted by the OgilvyDiscovery/New York revealed that many patients were in denial about the effects of anemia, which led to a reluctance to treat it and defined a role for the brand in helping sufferers to come to terms with their condition.
-- What is the proposition -- the single-minded thought that the communications will bring to life in a provocative and compelling way? It should build on our insights into the target audience and the role of the brand and crystallize them into a focused idea that captures the essence of what we want to say.
-- What is the support or reason to believe this? We need to give consumers "permission to believe" -- something that allows them to rationalize, whether to themselves or others, what is in reality an emotionally-driven brand decision. Avoid laundry lists. The support should be as focused as the insight or proposition, the truths that make the brand benefit indisputable.
-- What is the unique personality of the brand? People use products, but they have relationships with brands. As David Ogilvy said, "The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality is the one who will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit." When defining personality, be provocative and avoid meaningless generalizations such as "confident." The mood and tone of the communications should reflect the unique personality of the brand. The brief that led to British Airways' classic Manhattan commercial described it simply as "big, warm, goose pimples." Try using photographic images or collages, tapes of research groups, video, music or other stimuli to bring the brand to life.
One final observation. When preparing a brief bear in mind that different creative people may find inspiration in different parts of it. In Truth, Lies and Advertising, Jon Steel observes that legendary copywriter John Webster used to describe one inspiring minute in a two-hour conversation as a "good briefing."

How to maximize the chances of the brief leading to a great creative idea.
Treat every brief as an opportunity to do great work.
There is a tendency in some agencies to divide assignments into those with creative potential and those without. The reality is that the health of an agency depends in large measure on the quality of its creative output, so no agency can afford to miss an opportunity to do truly outstanding work. Given the critical importance of the brief to the resulting work, it is imperative that every brief is treated as an opportunity to help build the brand, the business, and the agency's reputation.
As David Ogilvy said, "Raise your sights! Blaze new trails! Compete with the immortals!"
Moreover, creative people, like all of us, do their best work when they believe that there is a determination and passion to do something truly great. Make them believe that "this is the one" and they are much more likely to give it their all.

Understand your audience.
The audience for the brief is not the marketing department, CEO or even the apocryphal housewife in Peoria. It is the creative team faced with a blank sheet of paper and a deadline. If you want great work, start by understanding the needs and motivations of the people responsible for creating it.
What motivates creative people is not sales charts or share points. It is the opportunity to create something that tugs at the heart as well as the wallet.
If you want advertising that inspires consumers, start by inspiring the creatives.
Involve the creative team before you brief them.
A planner or account person may lead the strategy development process, but the creative team should be their partner from the very beginning. Not only will it ensure that they agree with the strategic direction, the best creative people are by nature intuitive strategists, with a natural feel for consumers' attitudes and needs.
Don't confuse the brief and the briefing.
A written creative brief is a useful way of marshalling thoughts, but it can never replace a face-to-face briefing and the ongoing dialog that surrounds it. Its role is as an aide memoir, to ensure the key points from the briefing stay fresh in creatives' minds.
A creative briefing should try and bring the key message or theme alive in a way that will both inform and inspire. Get out of the office. Go to where the brand lives. Brief a beer campaign in a bar, an athletic shoe campaign in a playground. In one case, a swimwear brief was laminated and thrown into a swimming pool for the creative team to recover (presumably they were advised to bring a change of clothes.) In another example, the team was blindfolded to help them understand what it's like to be blind, before being briefed on a fund-raising campaign.
Be maniacally focused.
Try this test. Throw someone five or six tennis balls at the same time. Chances are they'll drop all of them. Throw them one and they'll probably catch it.
The best briefs always focus on one key message. Creatives usually perform best when given free rein to push the execution in one clearly defined strategic direction. As David Ogilvy said, "Give me the freedom of a tight briefing." Don't fudge the brief and expect the creative process to clarify unresolved strategic decisions. It won't.
Ensure that the focus runs through the whole brief. Does the main message address the insight? Does the reason to believe support the main message? Will this deliver against the desired objective?

Even market research company Millward Brown supports the need for focus. In an analysis of Link results, they found that executions which focus on one message consistently outperform those that are more ambiguous.
Be brief.
It's not called "brief" for nothing. A quick poll round the creative department suggested that brevity is valued above all else. Creatives should have access to as much information as they need, but the essence of the argument should be expressed in the fewest words precision allows.
There is a story of an examination candidate who answered the question "What is courage?" (for which 40 minutes had been allowed) with the one-word answer: "This." We too should aim to be this succinct and this meaningful.
Use the language of the living room, not the boardroom.
There's no substitute for original thinking, but too often corporate jargon is used to disguise a lack of it. Briefs should use language of the living room, not the boardroom (unless of course you are targeting CEOs).
When Karl Marx said, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," people understood what he meant. When Einstein said "E=MC2," they didn't have a clue.
Write the first ad.
A simple test of a brief is to try and write the first ad. Don't craft detailed words and images, but try and come up with a creative idea that demonstrates its executability.
John Hegarty takes it a step further. He describes the brief as being the first ad. Does the argument captivate you and make you want to buy? He suggests taking the proposition, visualizing it and pinning it next to your desk. If it makes a good billboard, then the brief has potential.
Start with an interesting strategic idea.
The last principle is in many ways the most important. If you want your creative work to be fresh and interesting, then you are best off starting with something fresh and interesting to say.
As David Ogilvy said, "Unless your advertising has a big idea it will pass like a ship in the night."
The best strategies and briefs take a radically new perspective on a familiar problem, reframing it in the minds of consumers and prompting them to reappraise their own needs and the role of the brand in addressing it.
A classic example is Ogilvy London's repositioning of Lucozade, a long established glucose drink. Lucozade had been positioned for years as an aid to recovery for sick children, but sales had been declinIng for some time, a situation not helped by a dowdy image. Ogilvy's solution was to create a sports energy drink category in the UK and then dominate it with Lucozade.
Another example is the recent "mLife" campaign for AT&T Wireless from Ogilvy New York. Rather than compete on generic benefits in an increasingly commoditized category, the team recognized that technological developments would have a fundamental impact on people's lives and the way they connect to others and set out to own this. The creative idea, "mLife" (or "mobile life"), sprung directly from this vision.

As Brian Collins, Executive Creative Director of the Brand Integration Group at Ogilvy New York says, "Define every opportunity as big as possible." Or as Steve Henry puts it in Excellence in Advertising, "Write every brief with the intention of changing the world."
A final piece of advice: Be open-minded and courageous.

The best creative teams don't work to a brief. They work from it. Working to a brief implies limits and constraints. The reality is that the brief is a starting point, a springboard to something new and greater. It should be directional but never prescriptive.

We need to be open-minded to the fact that creativity will take us to a place we maybe never knew existed. Indeed, we need to embrace and encourage this rather than fear it, because it is the source of competitive advantage both for Ogilvy and also for our clients.
Ultimately the role of the brief is to give us the courage to take a step into the unknown, knowing that what we find there can make the difference between the success and failure of our client's brand.
The English poet, Christopher Logue, described the process of creativity thus:
"Come to the edge,
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE
And they came
and he pushed
and they flew. . . "

It is the creative brief that can give us the confidence to take that step over the edge.

December 13, 2005 at 12:12 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 12, 2005

Can This Man Reprogram Microsoft?

Can This Man Reprogram Microsoft? - New York Times

By STEVE LOHR
Published: December 11, 2005

Redmond, Wash.

THINK back to Round 1 of the Internet, when things really got rolling in 1995. The computing landscape was shifting, and a cool, fast-growing young company symbolized the new order: Netscape. At the time, Microsoft looked to be a lumbering old war horse, trapped in the yesteryear of desktop personal computer software, word processors, spreadsheets and operating systems. It seemed, in other words, so 1980's.

But, of course, Microsoft emerged a winner. It embraced the Internet and vanquished the Netscape threat with hard work, ingenuity and strong-arm tactics that a federal court ruled violated the nation's antitrust laws. Microsoft's shares soared to a record high at the end of 1999.

The Internet, Round 2, is now under way. Again, the computing terrain is changing remarkably, helped along by free software like Linux and the spread of high-speed Internet access. Today, all kinds of computing experiences can be delivered as services over the Internet, often free and supported by advertising. Clever Internet software can now turn flat, view-and-read Web pages into snappy services that look and respond to a user's keystrokes much like the big software applications that reside on a PC hard drive. New companies are even sprouting up to offer Web-based word processors and spreadsheets, products long regarded as mature - and long dominated by Microsoft's desktop programs.

Champions of the Internet services model range from I.B.M. to start-ups. But the totemic company in this next big evolutionary step in computing is Google, the Internet search power whose ambitions appear to be growing as fast as its profits.

And Microsoft? It once more finds itself surrounded by doubt and dismissed as a laggard. Some of its own senior engineers have defected to Google and elsewhere, and its stock price has barely budged in three years, despite solid earnings growth, because others appear to be winning the race for the future.

The familiar pattern of a decade ago begs the question that Bill Gates was asked when he met last month with a group of executives and journalists from The New York Times: Will you do to Google what you did to Netscape?

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, paused, looked down at his folded hands and smiled broadly, as if enjoying a private joke. "Nah," he replied, "we'll do something different."

The man whom Mr. Gates is counting on to make a difference is Ray Ozzie, a soft-spoken 50-year-old who joined the company just eight months ago. He has the daunting task of galvanizing the troops to address the Internet services challenge, shaking things up and quickening the corporate pulse.

The forces arrayed against Microsoft, analysts say, may well prove more formidable than ever. "The problem Microsoft faces today is that there is a totally different model emerging for how software is created, distributed, used and paid for," said George F. Colony, the chairman of Forrester Research, a technology consultant. "That's why it's going to be so difficult for Microsoft this time."

Yet there are optimists. Big industry shifts, they say, create opportunity. Inevitably, they note, Internet computing erodes Microsoft's power to set technology standards, but the company can still benefit as the overall market expands. That's what happened in the 1990's. They say that if Microsoft shrewdly devises, for example, online versions of its Office products, supported by advertising or subscription fees, it may be a big winner in Internet Round 2.

"There's a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft to expand its business," said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who has a buy recommendation on the company. "But Microsoft had better be sure it is the one that capitalizes before others cannibalize their business."

AT first blush, Mr. Ozzie, whose title is chief technical officer, seems an unlikely person to meet the threat of Google and its brethren. He has only a small staff and no direct control over Microsoft's vast product groups. "It's soft power," Mr. Ozzie said in an interview here last week, referring to the foreign-policy concept that influence need not be measured in bombs and battleships.

And few doubt Mr. Ozzie's influence. "Ray Ozzie is someone with a tremendous technical reputation and an outsider, who Bill Gates trusts, and he's come in and said things have to change," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Ozzie is a software wizard whose geek gene was evident early. Growing up in suburban Chicago, he had a passion for Heathkits, which were do-it-yourself projects for electronics hobbyists. He was constantly building radios, tape players and other electronics gear, recalled Jack Ozzie, his younger brother. "There was always a smell of solder in the back bedroom," said Jack, who is a software engineer.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1970's, Mr. Ozzie wandered into the building that housed Plato, a computer system with terminals linked to a mainframe in a network that, remarkably for its time, had instant messaging, e-mail and online discussions. Mr. Ozzie became a senior programmer on the Plato system.

Mr. Ozzie recalled that he was "forever changed" by his experience with Plato. It gave him, he said, "a peek at what the Internet would ultimately become. It was a microcosm, an online community in an era when there weren't online communities."

In the 1980's, Mr. Ozzie applied that perspective to the new technology of the day: personal computers. At the time, PC's were mainly stand-alone machines for word processing, spreadsheet calculations and desktop publishing. Mr. Ozzie recognized that PC's could also be powerful tools for communications and collaboration. He led the team that created Lotus Notes, an early program for corporate e-mail and sharing information in digital workspaces, anticipating the kind of computing that would become commonplace only later with the rise of the Internet and the Web. In 1995, I.B.M. paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development Corporation and the prize was Lotus Notes.

In 1997, Mr. Ozzie founded Groove Networks to make advanced collaboration software using Internet peer-to-peer technology, well before the arrival of Napster and peer-to-peer networks for sharing music. Groove was a technological triumph, but not a big commercial success. Microsoft bought Groove this year to pick up its technology - and Mr. Ozzie.

Years ago, when Mr. Ozzie was a Microsoft competitor, Mr. Gates called him one of the world's great programmers. So, in Microsoft's engineering culture, Mr. Ozzie brings a lot of clout to his job.

He hit the ground quickly after he arrived in April. At first, he said, some executives told him that it was a big company and that he should get to know it for a year or so before deciding what to focus on. "That lasted about two weeks," he said.

In meetings of senior executives, the subject of how to cope with the Internet services shift in computing, how to turn it into an opportunity for Microsoft, was a constant theme - and one that deeply interested Mr. Ozzie. "Within a month, Ray was putting his thoughts on software-as-services on paper," noted Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, which includes the Office products and corporate software.

Mr. Ozzie then spent the next few months meeting with people across the company to see what work was being done in product groups. Simultaneously, he was devising a plan to help Microsoft capitalize on Internet services by blending the new technology - and economic models - with Microsoft's traditional software business.

In late October, Mr. Ozzie presented his ideas in a seven-page, 5,000-word memo, "The Internet Services Disruption." At first, it was e-mailed to fewer than 100 senior managers and engineers at Microsoft. But they passed it along to colleagues, and by early November it had leaked out to the press; copies are now posted on the Web. Microsoft has used such memos over the years to educate its corporate troops and to stir them up to combat major competitive challenges.

In a two-page note that accompanied the Ozzie memo, Mr. Gates compared it to one he wrote in 1995, "The Internet Tidal Wave," which assessed the Internet challenge of a decade ago. Microsoft, he wrote in the introduction to the Ozzie memo, was at similar crossroads. "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Mr. Gates wrote, and later emphasized, "The next sea change is upon us."

The Ozzie memo analyzes the Internet services trend, the competition and Microsoft's strengths and shortcomings, and it suggests how the company must change. The document is also a call to action: "It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk," Mr. Ozzie wrote. "We must respond quickly and decisively."

The memo is peppered with technical acronyms, and rivals are named. While Microsoft is progressing on several fronts, Mr. Ozzie wrote, "a set of very strong and determined competitors is laser-focused on Internet services and service-enabled software."

"Google is obviously the most visible here," he added.

There is an implicit critique of Microsoft's software-building practice of relying so much on product cycles measured in years. The last major release of Windows - XP - was in 2001, while the next one, Vista, has been scheduled for next year after repeated delays. The memo chastises no product by name, but it extols the virtues of speed and simplicity in software design.

"Complexity kills," Mr. Ozzie wrote. "It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

HIS comments all but echo those of some estranged engineers who have left Microsoft recently. Mark Lucovsky, a former senior engineer at Microsoft who joined Google, wrote in his blog earlier this year, "Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed." The companies to watch, Mr. Lucovsky wrote, have "embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of 'software as a service' and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly."

Mr. Ozzie is understandably careful in what he writes and says; his role at Microsoft is mainly to lead and encourage rather than to criticize. He emphasizes the importance of Microsoft's big desktop products like Windows and Office, and he says that Internet services should be seen primarily as a way to continually update and improve its offerings. Those updates and improvements, he said, should make Microsoft software teams happier by moving their work into the marketplace faster.

"People like to have fun doing what they're doing, and people who build software have fun by having people use their stuff," Mr. Ozzie said in the interview.

Yet Microsoft will also selectively offer Web services that do over the Internet some of what Office and Windows do on the desktop. The company took measured steps in that direction last month, when it introduced Windows Live and Office Live. Windows Live lets consumers manage their e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site. Office Live enables small businesses to set up Web sites and e-mail systems, and to provide collaboration sites for teams. Both will be supported by advertising and perhaps some subscription fees.

In the future, Mr. Ozzie suggests, Microsoft will go further, offering parts of Office - like Word, Excel or PowerPoint - as Web services. "I think there are potentially different or enhanced ways that we can take things that have traditionally been done with the Office suite and offer that to customers," Mr. Ozzie said. "That's absolutely what we're focused on."

The new approach, it seems, is a striking departure from Microsoft's longtime practice of bundling more and more software features into its big integrated products. The bundling has not been merely a design preference, but also a business strategy. With more than 90 percent of the desktop PC market for operating systems and office productivity applications, Microsoft has bundled outstanding programs with mediocre ones, and all of them typically became the industry standards.

But Internet services represent a more open, competitive model. "Software itself is going to be free, and you get paid for services that are supported either by ads or by subscription charges," said Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation, which develops free software for personal information like calendars and contacts. "For Microsoft, this is a bigger challenge than the rise of the Internet itself in 1995."

RECENT innovations have enabled Web-based software to look and respond more like desktop applications. Offering Internet alternatives to traditional PC programs are a new breed of start-ups, including Writely.com, for word processing; NumSum, for spreadsheets; and Zimbra and Scalix, both e-mail. I.B.M. has Web-based software called WorkPlace that is used by millions of workers. And Salesforce.com has built a fast-growing business by supplying customer relationship management software as an Internet service.

"No piece of software will replace Microsoft's Outlook, Word or Excel, but Web services will eat away at core areas of its Office suite over the next couple of years," said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com.

If that happens, Microsoft's business could be battered. Mr. Colony of Forrester Research predicts that Microsoft's profit margins, under pressure from Internet services, could fall by 40 percent or so over the next four years. A wild card is the hand that Google will play beyond search and how successful it may be. Mr. Colony, for example, says he thinks that Google will make a big difference. "I believe Google will revolutionize the software business," he wrote in a recent report.

Google has desktop search software and a Web-based e-mail service, two offerings aimed at parts of Microsoft's stronghold. How much further it plans to go in providing alternatives to Microsoft's software is uncertain, though it certainly looks interested.

Google was among the companies that attended a meeting last month at I.B.M.'s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., of the Open Document Foundation, a group formed to agree on freely available formats for word processing, spreadsheets and other office documents; the idea is to come up with alternatives to Microsoft's proprietary Office formats. And for the last few months, Google has talked with Wyse Technology, a maker of so-called thin-client computers (without hard drives).

The discussions are focused on a $200 Google-branded machine that would likely be marketed in cooperation with telecommunications companies in markets like China and India, where home PC's are less common, said John Kish, chief executive of Wyse. "Google is on a path to developing a stack of software in competition with the Microsoft desktop, and one that is much more network-centric, more an Internet service," Mr. Kish said. "And this fits right into that."

For his part, Mr. Ozzie is curious about the plans at Google but is by no means obsessed by it. Google, he said, is "obviously a very strong technology company, and we'll see what they do with that."

Yet Mr. Ozzie's view is that Microsoft's fate is in its own hands. If it charts its technology and business plans wisely, harnessing the talents of its army of smart people, he said, it should grow and prosper in this next wave of Internet computing. He speaks of a thriving "ecosystem" of open competition in which developers and customers have many choices and in which Microsoft's future is not in crushing rivals but in becoming an attractive choice.

In the past, Microsoft executives have decried free software, with its collaborative open-source development style, as akin to communism, if not downright evil. Not Mr. Ozzie. "I consider open-source software to be part of the environment, like the Internet," he said. "It's not the enemy and it's not going to go away. It's great for developers.

"And if we don't keep continually updating our offerings and develop better offerings," Mr. Ozzie added, "then shame on us."

The Microsoft strategy, he said, has to be to develop tools and technology that make it easier to build software for the Internet-services era and easier for users to have more productive and enjoyable computing experiences. In a sense, it's a reinvention of old Windows vision of computing, but in a very different competitive context from the desktop world that Microsoft ruled.

The new game plan, Mr. Ozzie said, is "obviously not an altruistic thing, but it doesn't even resemble the environment of old."

December 12, 2005 at 07:35 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (49) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 - Hinchliffe

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 (web2.wsj2.com)

It's getting towards the end of the year and I'm feeling the need to take stock of where we've actually come with Web 2.0 in the last 12 months. So much has happened in this space recently and a tidal wave of innovative, high-quality software has been released this year. So much in fact, that it's hard to keep track of it all. While many of us talk about Web 2.0 ideas, there's no substitute for pointing to concrete examples. And this also gives credit where credit is due to all the hard-working folks building the next generation of the Web.

So in spirit of the holidays, here is a list of some of the best Web 2.0 software that I've come across so far. You may have heard of some of these, but hopefully you'll find a few nice new Christmas presents under your Web 2.0 tree.

Finally, the usual disclaimer: This list is entirely subjective and any errors or omissions are my fault, you may not (and probably won't!) agree with some of the software I've listed. But this isn't a one-way web, I definitely encourage you to list anything you feel we missed or got wrong below in the comments. Please use the wiki link syntax ([url text_desc]) help to make sure you embed plenty of good links. Finally, a big thanks to Kate Allen for help compiling this list. Enjoy!

December 12, 2005 at 02:17 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (41) | Top of page | Blog Home

Ariz. Town Will Go Wall-To-Wall Wireless

Ariz. Town Will Go Wall-To-Wall Wireless - Yahoo! News

Sun Dec 11, 9:41 PM ET
By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press Writer
TEMPE, Ariz. - Call it a municipal status symbol in the digital age: a city blanketed by a wireless Internet network, accessible at competitive prices throughout the town's homes, cafes, offices and parks.

Tempe, the Phoenix suburb that is home to Arizona State University, is due to have wireless Internet available for all of its 160,000 residents in February, becoming the first city of its size in the United States to have Wi-Fi throughout.

Tempe officials hope that by making high-speed Internet as accessible as water or electricity across its 40 square miles, it will attract more technology and biotech companies — and the young, upwardly mobile employees they bring.

An increasing number of the nation's cities are looking at using Internet access as an economic development tool. Few cities have gotten as far as installing systems, "but most cities are realizing that it may be something that they want to do," said Cheryl Leanza, legislative counsel for the National League of Cities.

Philadelphia is developing a citywide high-speed system with EarthLink Inc. Unlike Philly or Tempe, New Orleans is building a free system, though the network speed will be limited.

The Tempe network is being installed by NeoReach Wireless, a subsidiary of Bethesda, Md.-based MobilePro Corp. Roughly 400 antenna boxes mounted on light poles throughout the city will be used to stitch together the network, to which NeoReach will sell access, primarily through other providers.

The network uses a so-called "mesh" setup, meaning it passes wireless signals from pole to pole and automatically reroutes transmissions if one of the transmitters breaks down.

Speeds will vary depending on the number of users logged into the same access point.

The network is strong enough only to be picked up outdoors or through one wall, meaning those who want service in their businesses or homes will need a box that serves as a signal booster and router.

The city of Tempe gave the company access to its light poles in exchange for use of the network in transmitting data to and from city offices and vehicles, said Karrie Rockwell, a spokeswoman for NeoReach.

Two hours of free access each day also will be available for Internet users on the Arizona State campus or the nearby Mill Avenue retail district, where the network began a year ago as a pilot project and has proven popular.

Robert Jenkins, 50, sits at a coffee house on Mill Avenue a couple of times a week with his laptop, downloading larger files that take too long at home when he uses his mobile phone to access the Internet.

NeoReach will directly sell service to outdoor users for $3.95 per hour or $29.95 per month. The resellers of NeoReach access have not yet announced pricing, but Rockwell said it will be cheaper than DSL or cable Internet access. Cable operator Cox Communications Inc. charges $49.95 per month for customers who don't get Cox phone or TV service. Qwest Communications International Inc. charges $44.99 and $54.99 per month, depending on the speed.

Tempe signed a contract with NeoReach after asking for bids — which prevented it from having to start its own utility and probably quelled potential objections to the city's involvement in a Wi-Fi network.

Elsewhere in the nation, cities have run into heavy resistance from telecom companies, which argue that the free market should dictate the cost and availability of service.

At least 14 states have passed laws limiting municipal Internet service, and other states are expected to consider similar limits, Leanza said. Arizona does not have such a law.

___

December 12, 2005 at 11:15 AM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (86) | Top of page | Blog Home

Clarkson University Engineer Outwits High-Tech Fingerprint Fraud

Clarkson University Engineer Outwits High-Tech Fingerprint Fraud

By: Clarkson University
Published: Dec 10, 2005 at 07:45
Eyeballs, a severed hand, or fingers carried in ziplock bags. Back alley eye replacement surgery. These are scenarios used in recent blockbuster movies like Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and "Tomorrow Never Dies" to illustrate how unsavory characters in high-tech worlds beat sophisticated security and identification systems.

Sound fantastic? Maybe not. Biometrics is the science of using biological properties, such as fingerprints, an iris scan, or voice recognition, to identify individuals. And in a world of growing terrorism concerns and increasing security measures, the field of biometrics is rapidly expanding.

"Biometric systems automatically measure the unique physiological or behavioral ‘signature' of an individual, from which a decision can be made to either authenticate or determine that individual's identity," explained Stephanie C. Schuckers, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Clarkson University. "Today, biometric systems are popping up everywhere – in places like hospitals, banks, even college residence halls – to authorize or deny access to medical files, financial accounts, or restricted or private areas."

"And as with any identification or security system," Schuckers adds, "biometric devices are prone to ‘spoofing' or attacks designed to defeat them."

Spoofing is the process by which individuals overcome a system through an introduction of a fake sample. "Digits from cadavers and fake fingers molded from plastic, or even something as simple as Play-Doh or gelatin, can potentially be misread as authentic," she explains. "My research addresses these deficiencies and investigates ways to design effective safeguards and vulnerability countermeasures. The goal is to make the authentication process as accurate and reliable as possible."

Schuckers' biometric research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. She is currently assessing spoofing vulnerability in fingerprint scanners and designing methods to correct for these as part of a $3.1 million interdisciplinary research project funded through the NSF. The project, "ITR: Biometrics: Performance, Security and Societal Impact," investigates the technical, legal and privacy issues raised from broader applications of biometric system technology in airport security, computer access, or immigration. It is a joint initiative among researchers from Clarkson, West Virginia University, Michigan State University, St. Lawrence University, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Fingerprint scanning devices often use basic technology, such as an optical camera that take pictures of fingerprints which are then "read" by a computer. In order to assess how vulnerable the scanners are to spoofing, Schuckers and her research team made casts from live fingers using dental materials and used Play-Doh to create molds. They also assembled a collection of cadaver fingers.

In the laboratory, the researchers then systematically tested more than 60 of the faked samples. The results were a 90 percent false verification rate.

"The machines could not distinguish between a live sample and a fake one," Schuckers explained. "Since liveness detection is based on the recognition of physiological activities as signs of life, we hypothesized that fingerprint images from live fingers would show a specific changing moisture pattern due to perspiration but cadaver and spoof fingerprint images would not."

In live fingers, perspiration starts around the pore, and spreads along the ridges, creating a distinct signature of the process. Schuckers and her research team designed a computer algorithm that would detect this pattern when reading a fingerprint image. With the new detection system integrated into the device, less than 10 percent of the spoofed samples were able to fool the machine.

Addressing potential problems before they can occur is one of the goals of Schuckers' biometrics research. "As security systems based on biometrics continue to develop, it is important that people are reassured that their privacy is protected," she said. "How confident will someone feel giving his/her fingerprint over a public communication channel, such as the Internet? The technology needs to be solid and reliable and offer adequate privacy protection before biometric security systems will be accepted by the public."

Schuckers is also a member of the Center for Identification Technology, a cooperative research center headquartered at West Virginia University that brings together the NSF, industry and government agencies, and university researchers. She is director of the Biomedical Signal Analysis Laboratory at Clarkson. Schuckers joined the faculty of Clarkson in 2002. She received her doctoral degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1997.

Clarkson University, located in Potsdam, New York is a private, nationally ranked university with a reputation for developing innovative leaders in engineering, business, the sciences, health sciences and the humanities. At Clarkson, 3,000 high-ability students excel in an environment where learning is not only positive and supportive but spans the boundaries of traditional disciplines and knowledge. Faculty achieve international recognition for their research and scholarship and connect students to their leadership potential in the marketplace through dynamic, real-world problem solving.

© Copyright 2005 by YubaNet.com

December 12, 2005 at 11:11 AM in Smart Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard 2 hours, 37 minutes ago

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Six Apart Ltd., creator of Movable Type -- the most popular software used to create professional blogs -- said on Sunday Yahoo will be the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.

The partnership is the latest in a string of deals by the world's largest Internet media company as it seeks to embrace so-called "social media," the new generation of Web sites that encourage Internet users to share written text, photos and videos.

On Friday, Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us, a site for users to share their favorite Web links. Earlier this year, it acquired Flickr, which offers a way to annotate and share photos.

Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.

"This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business," he said.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.

Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.

Movable Type is commonly used by businesses, Web designers and professional bloggers to create easily updated Web sites. Other blog software such as Google Inc.'s Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Six Apart's own Live Journal, are more often used to create blogs for individuals.

Yahoo hosts roughly 30 million individual Web sites, including hundreds of thousands of small business sites, said Rich Riley, general manager of Yahoo's small business unit. One in eight U.S. online stores are hosted by Yahoo, he said.

Yahoo is one of the world's largest suppliers of hosted Web sites, which refers to Web sites set and maintained for customers by Yahoo for a monthly subscription fee.

Six Apart said it had optimized the underlying software in Movable Type so that it responds twice as fast as the same software offered by Six Apart's own Web site.

Six Apart continues to develop versions of Movable Type designed to run inside big businesses, along with its consumer-oriented Live Journal software and a quick set-up version of Movable Type known as TypePad.

Separately, Dash said Six Apart's Japanese unit is developing a version of Movable Type to run on Oracle database software, in a bid to encourage wider use of blogs among big businesses. Six Apart was developed to run on open source database software originally.

Privately-held Six Apart, founded four years ago by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, counts 100 employees worldwide. It has received nearly $12 million in funding from backers Neoteny Co. Ltd. and August Capital, Dash said.

December 12, 2005 at 02:57 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (36) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 10, 2005

Retailers Take Multi-Faceted Approaches to Multi-Channel Success

A Resurgence is In Store for Retailing

Macy’s, Sears and REI adopt distinct strategies that consider how the goals of each channel fit together

By Susan Reda, Executive Editor

It’s a standard topic of conversation with children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” If they’re under 10 years old, just about anything from astronaut to zookeeper receives an adult’s optimistic nod. But as their late teens approach, expectations change. Teenagers are expected to have an idea about where they’re heading and a game plan to get there.

Multi-channel retailers have reached those pivotal years. Even though a majority of retailers have had an on-line presence for a mere five to seven years, rapid growth and consumer acceptance have compressed the timeline.

Industry experts say that multi-channel success is contingent upon figuring out how the e-commerce piece fits into the total organization, how to leverage e-commerce assets across the enterprise and what organizational and technological tools are needed to reach the goal.

Dale Achabal, director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, and Kirthi Kalyanam, director of e-business initiatives at SCU, are engaged in ongoing research on the factors that drive multi-channel strategies. Their aim is to provide on-line companies with tools to help determine which strategy is right for their unique businesses.

“We’re looking at multi-channel retailing from a strategic point of view,” says Achabal. “Everybody seems to have a multi-channel presence today, but not everyone has really thought out how the e-commerce channel links to their traditional stores, their direct mail business or both. “If you ask some on-line retail companies whether the decision to have the same assortment across all channels is part of a measured approach or just the way they’ve been doing it since the company first launched its e-commerce initiative, you’re likely to find that, in many cases, it’s the latter,” he says.

BLENDING ASSETS Achabal’s research calls for executives to examine four key factors that shape a multi-channel strategy: customer expectations, assortment characteristics, company structure and competitive environment.

A comprehensive evaluation of these factors provides a framework for determining, for example, whether it’s better to focus on key items vs. a full assortment, or whether it’s more advantageous to deliver a uniform brand experience across every channel vs. differentiating the website based on customers’ expectations.

"True multi-channel advantages are realized when an organization engages in the strategic blending of key assets across value chains,” explains Achabal. “There are no hard-and-fast rules to apply here. The approach will be different for each company, based on what’s right for its unique business and customer. But the attitude some senior executives have, that the e-commerce channel doesn’t command their attention because they have bigger fish to fry, is one that can negatively impact their entire business.”

While many e-retailers continue to sort out which multi-channel strategy is most relevant to their overall business scheme, a handful of players are ahead of the curve, including Macys.com, Sears.com, LandsEnd.com and REI.com. Each has adopted a distinct multi-channel strategy that takes into consideration the role of e-commerce vs. the other channels in which the company operates.

The strategy at Macys.com has evolved considerably since its 1996 debut as a view-only site focused on bridal registry. At one point, company executives considered recreating the full-line department store in the virtual world, but they quickly discovered that the channels attract different shoppers and require distinct strategies.

“We’ve grown this business by focusing on the customer who is shopping on-line and by managing the shopper’s expectations,” says Gene Domecus, senior vice president of e-commerce at Macys.com, a division of Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores. “Over the years, we’ve actually reduced the size of the assortment and grown the business.”

CATER TO CUSTOMERS In 1998, plans called for offering e-shoppers the best of Macy’s East and Macy’s West, featuring top brands from every category. That strategy went through several iterations over the next two years before executives decided to eliminate certain categories, such as career apparel, and place more emphasis on others, including juniors and home-related merchandise.

“Juniors is now 40 percent of our women’s apparel on-line. It’s nowhere near that large in the store,” Domecus notes. “The same can be said of the home business. As a percentage of total sales, it’s much higher on-line than in the traditional store setting.

“The on-line shopper comes to Macys.com with a mission, a gift to buy or something she needs,” he adds. “It would be neither practical nor profitable to have the same four million sku’s on-line as we have in the stores. We have to cater to the needs of the on-line customer if we intend to grow this business.”

Today, Macys.com is operated separately from the traditional stores, including separate buyers and inventory. Still, items featured on-line must be available in at least one Macy’s division. While the product assortment is smaller, items are available in greater depth than in the traditional stores, and anything purchased on-line can be returned to the stores.

Domecus de-scribes the e-commerce channel as being in lock-step with the company’s corporate direction. “Federated is focused on growing its business while catering to customer needs,” he explains. “Our mission is the same, but that doesn’t imply that everything that works in one channel will work in another.”

Case in point: Macy’s executives tried extending the brand into direct mail in 1998 with a catalog targeted to customers outside the retailer’s major markets. The catalog was short-lived as executives realized that the product offering was not in sync with the other channels. To stay true to the brand, the decision was made to exit the catalog business.

“Just because you can do business in every channel of retailing doesn’t mean you should,” says Domecus. “Our decision to exit direct mail is a perfect example of that. Each company has to understand the role of multi-channel retailing within its overall business, then manage growth in that context. For example, the on-line channel plays a huge role in delivering new customers to Federated by means of the on-line bridal registry. The Internet generates 30 percent of all the new registry customers at Federated.”

BRAND POWER While Macy’s runs its Internet channel separately from the store operation, Seattle-based REI. com makes every effort to deliver a consistent customer experience, operating its on-line channel as an extension of the store and direct mail businesses.

“Ultimately, it’s about the power of the brand and the desire to communicate to the customer with one voice,” says Joan Broughton, vice president of multi-channel programs at REI. “Executives were of one mind from the outset in terms of how the e-commerce piece would fit into the total business. We are still engaged in integrating the systems used across the various channels, but we always wanted the customer to feel that the on-line shopping experience met his expectations of the REI brand.”

Broughton points out that the on-line assortment is a superset of the store product. If a customer can’t find what he wants in the store, he can order it on-line via the in-store kiosk. The next phase for REI is to enable shoppers to buy on-line and pick up in the store, a service that’s set to debut this summer.

Each business channel contributes to the retailer’s overall growth. Most retailers’ e-commerce operations generate 4 percent to 5 percent of the total business, according to Broughton. At REI, the on-line channel contributes more than 11 percent of total company sales.

“The value of REI.com goes beyond its on-line sales generation. It is viewed within the company as an asset that goes across all sales channels. We know its value as a driver of business, based on our knowledge of the customer, how she shops and what she buys. Our strategy is to deliver a consistent experience, regardless of which door the customer comes through.”

LEVERAGE STRENGTHS Bill Bass, who wears two hats – vice president and general manager of Sears Customer Direct and senior vice president of e-commerce at Lands’ End – is quick to note the similarities and differences in the two ulti-channel businesses.

“Lands’ End started a catalog business, slowly expanded into the e-commerce channel and recently entered the traditional store channel,” explains Bass. “Sears’ roots are in bricks-and-mortar retailing and direct mail, but they got out of the direct mail business and methodically built the on-line channel with careful emphasis on exclusive brands. But when you look closely at the two, each has leveraged its strengths and adopted a gradual approach to growing the on-line channel.

“Different companies will pull different levers,” Bass continues. “The important thing is not which strategy a company chooses, but how the strategy that it picks fits with the rest of the business goals.

”Executives at Lands’ End began dabbling in e-commerce because of their fascination with technology. The Dodgeville, Wis.-based retailer, the first direct marketer to launch an 800 telephone number, is considered an Internet pioneer because of early experiments at selling via CD-ROM on Prodigy and AOL. As the company’s on-line presence grew, the goal was to be a channel agnostic, making certain that the product and experience on-line was consistent with the catalog.

Today, Lands’ End continues to leverage new technologies to drive e-commerce growth, hence the launch of technologies such as the virtual model and customized apparel. Still, to make the shopping experience easier for the consumer, the brand is now available in Sears stores.

At Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based Sears, the venture into e-retailing has been methodical, but one that acknowledges customers’ changing expectations of shopping and service and plays to the company’s strengths. “Sears executives leveraged the strength of the store channel, in this case its vast network of more than 800 stores, to drive sales on-line,” recounts Bass.

“By giving shoppers the option to buy an item on-line and pick it up at a local store, they manage to grow business in both channels. Today about 30 percent to 40 percent of on-line sales are picked up in the store,” he adds. “That’s the beauty of multi-channel retailing. It’s understanding how the goals of each channel fit together to drive the total business.”

©2003, NRF Enterprises, Inc.

December 10, 2005 at 04:13 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Evolution of Customer Service for Financial Services:

The Evolution of Customer Service for Financial Services: Speech-enabling Multi-channel Customer Care

Overview

Innovation and adaptation are critical to industry leadership. As the world economy gains momentum in its long-delayed recovery, retail banks are reinventing themselves as flexible, dynamic sales organizations at the front end, and efficient, low-cost processors at the back end. Driving this reinvention is intense local and global competition. The key to staying ahead lies in leveraging all available customer relationship management mechanisms — in order to ensure that retail banking customers can get what they need when they need it, while ensuring that banking operations have real-time, relevant access to information about customers and critical operations across the enterprise.

What can today's converged, web-voice solutions do to help your financial services organization realize the aforementioned goals and objectives? Just ask yourself the following questions: When customers dial in to your call center, use your ATM network, log on to your online banking system, or visit a branch office, are you able to serve them consistently regardless of method of interaction? Is all pertinent and appropriate information available at the precise moment of customer interaction? Can you spot the ideal moment to offer your customer the equity line or debit card that would make them a more profitable customer? In short, are you optimizing every interaction with every customer? Most likely, the information and processes required for this type of service and highly effective selling already exist in your retail banking enterprise; however, they may not be working optimally. By identifying, integrating, and leveraging these processes in real time at the point of customer interaction, you can convert them into a profit engine. You can also differentiate your customer interaction from the competition by offering state of the art speech interfaces that are not only easy to use for your customers, but also easy to maintain, and that leverage many of the web-based assets that you have invested in today.

This is precisely the power that today's open-standards based voice systems bring to retail banking. As banks look for ways to achieve higher profits through customer service and sales, they need to integrate customer service systems, tie them to a variety of back-office systems, and supply them with consistent information. A state-of-the-art voice system based upon the Microsoft .NET Framework makes this possible by enhancing payment and financial data with real-time, comprehensive, cross-channel information to enable personalized service to each customer as a "market of one." In fact, this solution delivers critical customer and business information to all parts of the enterprise — immediately and consistently. The solution integrates core systems, data warehouses and delivery channels in real time, driving unprecedented levels of integration, performance, and manageability. It complements and adds value to your existing IT investment. And because this solution is built to scale up and out, you can be assured that solution will be able to grow with you and your customers.
Business challenges and opportunities

Every year, retail banking customers engage in more than 200 billion interactions with their financial institutions. Each interaction has the potential to either create value and strengthen the customer relationship or leave customers feeling frustrated and dissatisfied. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index suggests that the latter scenario too often prevails: At the end of 2004, customer satisfaction for the top four U.S. banks was rated at a score of 71 (out of a possible 100), lower than the scores achieved by department stores, supermarkets, and insurance companies. A major contributor to these low scores is the lack of an integrated customer view, resulting from an infrastructure that is incapable of delivering such a view. The problem of multiple core systems complicated by a growing number of disparate delivery channels makes finding a solution even that much more challenging. These systems were developed individually using state-of-the-art toolsets, specialized development skills, and proprietary data models. As a result, they have widely varying integration requirements, data structures and availability guidelines. And no single channel has complete access to an up-to-date, consolidated view of critical customer and business data. The "many-to-many" connections between back-office systems and front-office delivery channels create an enterprise infrastructure that is complex, expensive and incapable of delivering a single view of the customer from the bank's perspective or a single view of the bank from the customer's perspective. In fact, the existing technology within the average banking institution makes it virtually impossible to create this unified view. In an attempt to improve customer satisfaction, financial institutions have spent billions of dollars on customer-focused products and services, as well as on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects. These efforts were implemented as internally-facing, data-driven systems and have been hampered by a lack of consistency in delivering the information to the customer when it really counts: at the exact point and time of interaction. Leading banks seek to create an environment in which customers are treated consistently at every point of interaction, and in which the bank can leverage up-to-the-second information to capitalize on sales and marketing opportunities. Only with multiple customer access channels, and real-time access to customer data, can banks maintain and advance profitable relationships with their customers.
Industry trends

Across the financial services spectrum, whether in retail banking, wholesale banking, or the securities environment, enterprises are facing a growing list of challenges. Continued pressure on interest margins makes the need for efficiency greater. Customer service, retention and loyalty depend on the regular rollout of new products, services (including value-added advisory services) and payment mechanisms. And a single view of the customer, whether corporate or individual, is needed to achieve real-time decision-making capabilities and to deliver new service levels. A virtual avalanche of compliance, regulatory and industry mandates, such as anti-money laundering, the USA Patriot Act, SWIFTNet and Basel II, is descending on the industry. The "do more with less" paradigm that characterizes 21st century business requires an even stronger focus on operational efficiency, accompanied by greater emphasis on cost reduction and improved return on IT investment. Consolidation in the financial services industry will continue, fueled by the desire to move into new markets and products, integrate distribution channels and lower costs through greater economies of scale.
Technology trends

The TowerGroup, a leading research and advisory firm focused on technology in the global financial services industry, projects that worldwide IT spending will grow at the rate of 3.3 percent per year going forward. This projection is based on a broad agreement that technology is a primary enabler for the development of new, customer-centric features and services. Legacy systems lack the flexibility needed to integrate data across internal and external environments in real time and leverage it for informed business decisions. An increasing number of financial institutions are pursuing open platforms for more efficient standardization, greater modularity, faster application development and lower total cost of ownership.
Investment protection

Infrastructure replacement is not an option in today's retail banking environment — a result of the enormous investment in legacy core banking and delivery channel systems. Current technology solutions include some level of channel integration. However, banks must replace existing platforms to take advantage of their enhanced integration capabilities. For effective branch, call center, voice-response, kiosk, and online banking integration without a central hub, all three systems would need to be replaced with a single solution. And the provider of such a solution may not have the necessary experience in all of these areas to provide a scalable, reliable multi-channel delivery system. The way this can be done successfully is through the deployment of a reusable framework.

Open-standards for converged web/voice solutions have made the reusable framework concept a reality for financial services organizations. Based on more than a quarter century of financial industry experience in traditional voice-enabled customer relationship management systems and real-time transaction processing, Intervoice and Microsoft have created solutions for the financial services contact center. These solutions have their roots in core Intervoice and Microsoft service and technology components such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Speech Server, Microsoft Active Directory, Intervoice Telephony Interface Manager (SIP & TDM), and the Intervoice Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Server. A typical solution framework depicting how voice-enabled technologies can be incorporated into today's financial services contact center is depicted in the Figure 1 below:

This architectural framework can enable a financial institution to enhance payments and financial data with real-time, comprehensive, cross-channel information to serve each customer as a "market of one." By integrating and not rebuilding best-in-class front-office solutions, today's voice solutions protect the bank's investment in individual delivery channels while giving your customers a competitively different customer service experience through speech-driven voice self service. What's more, this solution gives the bank the flexibility to leverage existing infrastructure investments — IT Human Resources, desktop and server licenses, legacy CRM systems like Oracle and SAP, online access methods, CTI software, existing switching fabric and more!
Capabilities and benefits

Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server for retail banking deliver an up-to-the-second, consolidated view of all payment and customer related data — enabling financial institutions to optimize every customer interaction. The solution addresses major business challenges, including the need to reduce costs, increase revenue and profitability, improve customer service, respond quickly to changing market dynamics, and leverage existing investments.

Key benefits include:

* Reduced costs: The solution enables financial institutions to leverage actual cost analysis to drive profitability decisions. It's real-time view of enterprise-wide transactions makes it possible to intercept fraud before it happens, lowering financial risk. The solution framework significantly reduces the number of individual point-to-point interfaces (estimated at US$30,000 to US$50,000 per interface) needed to support application-to-application and channel-to-channel interconnects, resulting in immediate IT savings.
* Incremental ROI: The solution can be implemented in an incremental fashion, with short-term return on investment at every step.
* Improved customer service leading to increased revenue and profitability: The solution delivers the insight needed to serve each customer as a "market of one," dynamically personalizing and optimizing every customer interaction in real time — at the point of the transaction. It also makes it possible to identify, and appropriately target, the bank's most profitable customers with special programs and offers, improving customer retention and profitability.
* Agile response to changing business requirements: The solution combines real-time and historic information in a powerful decision-making tool. By synchronizing key business data, it provides "one version of the truth" to support all business processes. It enables faster time-to-market for new services — a key success factor in today's increasingly competitive financial services environment. It also facilitates prompt compliance with evolving regulatory requirements and legal mandates.
* Ease of expansion: The solution framework provides the flexibility to add new data sources and users, expanding the current environment with no disruption to existing systems or processes. The solution uses .NET technologies for ease of integration with a standard, reusable, and modular infrastructure that greatly facilitates the addition of new products, services, and channels.
* Investment protection: The solution adds real-time capabilities to current applications and data sources, so banking institutions can preserve their investment in legacy systems while enhancing the power of existing solutions. The solution adds new value propositions to the legacy infrastructure and minimizes the impact on core systems.

Summary

The growth of e-business of over the past several years has led to an explosion in the number of interactions a financial services organization has with its customers. A company must plan for interactions not only through a contact center, but also through multiple touch points including the Web, mobile phones, Pocket PCs, and e-mail. Financial services companies that have successfully deployed self-service options for customers continually look for ways to improve and integrate these services to reduce the total cost of ownership, increase profitability, increase customer satisfaction, retain customers, and uncover new revenue opportunities. Key contact center solutions that can help you further enhance self-service capabilities and realize these benefits can be achieved through Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server.

Designed and certified for Microsoft Windows, Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server facilitate a new age of integration and collaboration between the retail banking consumer and the financial enterprise. By leveraging the power of Microsoft Windows and .NET technologies, these solutions allow you to "close the loop" between your customer care strategies and the technology already in your customers' hands.

Intervoice Solutions for Microsoft Speech Server offer an efficient and effective path for any business that seeks to deploy speech-enabled technology as well as a centralized integration framework to take advantage of all other customer touch points in their organization. Our solutions deliver extraordinary ROI potential by providing highly integrated, efficient, speech-enabled, self-service capabilities for enterprise financial services organizations at an economical price. Future business needs are met by a flexible technology that provides multiple deployment options through a highly scalable and integrated architecture built on the .NET Framework. In fact, the ability to manage one .NET code base for both Web- and voice-enabled applications makes it possible to extend new and ubiquitous self-service capabilities to retail banking customers — ultimately enabling you to balance enterprise and customer goals through an optimized customer experience. Let Intervoice show your financial institution how to optimize its technology investments to succeed in today's challenging environment. For more information visit us at www.intervoice.com/solutions/microsoft-solutions.

Author Profile:
Michael Segura is responsible for strategy, product, and market development of Microsoft products for Intervoice. Segura has 15 years of experience managing business units within the telecommunications, energy and consulting industries. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas A&M University and has completed Executive Marketing Management Program from Duke University and University of North Carolina. Segura also holds a CPA certification.

December 10, 2005 at 01:57 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Embracing a Multichannel Strategy

destinationCRM.com: Embracing a Multichannel Strategy

The marketplace has spoken: pure-play is out, click-and-brick rules.

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by Brett Anderson

Friday, April 27, 2001
Thanks to recent and rather sobering setbacks in the U.S. economy, many U.S. executives not previously committed to a multichannel strategy have experienced a remarkable epiphany. Admitting that pure-play is powerless, they have submitted to a higher marketplace authority that says multiple touchpoints are critical for businesses that want to stay competitive and build profits.

In other words, the "click, click, click" of yesterday's economy has evolved into the more Darwinian mantra, "click, brick, paper, voice." Click here to learn more!

And understandably so. The "clicks and mortar" strategy combines the advantage of offering customers greater access to and awareness of your company's products and services with strong operations and inventory management.

"We think the most successful strategy is for existing brick-and-mortar companies to basically build the Internet into everything they do, because the asset of your customers needs to be leveraged throughout the organization--stores driving traffic to the Web, the Web driving to stores. That's the only way to do it," says John Sheldon, associate director, e-business architecture at Dialogos, a customer development consulting firm headquartered in Boston.

Customer demand is one of the strongest drivers of multichannel models. The quest for convenience has drawn many consumers to clicks-and-mortar retailers that give them a choice of making their purchases on the Internet, through a catalogue or from a store. Many of these companies will allow purchases made online to be returned to local outlets.

"Customers want to be able to return merchandise using the method that is most convenient to them, whether it's by mail or at a store location," says Dennis A. Veltre, founder of Clicks &
Mortar Consulting, a Bayside, New York-based firm specializing in the retail market.

The majority of traditional companies have long leveraged multiple channels in marketing to customers, selling and cross-selling products, and managing inventory and fulfillment. Their operational models offer such advantages as strong brand presence and relatively low customer acquisition costs. The newer Internet channel offers powerful personalization technologies and a customer-centric focus that is important in retaining customers in today's challenging marketplace. Combining these advantages creates the competitive edge and efficiencies companies need to survive.

Making the Multichannel Model Work
To leverage this multichannel model, companies must develop a strategy that makes sense for their particular business and product category. "It all depends on where you are in the food chain right now," says Miki Tsusaka, Boston Consulting Group's vice president director of the consumer practice. "What is your current level of sophistication and understanding of your customer base? And what is the objective? Is it to retain every single customer you've got? Is it to buy new customer names because you're nobody and you need to get to that scale? Is it to sell customers the next category?" Once you have identified that objective, she says, only then can you determine what level of investment--in
technologies and in partnerships or acquisitions--makes sense.

"After all, you do not want to buy a nuclear engine if you can
paper-and-muscle the job through at the outset."

The extent to which online and offline elements function together to better serve the customer will determine the organization's future success. The challenges involve not only the technology, but also the ways in which information from each division is leveraged across the organization to promote business goals. From a purely technological perspective, integrating legacy systems with newer e-commerce front-end and back-end systems is both time-consuming and painful. While common architecture should govern distribution, the methods of distribution themselves must remain distinct for online and offline channels. "You will run a real inefficient operation if you don't have different methods and techniques for [online and offline]," observes Veltre. "You cannot work with a common inventory very easily, because in an online environment, you have to be able to reserve the stock and be able to promise it to the customer at a moment's notice."

Challenges notwithstanding, most industry analysts agree that the clicks-and-mortar approach to retailing is a winning proposition. The dollars-and-cents value of the strategy is well illustrated by the success of Gap, whose gap.com has been selling online since 1997. Sales have increased dramatically at Gap during this period, not merely because of incremental online revenue, but
because the different channels, both offline and online, drive customers to buy--and to buy more. For example, the Gap's in-door campaign to collect shoppers' e-mail addresses has broadened its online marketing base, increasing online traffic. Overall, customers who shop online and in the stores spend 50 percent more than single-channel customers.

Cannibalization Concerns
The benefits of opening an Internet channel can be compromised when companies don't address their concerns over the cannibalization of established channels of business by the online breed. The concern is a legitimate one, particularly in cases where a retailer may have too many stores, says BCG's Tsusaka. "I think the Gap right now is over-stored. In an over-stored environment, it's interesting how these organizational tensions arise if your dot com is too competitive." This tension is mitigated, she notes, by the fact that many online Gap customers who return items to the chain's physical stores actually make additional purchases in the process. Even so, for many over-stored companies, the solution is not necessarily to minimize online activity, but to reduce the physical network--if that's what makes sense for the customer base.

Tsusaka stresses that the right strategy is the one that most benefits the customer. "The act of cannibalization, if it's to your own benefit and your customer's, I don't think is bad," she observes. "It's cheaper for a catalogue company to send me fewer catalogues each year. If I start shopping on the Net, you might be able to send me a smaller catalogue. The act of cannibalization is not a bad proposition to you at all, as long as there aren't huge negative repercussions to your physical store network. At the end of the day, the online business is not going to be 50 percent of your core."

The very fact that, to maintain and grow a healthy customer base, traditional companies are increasingly migrating online while Internet companies are exploring traditional channels suggests that the one channel's domination of the customer relationship to the detriment of the other is an unlikely threat for the majority of companies. And the risks of relying on a single-channel strategy are probably greater than not.

"In my opinion, nobody in the retail space is going to be content with one channel," says Veltre. "When you're one-channel, and the customer expectation is to have the convenience of choosing between a store, a Web site or a catalogue," he concludes, "you're going to lose that customer."

December 10, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (50) | Top of page | Blog Home

Bank branch transformation: The root of a multi-channel success strategy

IBM - Bank branch transformation: The root of a multi-channel success strategy

With the popularization of the Worldwide Web, the conventional wisdom was that banks would begin to lose branches like a willow in a windstorm, opting to build more cost-effective business models around the virtual advantages of the Internet. But customers made it clear they still wanted the human touch, and savvy banks now are transforming branches to play key roles in a more expansive, multi-channel strategy.

Every retail bank has a different idea about branch renewal, though, and the look of new branch blueprints can range all the way from radical to retro-chic. But the underlying business objectives are pretty much the same, and to that extent banks should be guided by some fundamental considerations – the first of which can be summarized by an old Oliver Cromwell quote: “Think it possible, you may be mistaken.”

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Or at least that you could be underestimating how customers may respond. That’s exactly what happened when retail banks saw the Internet as a potential way to offload the significant overhead costs of brick-and-mortar branch offices. There was a growing public fascination with the Web, to be sure. But at about the same time the financial services sector was going through a period of intense consolidation, which generally leads merged banks to conclude that they’re suddenly branch-heavy and in need of some paring. Add to that average high teller turnover rates and it’s not at all hard to imagine that the cost-effective virtues of virtual branches was exactly the story bank managers wanted to hear.

Read on...

It turns out, however, to have been only part of the plot line. The cost benefits of self-service Internet sites aside, customers made it clear there is a value to them in doing business with a live human being. They like being able to talk with somebody, both behind the counter and in the waiting line. Without that comforting personal interaction, there is a palpable loss of a sense of community.

It’s also likely that a four-dimensional interaction with a real live person adds to a customer’s confidence in the finality of the transaction. They actually hand that deposit to someone they can see and hear and feel, and watch as it moves directly into their account. No questions. No doubts. Just an honest-to-goodness paper receipt that will stand up in court. And with the latest focus on the dangers of identity theft, it’s likely as well that branch customers enjoy a sense of assurance in being recognized by name and face.

But equally important, customers have made it clear that they want access to a variety of channels – the Internet for on-the-fly transactions and balance updates, ATMs for a quick hit of cash, telephones for those times when a computer isn’t available, and walk-in branches when nothing but a live human being will do.

By the numbers

In fact, leading U. S. banks are looking to differentiate themselves from competitors by increasing their investments in distribution channels. One survey shows that, if bank executives had additional technology spending money available to them to improve retail bank profitability, they probably would spend 20 percent on new product development, 20 percent to offset product pricing, and a full 60 percent on development of delivery channel solutions. (Source: TowerGroup 2002 Primary Market Research; Datamonitor; IBM Institute for Business Value)

The upshot is that, even with more access to alternative channels, bank customers continue to demand in-person branch service. Market research has shown that 92 percent of U.S. retail banking customers use a physical branch at least once a month, and 50 percent actually prefer branch offices to automated channels. (Source: Business 2.0 magazine, Oct. 2004, “How to Get Tough With Bad Customers.”) That’s why branch transformation needs to be an integral part of an overall retail banking strategy that focuses on sustaining, maintaining and investing in multiple channels, especially for U.S. financial services institutions.

Generally speaking, most banks see branch transformation in terms of a move toward customer self-service, but there is no single model being followed by any one business organization. Washington Mutual, for instance, operates a few Ocasio sites, a relatively radical approach in which a branch office operates essentially like a store. Transaction areas are open and airy, and tellers wander the floor to assist customers with the specific business they want to conduct. Savings accounts? Aisle 6. Certificates of deposit? Aisle 3. Consumers even can buy hats and t-shirts and coffee mugs.

Can we take your order?

Commerce Bank branches set themselves apart by being open every day, including Sundays, and ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann likens his retail bank to financial services fast food. “The difference between ING Direct and the rest of the financial industry is like the difference between take-out food and a sit-down restaurant. The business isn’t based on relationships; it’s based on a commodity product that’s high-volume and low-margin. We need to keep expenses down, which doesn’t work when customers want a lot of empathetic contact.”

ING Direct’s strategy is to target a specific retail banking niche – the 8 percent of customers who don’t stop by a branch office every 30 days or so. But for banks more interested in the 9 out of 10 customers who do, the essential objectives for branch transformation are these:

* Create competitive cost of operation by improving efficiency and effectiveness
* Update, replace and re-engineer processes and systems to more efficiently support staff and customers
* Leverage all retail channels to maximize value to customers and the bank
* Grow revenue by becoming the provider of choice
* Improve service delivery by deploying a more flexible, reliable IT infrastructure.

The idea is to make the most out of a customer while he or she is on the premises, and to accomplish that banks need to have a more complete picture of who that customer is, including their current financial requirements, where they are in their lives right now, and what kinds of services can be presented as sensible follow-up offers. There are no single solutions to the problem, but there are a series of incremental steps banks can and should be taking to develop their own particular models.

For instance, each bank needs to make up-front decisions about functional and operational issues. Are tellers going to major in transactions, or, as part of an effort to imbue a deeper sales and service culture, will they sell, too? Maybe the better approach is to have them do both, and refer services in the bargain. Either choice requires better training.

And what about technology? Is it flexible and resilient enough to support a multi-channel architecture and provide a common and comfortable customer experience? In answering that key question, banks need to consider not only back-office systems, but front-office equipment, cross-enterprise networking infrastructures and the cost and strategic benefits of leading-edge technology such as voice-over IP and customer relationship management software.

Some banks are beginning to move toward fingerprint stamping and retina scanning to enhance security, for example. Others are revamping to incorporate broadcast readers and smart cards that will instantly recognize customers as they walk through the front door, alerting managers and sales persons about not only their physical presence, but their financial and account histories. In the end, functionality, ease-of-use and customer interaction will be determined by the IT infrastructure on which a branch bank is built.

The bottom line in bank branches is this: They’re how a financial institution’s customers see it and talk to it, and to that extent are invaluable assets in terms of capitalizing on customer needs and market opportunities. Transforming them – taking them to the next level as a key part of an overarching, multi-channel business plan designed to differentiate services and raise customer satisfaction – can help banks to reduce operational costs, generate new revenue, reverse employee turnover and position the business for rapid market and customer response.

December 10, 2005 at 01:53 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

Cingular Launches 3G Network: BroadbandConnect Service Offers Ultra-Fast Connections

Cingular MediaRoom - News Releases

CINGULAR LAUNCHES 3G NETWORK

BroadbandConnect service offers ultra-fast connections

ATLANTA – DECEMBER 6 – Cingular Wireless today launched its super-charged wireless network capable of providing customers with high-speed access to information in a world that has gone mobile. Customers can use the third-generation (3G) network to access Cingular BroadbandConnect, which is available to nearly 35 million people in 52 communities throughout the United States. The company will continue to extend the network rapidly next year.

Stan Sigman, Cingular’s president and CEO, announced the service at an investor conference in New York City: “Make no mistake about it: Wireless users want the speed and services they’ve come to expect from their wired connections. And today Cingular is delivering on its promises to provide both the speed and reliability customers need.”

December 10, 2005 at 01:01 PM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Nokia Buys a Mobile E-Mail Strategy

Business 2.0 :: Online Article :: Wireless Report :: Nokia Buys a Mobile E-Mail Strategy

Spending $440 million on Intellisync gets the cell-phone maker into the lucrative corporate e-mail market. Just one question: Did it wait too long to jump in?

By Matthew Maier, December 06, 2005
Nokia's (NOK) move to buy Intellisync, a Silicon Valley-based developer of e-mail software for cell phones, highlights the company's strategic dilemma: Wireless carriers control most of its sales, and it derives little profit from the services its phones deliver. With Intellisync under its wing, Nokia hopes to crack the lucrative market for mobile e-mail, which is forecast to grow from $400 million this year to $2 billion before the end of the decade.

Just selling hardware puts Nokia in a three-way race to the bottom with Motorola (MOT) and Samsung to see who can make the cheapest phones. And while Nokia has marvelously efficient manufacturing operations, the Finnish giant has aspirations that go beyond being the Dell (DELL) of cell phones.

But what did Nokia get for the $440 million it spent on Intellisync? The startup was just one of several companies in the fragmented market for mobile e-mail services, a sector that includes Good Technology, Seven Networks, Visto, and the current leader, Research in Motion -- not to mention Microsoft (MSFT), the world's largest software company. RIM, which started out selling e-mail-only BlackBerry devices, has in recent years moved aggressively into the phone market. A big selling point of RIM's BlackBerry phones is the e-mail software and services that come with them. With Intellisync, Nokia, the world's largest phone maker, plans to sell companies phones, software, and services to link them all. Most important, Nokia, like RIM, will now be able to extract a steady service revenue stream for its clients instead of just relying on selling phones.

On the surface Nokia's timing looks good. RIM is practically synonymous with mobile e-mail, but the Waterloo, Ontario, company is facing a patent lawsuit that could threaten its core product. And delivering e-mail to cell phones is quickly becoming one of the most important services for today's mobile workforce. While the number of users checking corporate e-mail on their phones today is small -- about 7 million -- that figure is expected to explode next year.

But that explosive growth means Nokia has no shortage of competition -- and Microsoft presents the biggest threat. Though it was late to the market, it has a ready-made customer base. Nearly half of all business customers use Microsoft's Exchange software to access their e-mail. E-mail administrators can install Nokia's e-mail software on top of their existing Exchange servers or just stick with Microsoft's own mobile e-mail solution, which is increasingly becoming compatible with a wide range of devices, including ones from Palm and Motorola.

Was Nokia's money put to good use buying Intellisync? That is -- pardon the expression -- a tough call. For a company with $39 billion in revenues, a $440 million acquisition is practically spare change, and the deal gives Nokia a stake in the mobile e-mail market. It will likely have to spend more than that, however, as it retools Intellisync's software and gears up an enterprise sales force. Selling to corporate IT managers is very different from selling to wireless carriers. And providing a service -- especially one like mobile e-mail that users depend on -- requires a different mind-set than engineering a cell phone. We'll have to watch closely to see if Nokia delivers.

December 10, 2005 at 01:00 PM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese - New York Times

By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: December 9, 2005

FUZHOU, China - One of China's newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.

That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies.

With more than 100 million people worldwide logging on every month to play interactive computer games, game companies are already generating revenues of $3.6 billion a year from subscriptions, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer gaming market.

For the Chinese in game-playing factories like these, though, it is not all fun and games. These workers have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres.

As they grind through the games, they accumulate virtual currency that is valuable to game players around the world. The games allow players to trade currency to other players, who can then use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies - many of them here in China - auctioning for real money their powerful figures, called avatars. These ventures join individual gamers who started marketing such virtual weapons and wares a few years ago to help support their hobby.

"I'm selling an account with a level-60 Shaman," says one ad from a player code-named Silver Fire, who uses QQ, the popular Chinese instant messaging service here in China. "If you want to know more details, let's chat on QQ."

This virtual economy is blurring the line between fantasy and reality. A few years ago, online subscribers started competing with other players from around the world. And before long, many casual gamers started asking other people to baby-sit for their accounts, or play while they were away.

That has spawned the creation of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of online gaming factories here in China. By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, toiling away in dark Internet cafes, abandoned warehouses, small offices and private homes.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these "virtual sweatshops."

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

For many online gamers, the point is no longer simply to play. Instead they hunt for the fanciest sword or the most potent charm, or seek a shortcut to the thrill of sparring at the highest level. And all of that is available - for a price.

"What we're seeing here is the emergence of virtual currencies and virtual economies," says Peter Ludlow, a longtime gamer and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "People are making real money here, so these games are becoming like real economies."

The Chinese government estimates that there are 24 million online gamers in China, meaning that nearly one in four Internet users here play online games.

And many online gaming factories have come to resemble the thousands of textile mills and toy factories that have moved here from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world to take advantage of China's vast pool of cheap labor.

"They're exploiting the wage difference between the U.S. and China for unskilled labor," says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the author of "Synthetic Worlds," a study of the economy of online games. "The cost of someone's time is much bigger in America than in China."

But gold farming is controversial. Many hard-core gamers say the factories are distorting the games. What is more, the big gaming companies say the factories are violating the terms of use of the games, which forbid players to sell their virtual goods for real money. They have vowed to crack down on those suspected of being small businesses rather than individual gamers.

"We know that such business exists, and we are against it," says Guolong Jin, a spokesman for N-Sina, a Chinese joint venture with NC Soft, the Korean creator of Lineage, one of the most popular online games. "Playing games should be fun and entertaining. It's not a way to trade and make money."

Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Universal and the creator of World of Warcraft, one of the world's most popular games with more than 4.5 million online subscribers, has also called the trading illegal.

But little has been done to halt the mushrooming black market in virtual goods, many available for sale on eBay, Yahoo and other online sites.

On eBay, for example, 100 grams of World of Warcraft gold is available for $9.99 or two über characters from EverQuest for $35.50. It costs $269 to be transported to Level 60 in Warcraft, and it typically takes 15 days to get the account back at the higher level.

In fact, the trading of virtual property is so lucrative that some big online gaming companies have jumped into the business, creating their own online marketplaces.

Sony Online Entertainment, the creator of EverQuest, a popular medieval war and fantasy game, recently created Station Exchange. Sony calls the site an alternative to "crooked sellers in unsanctioned auctions."

Other start-up companies are also rushing in, acting as international brokers to match buyers and sellers in different countries, and contracting out business to Chinese gold-farming factories.

"We're like a stock exchange. You can buy and sell with us," says Alan Qiu, a founder of the Shanghai-based Ucdao.com. "We farm out the different jobs. Some people say, 'I want to get from Level 1 to 60,' so we find someone to do that."

Now there are factories all over China. In central Henan Province, one factory has 300 computers. At another factory in western Gansu Province, the workers log up to 18 hours a day.

The operators are mostly young men like Luo Gang, a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father to start an Internet cafe that morphed into a gold farm on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China.

Mr. Luo has 23 workers, who each earn about $75 a month.

"If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants," he said, "or go back to help their parents farm the land - or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all."

Here in coastal Fujian Province, several gold farm operators offered access to their underground facilities recently, on the condition that their names not be disclosed because the legal and tax status of some of the operations is in question.

One huge site here in Fuzhou has over 100 computers in a series of large, dark rooms. About 70 players could be seen playing quietly one weekday afternoon, while some players slept by the keyboard.

"We recruit through newspaper ads," said the 30-something owner, whose workers range from 18 to 25 years old. "They all know how to play online games, but they're not willing to do hard labor."

Another operation here has about 40 computers lined up in the basement of an old dilapidated building, all playing the same game. Upstairs were unkempt, closet-size dormitory rooms where several gamers slept on bunk beds; the floors were strewn with hot pots.

The owners concede that the risks are enormous. The global gaming companies regularly shut accounts they suspect are engaged in farming. And the government here is cracking down on Internet addiction now, monitoring more closely how much time each player spends online.

To survive, the factories employ sophisticated gaming strategies. They hide their identities online, hire hackers to seek out new strategies, and create automatic keys to bolster winnings.

But at some point, says Mr. Yu, the Fuzhou factory operator who started out selling computer supplies and now has an army of gamers outside his office here, he knows he will have to move on.

"My ultimate goal is to do Internet-based foreign trade," he says, sitting in a bare office with a solid steel safe under his desk. "Online games are just my first step into the business."

December 10, 2005 at 12:40 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

Knowing the enemy within

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Knowing the enemy within

By Charles Bermant

Special to The Seattle Times

When most of us think of spammers, we conjure up images of a fat guy wearing loud clothes and too many rings, braying away in a voice that annoys the people at the next table in the same way his stock in trade does for his victims.

Or maybe some skinny, pimply kid in pajama bottoms, sending out a million messages from his basement; whooping with joy upon receiving the handful of responses that will keep him in business.

In any case, picture the most reprehensible person imaginable, a miserable soul bent on spreading the gloom as he invades your inbox.

Stereotypes, however, don't always ring true. And at least one spam fighter feels the way to fight spammers is to address them as human beings, and just say no-thank-you.

Blue Security (www.bluesecurity.com) is assembling a do-not-intrude registry, similar in spirit to the do-not-call list that has gained moderate success in the battle against intrusive telephone solicitors.

It requires signing up for the service — which is at present free to consumers — and installing a mail client on your PC. You become part of this now 70,000 strong list that is made available to spammers who will presumably not send you any messages if you are on the list.

The first impression highlights an obvious drawback: Providing a spammer with a list of active e-mail addresses evokes a fox and a henhouse. But Blue Security Chief Executive Eran Reshef said the list is encrypted, preventing its viewing, dissemination or, most important, merging into a database. Instead, a spammer merges the do-not-intrude names into his own list, then erasing those appearing in both places.

"This isn't a magic bullet," he said. "Rather, it is a way to change spam activity in the long term."

The key to success here is recognizing spammers as businessmen driven by the profit motive, rather than the absolute scum of the earth.

Reshef, again: "These people are out to make money. They will respond to requests from people who are not interested in hearing from them. They don't want to go where they are not wanted."

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Reshef's real-world example portrays a merchant who sets up shop in a new location and then blankets the neighborhood with leaflets. The people who take the time to throw out each flier are the same who use e-mail filters. But Reshef's customers band together, go to the merchant and ask him to stop.

I haven't met enough spammers to determine whether this will work, so I should rein in the skepticism.

Reshef has met some of these people. He said about 20 such characters are responsible for all of the world's spam. Some of them are already complying with the Blue Security scheme.

There are a few reasons why I won't join in here. Much of the spam I get is from obvious scam artists and faux Nigerians who don't have a Web site, which is necessary for this to work. And for the time being, Mac users are left out. Finding someone to port the program to the Rest of Us is toward the middle of Reshef's to-do list.

In the meantime, I seek the answer to a more important question: Am I a sexist if I imagine that all spammers are men?

If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at cbermant@seattletimes.com. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

December 10, 2005 at 09:43 AM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (38) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 09, 2005

US Internet users still falling for phishing scams

Finextra: US Internet users still falling for phishing scams

Phishers are getting better at tricking consumers into revealing bank account details, according to study conducted by AOL and the National Cyber Security Alliance, which found that two-thirds of US consumers who had received scam e-mails thought they were from legitimate firms.

According to the research, phishing attacks aimed at identity theft now affect roughly one in four Americans (23%) each month.

Around 70% of consumers who received these phishing e-mails thought they were actually from legitimate companies.

"Phishers are getting better at tricking consumers into revealing their bank account and financial information, and most Americans can't tell the difference between real e-mails and the growing flood of scams that lead to fraud and identity theft." says Tatiana Platt, Senior Vice President and Chief Trust Officer for AOL. "Consumers need to be aware of the risk, and they need to use critical protections like anti-virus software, spyware protection, and a firewall to help protect them from online threats."

Three-quarters (74%) of respondents said they used their computers for sensitive transactions such as banking, stock trading, or reviewing personal medical information. But the study found that 81% of home PCs lack at least one of the three critical protections - updated computer virus software, spyware protection and a secure firewall - necessary to help guard against viruses, spyware, hackers and other threats.

More than half (56%) of respondents either had no anti-virus protection or had not updated it within the last week. Almost half (44%) did not have a properly-configured firewall and over a third (38%) lacked spyware protection. Yet, despite these findings, the large majority of users (83%) believed that they were safe from online threats.

December 9, 2005 at 12:45 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 08, 2005

iPod, other IT products dominate list of popular items this year

Japan Today - News - iPod, other IT products dominate list of popular items this year - Japan's Leading International News Network

Thursday, December 8, 2005 at 07:24 JST
TOKYO — Portable digital audio players including the iPod turned out to be the most popular items in Japan in 2005, while HDD-equipped DVD recorders were close behind in second place, according to results of an Internet consumer survey released Wednesday by Dentsu Inc.

Items related to information technology dominated the top 10 list of the hit products as there were seven of them, including blogs and widescreen flat-panel television sets which came in third and fourth places, Dentsu said.

© 2005 Kyodo News. All rights reserved. No reproduction or republication without written permission.

December 8, 2005 at 12:56 AM in Japan | Permalink | TrackBack (50) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 07, 2005

CircuitCity.com’s fast payoff from 24-minute fulfillment

InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Thursday, November 17, 2005

Circuit City is seeing increased sales and customer traffic in stores thanks to making its new 24/24 in-store pickup guarantee a key component of its advertising strategy. Launched earlier this year, 24/24 guarantees customers that items ordered online will be ready for in-store pickup in 24 minutes or they receive a $24 gift card.

Circuit City began to highlight the service in its ad campaign during the fourth quarter as a way to promote multi-channel shopping, according to Fiona Dias, chief marketing officer for Circuit City. The revenues generated from 24/24 have grown faster than Circuit City anticipated.

“We are very surprised at how fast use of 24/24 has built,” says Dias. “Most multi-channel retailers include the URL for their site at the end of their ads, we decided to play it up in our ads and on our site as a way to drive multi-channel sales. This is our way of saying we make shopping simpler.”

24/24 is expected to give CircuitCity.com an edge during the peak holiday shopping season, a time when many consumers prefer to shop online to avoid in-store crowds, but worry about timely delivery from online retailers.

“Closely integrating the online and in-store channels can advantageously position a retailer in the minds of their customers,” says Geoff Wissman, vice president with consultants Retail Forward.

Dias adds that CircuitCity.com selected the 24-minute fulfillment guarantee because it was seeking a time frame that grabbed people’s attention, a la Lens Crafters’ promise of glasses in 60 minutes or less, and as a play on the Internet’s 24/7 shopping capabilities. “We also wanted to create a guarantee that maybe seemed a little absurd to our competitors, but which we knew we could manage and would make our online shopping experience simpler,” says Dias. “Now we have competitors inquiring how to do it.”

December 7, 2005 at 03:43 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (75) | Top of page | Blog Home

Broadband banking

Finextra: comment - Broadband banking

The finance sector needs to get wise to the demand for information on demand says Jim Sterne, producer of the Emetrics Summit

CBS recently announced the launch of a 24-hour digital news network as part of a major expansion of CBSNews.com. Welcome to Immedia - the shape of things to come.

People want their news right now. News organizations around the world published mobile phone photos from the London Tube after the bombings. Live video online is a forgone conclusion and news is where it makes sense to have it first. This is going to put serious pressure on the news agencies to verify their sources or to lable breaking reports as 'Unverified' just so they can publish immediately.

TV takes too long to do much more than, "We interrupt this programme to tell you that we have no details but reports are coming in that Michael Jackson has been launched and will collide with an asteroid soon. Now back to Coronation Street."

Radio has traditionally been the place for breaking news but they don't go deep. The Web can go fast and deep at the same time due to the lower cost of production. The CBS press release said the new CBSNews.com would include:

* an on-demand, 24-hour news network in the digital broadband space;
* a blog to be called "Public Eye" designed to provide greater openness and transparency into the news gathering process;
* a newly-configured homepage including The EyeBox, an on-page video player showcasing the free broadband video of CBSNews.com including over 25,000 clips - and video yet to be broadcast on the network;
* a commitment by CBS News fully to integrate its personnel and other global newsgathering resources to provide exclusive, original reporting and commentary around the clock.

Calling it a 'news blog' gives the impression that reporters can publish immediately. Interesting and inevitable, but not the end of the story. This isn't just about breaking news.

You can search the Internet for online video through Blinkx.tv, a UK site that is creating an index for keyword and conceptual searches.

This also isn't about just the news. Enid Burns recently reported for ClickZ on Nick at Night's exclusive video content and VH1's VSpot. It won't be long until new shows and old shows are available 24/7. And how about movies?

In a UK first, ISP Tiscali has teamed up with film production company Dogwoof Digital to launch the new film EMR simultaneously in cinemas, on the Internet and on DVD. Can you spell convergence?

I've avoided uttering the convergence word until now. Finally, it seems, the Internet Protocol Network of Networks is going to be the delivery medium of choice. How and where you consume it is up to you. Big screen for movies, medium screen for email and surfing, small screen for snap-shots and phone calls and calendars and no screens for music and audio.

Yes, audio - let's not forget podcasting. USA Today recently reported that, "Podcasts from ESPN, CNN, ABC News and the TV show Queer Eye are among the most popular this week on iTunes, Apple's download site." Podcasts are also working well for radio stations across the UK.

So now that broadband has finally hit the tipping point, we're going to see immediate news and permanent archived entertainment for anytime consumption. Immedia and Permedia.

What does this mean to the world of finance and financial institutions? Two things - both complex and resource intensive. First, your marketing had better become multi-media quickly. The consumer (be it the 'great unwashed' or business-to-business) is going to expect access to information in print, online and via video and there will be no difference between them. I want to see customer testimonials, product reviews, investment news, demonstrations, etc., in video that I can access from your Website.

Second, your marketing had better come with clear expiration dates. Information is no longer tossed out. Yesterday's news you say? Only good for chip paper? That's the paper. The news lives on in online archives. Your client testimonial video is still on a prospective customer's hard drive even though you and the client have had a falling out and they're moving their money.

I'll be addressing these issues at the London Emetrics Summit in May 2006. My point is, we will have to manage the public information about our products and services in a different way from now on. Instantly (Immedia) and for the long haul (Permedia). Once again, times have changed.

Jim Sterne is a consultant and speaker who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, produces the Emetrics Summit (London 3-5 May 06) emetrics.org and is a founding director of the Web Analytics Association.

December 7, 2005 at 02:50 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Distinguishing Start.com From Live.com

Distinguishing Start.com From Live.com

By Mary Jo Foley

When we first heard about Microsoft's Live.com plans a few weeks back, most of us Microsoft watchers equated Microsoft's newly minted Live.com with its Start.com Web aggregator, which is currently in beta test. No one corrected us for doing so. But according to Microsoft blogger Sanaz Ahari, the MSN team doesn't consider the two to be the same. Start.com is more of an incubation tool, while Live.com is the future home of all of the new properties Microsoft is planning to ship under the Windows Live banner, Ahari says. Definitely a subtle distinction, but a difference, nonetheless.

December 7, 2005 at 12:25 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (28) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sun unveils first Niagara servers

Sun unveils first Niagara servers - vnunet.com

New systems target web server market
Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 06 Dec 2005
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Sun Microsystems is expected later today to unveil the first servers that use its new UltraSparc T1 processor, previously codenamed Niagara.

The new servers are a "game changer" for Sun, according to Fred Kohout, vice president of marketing at Sun's Scalable Systems Group.

"We think we are five years ahead of the competition," he told vnunet.com. "There is not another system vendor in the world that can field a platform with this kind of performance, power and space efficiency."

The new servers come in the 1U T1000 and the 2U T2000 and target high throughput systems such as web servers and email servers.

The new T1 processor was officially unveiled last month and features up to eight cores with four threads each. This allows it to act as 32 individual processors. In addition to performance, Sun touted the chip's low power consumption.

Online auction website eBay is among the early customers of the system, along with Air France and EDS.

The new servers target systems running on Intel's Xeon processor. Although the T1 systems could also be used to compete with Sun's Galaxy servers powered by AMD's Opteron processors, Kohout emphasised that both target distinctly different markets.

The AMD systems are designed for compute intensive applications such as large databases and analyses. The T1 is built to quickly perform many relatively easy tasks.

While the T1 itself is a new chip architecture, developers will not need to recompile their applications to benefit from the new multi-threading capabilities.

But applications will get even better performance if they use Sun's new Studio 11 development tools designed to support the chip's multi-threading capabilities.

The servers will only support Sun's Solaris operating system for now. The vendor is inviting developers of other operating systems, including Linux and Windows, to port their software to the new server.

The T2000 is currently shipping. Prospective buyers will have to wait until the first quarter of 2006 to purchase the T1000. Prices start at $2,995 for the T1000 and $7,795 for the T2000.

December 7, 2005 at 12:23 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (47) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 06, 2005

Google: Ten Golden Rules

Google: Ten Golden Rules - Issues 2006 - MSNBC.com

Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it at google.

By Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian
Newsweek
Updated: 11:33 a.m. ET Dec. 2, 2005

Issues 2006 - At google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers." After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that smart businesses will "strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way." Those that succeed will attract the best performers, securing "the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years."

At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is one we take very seriously, because those who don't get it right will be gone. We've drawn on good ideas we've seen elsewhere and come up with a few of our own. What follows are seven key principles we use to make knowledge workers most effective. As in most technology companies, many of our employees are engineers, so we will focus on that particular group, but many of the policies apply to all sorts of knowledge workers.

* Hire by committee. Virtually every person who interviews at Google talks to at least half-a-dozen interviewers, drawn from both management and potential colleagues. Everyone's opinion counts, making the hiring process more fair and pushing standards higher. Yes, it takes longer, but we think it's worth it. If you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring process, you'll get more great people. We started building this positive feedback loop when the company was founded, and it has had a huge payoff.
* Cater to their every need. As Drucker says, the goal is to "strip away everything that gets in their way." We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses—just about anything a hardworking engineer might want. Let's face it: programmers want to program, they don't want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.
* Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. This way, when a programmer needs to confer with a colleague, there is immediate access: no telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a reply. Of course, there are many conference rooms that people can use for detailed discussion so that they don't disturb their office mates. Even the CEO shared an office at Google for several months after he arrived. Sitting next to a knowledgeable employee was an incredibly effective educational experience.
* Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a snippet once a week to his work group describing what he has done in the last week. This gives everyone an easy way to track what everyone else is up to, making it much easier to monitor progress and synchronize work flow.
* Eat your own dog food. Google workers use the company's tools intensively. The most obvious tool is the Web, with an internal Web page for virtually every project and every task. They are all indexed and available to project participants on an as-needed basis. We also make extensive use of other information-management tools, some of which are eventually rolled out as products. For example, one of the reasons for Gmail's success is that it was beta tested within the company for many months. The use of e-mail is critical within the organization, so Gmail had to be tuned to satisfy the needs of some of our most demanding customers—our knowledge workers.
* Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top.
* Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision maker as hero. We adhere to the view that the "many are smarter than the few," and solicit a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions
* Don't be evil. Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.
* Data drive decisions. At Google, almost every decision is based on quantitative analysis. We've built systems to manage information, not only on the Internet at large, but also internally. We have dozens of analysts who plow through the data, analyze performance metrics and plot trends to keep us as up to date as possible. We have a raft of online "dashboards" for every business we work in that provide up-to-the-minute snapshots of where we are.
* Communicate effectively. Every Friday we have an all-hands assembly with announcements, introductions and questions and answers. (Oh, yes, and some food and drink.) This allows management to stay in touch with what our knowledge workers are thinking and vice versa. Google has remarkably broad dissemination of information within the organization and remarkably few serious leaks. Contrary to what some might think, we believe it is the first fact that causes the second: a trusted work force is a loyal work force.

Of course, we're not the only company that follows these practices. Many of them are common around Silicon Valley. And we recognize that our management techniques have to evolve as the company grows. There are several problems that we (and other companies like us) face.

One is "techno arrogance." Engineers are competitive by nature and they have low tolerance for those who aren't as driven or as knowledgeable as they are. But almost all engineering projects are team projects; having a smart but inflexible person on a team can be deadly. If we see a recommendation that says "smartest person I've ever known" combined with "I wouldn't ever want to work with them again," we decline to make them an offer. One reason for extensive peer interviews is to make sure that teams are enthused about the new team member. Many of our best people are terrific role models in terms of team building, and we want to keep it that way.

A related problem is the not-invented-here syndrome. A good engineer is always convinced that he can build a better system than the existing ones, leading to the refrain "Don't buy it, build it." Well, they may be right, but we have to focus on those projects with the biggest payoff. Sometimes this means going outside the company for products and services.

Another issue that we will face in the coming years is the maturation of the company, the industry and our work force. We, along with other firms in this industry, are in a rapid growth stage now, but that won't go on forever. Some of our new workers are fresh out of college; others have families and extensive job experience. Their interests and needs are different. We need to provide benefits and a work environment that will be attractive to all ages.

A final issue is making sure that as Google grows, communication procedures keep pace with our increasing scale. The Friday meetings are great for the Mountain View team, but Google is now a global organization.

We have focused on managing creativity and innovation, but that's not the only thing that matters at Google. We also have to manage day-to-day operations, and it's not an easy task. We are building technology infrastructure that is dramatically larger, more complex and more demanding than anything that has been built in history. Those who plan, implement and maintain these systems, which are growing to meet a constantly rising set of demands, have to have strong incentives, too. At Google, operations are not just an afterthought: they are critical to the company's success, and we want to have just as much effort and creativity in this domain as in new product development.

Schmidt is CEO of Google. Varian is a Berkeley professor and consultant with Google.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

December 6, 2005 at 09:15 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 05, 2005

Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart

By Robert X. Cringely

Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.

Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to any of the company's traditional strengths.

Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to any of the company's traditional strengths.

The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings.

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.

And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

All this is based, of course, on Google's proven network and hardware expertise. Have you seen Google's Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites) for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not.

And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.

But that doesn't mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage.

Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

And yet next week I'll take it one more step.

December 5, 2005 at 11:48 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Japanese diet lets you live longer and look younger, says Melissa Whitworth

Telegraph | Expat | The secret of eternal youth

If you need inspiration to change your diet, spending a couple of hours with Naomi Moriyama should do the trick. She has a slight (but not too skinny) frame, perfect skin, lots of energy and gleaming hair. She looks 20 years younger than her real age of 45. When buying alcohol, she is often asked for ID, and is regularly quizzed on which university she attends. She is a living example of what most women her age dream of.

Yet Moriyama is no different from millions of other Japanese women who grew up eating their mothers' traditional, home-cooked food. As a result of this diet, which is heavy on fresh vegetables, brown rice, soy and delicately cooked fish, Japan has the lowest rate of obesity in the developed world - just three per cent for men and women, compared with 23 per cent for women in Britain and 34 per cent for American women.

Japanese people also have the highest life expectancy - 85 years for women, 78 for men - and the lowest rates of heart disease and other life-threatening illnesses. In short, Japanese people, especially women, are the healthiest in the world.

"We really focus on fresh, enjoyable, healthy food," Moriyama says when we meet in New York. "Women demand it. We are so used to having delicious food. It is not just for gourmets - it's for everybody."

Inspired by the dishes that her mother, Chizuko, prepares in her tiny kitchen in Tokyo, Moriyama wrote a memoir about the food she ate growing up. She and her American husband, William Doyle, came up with the title Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat - a nod to Mireille Guiliano's bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat.

Doyle, 48, co-authored the book. "The original title was My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen," he explains. "But we were so startled by the numbers we came across during our research that we changed it."

Britain's numbers are more troubling. Levels of obesity in England have tripled since 1980, thanks to the West's reliance on fast and over-processed food, and our habit of eating little or no fresh fruit or vegetables.

Moriyama found this out for herself when she went to America to study at the University of Illinois. She immediately gained 25lb from a diet of pizza, burgers and pancakes.

'I just busted out of my clothes," she says. "It was not only the food, but the quantities, too. I could not believe it, but I was eating it. When I went back to Japan, to my mum's kitchen, I lost it all. I didn't even have to think about it.

"In Japan, there is an emphasis on presentation - modest portions, using beautiful, small plates. A typical Japanese meal has four or five different dishes, instead the food being combined on a big plate. As my mum says, preparing a meal is like painting a picture. By serving modest portions, you slow down. You might go back for seconds or thirds, but you are pacing yourself."

When most people think of Japanese food, they think of sushi. Sushi restaurants have indeed caught on in Britain, but Moriyama explains that raw fish is a very small part of the Japanese cuisine. "Sushi is just one of the many dishes we have," she insists. The other 95 per cent is the kind of food she writes about in her book.

A typical Japanese supper, which anyone in Britain could easily prepare tonight, might consist of a selection of fresh, seasonal vegetables and tofu, chopped and stir-fried in rapeseed oil at a high heat, accompanied by a bowl of brown rice and a small piece of fresh or tinned Alaskan salmon, and followed by a cup of green tea.
'Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat'

One of the book's main points is that we should all eat more vegetables. "In traditional Japanese dishes," says Moriyama, "vegetables are steamed or cooked in broth. They are delicious. Much of the cooking is very light, which brings out the flavours and the colours of the food."

"Major studies show that Japanese longevity is not in the genes," says Doyle. "Japanese people living in America get just as fat and unhealthy as the rest of us. Naomi and I play a game walking the streets of New York. When we see a Japanese family, we say, 'Who's the mother and who's the daughter?' "

'Secrets from my mother's Tokyo kitchen'

The Japanese diet is based on fish, soy, rice, vegetable and fruit Japanese people eat more than twice as much fish per capita than Westerners and are crazy about fresh vegetables such as leafy greens, daikon radish and eggplant. A study of 200 elderly Japanese women found that they ate more than 100 different foods each week, compared with just 30 in a typical Western diet.

Japanese cooking is super-light and ultra-gentle

Instead of roasting or baking, Japanese women usually steam, pan-grill, sauté, simmer or stir-fry quickly over a high heat. These methods save more of the food's nutrients. They never smother food in heavy cream or butter-based sauces.

The Japanese eat rice instead of bread with every meal

Bread consumption is far lower in Japan than it is in the West, and brown rice is the mainstay of the diet. This is very high in fibre and keeps you feeling full.

Japanese women are the princesses of the power breakfast

They don't eat eggs, bacon, sugary cereals, muffins or bread for breakfast. A typical home-cooked breakfast would be a cup of green tea, steamed rice, miso soup with tofu, some seaweed, a small omelette and a piece of grilled salmon. This will keep them going all day.

Japanese women are crazy about pudding

They love puddings and snacks, but they eat them less often and in much smaller portions. Japanese people eat a quarter of the amount of sugary products that Westerners do.
# 'Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat' by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle (Vermillion) will be available on Jan 5 for £11 + £1.25 p&p. To order now call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 428 4112

December 5, 2005 at 11:38 AM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (92) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 04, 2005

The future ends at the firewall

FT.com / Business life - The future ends at the firewall

By Richard Waters
Published: December 1 2005 18:36 | Last updated: December 1 2005 18:36

www internet genericBe warned: for many office workers, life in the internet age is about to get much more frustrating.

New services from companies such as Google and Skype and the spread of domestic broadband access have created a new generation of digitally aware consumers. Having access to free video conferencing, or being able to examine the world in exquisite detail on a programme such as Google Earth, has awakened home computer users to the expanding possibilities of life on the web.

When they get to work, however, these same computer users are starting to find that many of the digital goodies they have come to expect are out of reach. That is more than just a frustration for individual workers: as more technology innovation shifts to the web, it could slow the pace at which many new technologies are adopted and prevent companies from reaping the full productivity benefits.

The new reliance on personal experimentation on the internet as a way to spread new technology at work was summed up recently by Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer at Microsoft. In a landmark memo to Microsoft staff, intended to accelerate the software company’s shift to the web, he outlined a new approach to technology adoption that has little to do with the efforts of the corporate IT department.

“[Technology] products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word of mouth,” he wrote. “This is not just true of consumer products: even enterprise products now more often than not enter an organisation through the internet-based research and trial of a business unit that understands a product’s value.”

Yet just as a new wave of internet-based technology breaks, many workers are no longer being given a chance to try it out in this way. Slow corporate networks, the fear of exposure to computer viruses and concerns about the escalating costs of maintaining large numbers of PCs have led many companies instead to clamp down on personal experimentation.

“In a lot of companies, the desktop is locked down – only the IT department has access to it,” says Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s enterprise division. “There’s no question that consumer technology is racing ahead at a breakneck pace. Enterprise technology kind of slogs along; the adoption rates are much slower.”

The chasm that is starting to open between the experience of using computers at home and in the office is based on two things. One is the availability of bandwidth: most companies cannot afford to meet the soaring expectations of their workers. The other is the ability to try out new software applications and services that live on the web.

When it comes to bandwidth, even the technology professionals are starting to feel the frustration. John Vogt-Nilsen, who runs the communications network at Orbital Sciences, a US maker of rockets, says he has an internet connection at home that runs at 10 megabits per second; by comparison, the capacity of the outbound internet connection for his company’s 1,800 employees amounts to only 6 mbps.

As more people experience high bandwidth at home, the level of frustration at the office will rise, he predicts. “There is going to be a huge phenomenon of people demanding bandwidth [at work]: I can’t satisfy that,” he says.

Data-intensive internet audio and video account for much of the new craving for bandwidth, says Bobby LaRocca, director of information security for the Palm Beach school district in Florida. “Streaming radio and TV are killing our bandwidth,” he says.

Blocking access to internet-based entertainment services is one way to conserve network capacity. Palm Beach, for instance, has blocked the internet radio services that were starting to consume an inordinate amount of the network, says Mr LaRocca.

But other bandwidth- hungry applications that have a more direct bearing on office or school life are also starting to proliferate. The school district has just increased the capacity of its network from 45 mbps to 256 mbps, but even an increase of that scale may not be enough to cope with the new video conferencing service that the district wants to run over its network. “It’s probably going to hit [the new bandwidth], and hit it good,” says Mr LaRocca.

The growing reliance on network-based applications raises a second question: how easily can workers get access to potentially productivity-enhancing technology tools that lie beyond their company’s firewall?

This is more than just a mild annoyance – the rate at which office workers adopt many new technologies could be at risk.

“A lot of the innovations of the last five years have started out among rogue groups of [office] users and then become mainstream,” says John Kish, chief executive officer of Wyse, which makes stripped-down desktop computers designed for use with applications that reside on the network.

Workers who try out new technologies for themselves, without the official approval of the IT department, have often proved far more adept at finding and employing services that bring direct benefits to their work.

What happens when corporate firewalls block this grassroots approach to technology adoption?

Enlightened companies are starting to loosen the controls on their workers, claims Mr Girouard at Google. “Gradually, organisations are waking up to the fact that they need to give their employees access to more productivity-enhancing technology – often that just means getting out of the way,” he says.

Yet the trend in most corporate IT departments is still moving in the opposite direction. The threat from computer viruses has led most big companies to block their workers’ ability to download software from the internet, restricting their access to new services.

New ways of delivering internet services are helping to limit this problem, says Mr Girouard. Using a new approach to designing internet services, known as Ajax, companies such as Google have been able to enhance the experience of using a web browser. That has meant that workers can get access to more advanced services without needing to download software on to their own machine.

However, that has not done much to liberate the average office drone suffering from technology lock-down. According to Mr Kish at Wyse, this is simply the new reality of office life. Deciding for yourself what technology would help you work more effectively may seem appealing, but it no longer fits with the need to control IT more closely. “It is being outweighed by the realities in front of the business,” he says.

The message, for today’s increasingly frustrated office workers: just get used to it.

POWER FAILURES: HOW WORKERS GAINED AND LOST COMPUTER CONTROL

Until recently, workers had been enjoying increasing influence over the technology they use at work.

THE MILESTONES

Minicomputers. The arrival of departmental computers broke the IT department’s stranglehold through the mainframe and ushered in an age of experimentation.

Spreadsheets. Desktop personal computers accelerated the demystification of office technology and gave many managers their first taste of hands-on computing. Spreadsheets were among the first tools to be taken up enthusiastically, enabling managers to model financial information for themselves.

Personal digital assistants. Palm, Psion and other personal organisers allowed workers to bring their own technology tools to work. When they tried to “synch” these devices with data on office PCs, the line between personal and office technology use started to blur.

Instant messaging. Communication tools have become the new battleground between workers and the IT department. Instant messaging, web-based e-mail and now online video conferencing have been taken up by millions of consumers. But at work, many find themselves limited to using a corporate e-mail account and a telephone.

“Blaster” worm. The fast- spreading threat, in August 2003, followed a series of other virus and worm attacks, leading IT departments to reimpose control. It signalled the end of the computing free-for-all.

December 4, 2005 at 11:07 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (54) | Top of page | Blog Home

Branson plots £4.5bn cable deal to create media giant

Telegraph | Money | Branson plots £4.5bn cable deal to create media giant

By Andrew Murray-Watson (Filed: 04/12/2005)

Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur, is set to transform the British TV and telecoms landscapes by merging Virgin Mobile with NTL, the cable company. The move will create an entertainment and communications giant worth £4.5bn and with more than 9m customers.

The deal will see Branson swap his 72 per cent holding in Virgin Mobile for a 14 per cent stake in the enlarged cable and mobile group. He will be the largest single shareholder in the new company.

NTL will be rebranded Virgin following the deal. The transaction, which amounts to a reverse takeover, will extend Branson's business empire into the sitting rooms of an additional 5m British homes.

The new Virgin media and entertainment group will also have 2.5m broadband internet customers, 4.3m fixed-line telephony accounts, more than 5m mobile phone customers and revenues in excess of £4bn.

It will be a major force in the pay-TV market and pose a strategic threat to the dominance of British Sky Broadcasting, headed by James Murdoch and 37 per cent owned by News Corporation, the global media group controlled by his father, Rupert Murdoch. News International, a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp, owns the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of The World newspapers.

One banker said yesterday: "James Murdoch is going to choke on his muesli when he hears about this one. It's going to be the battle of the brands - Virgin versus Sky."

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that Simon Duffy, the chief executive of NTL, first approached Branson nine months ago. Secret talks between the two sides have been continuing since then. They culminated on Friday at a hotel in Hampshire where T-Mobile, the German mobile group that carries Virgin Mobile calls on its network, was informed of the deal.

Virgin Mobile is expected to make an announcement to the stock market tomorrow confirming that it has received a takeover approach. But with Branson backing the deal, it looks certain to go ahead.

NTL will then begin the process of winning support for the takeover from the shareholders who own the 28 per cent of Virgin Mobile that is publicly traded.

It is believed that the cable company, which is listed on Nasdaq in the US, will make an offer for Virgin Mobile's listed shares at a premium to their closing price on Friday of 311p. The deal between Branson and NTL will need support from Virgin Mobile's board and Tom Alexander, the chief executive, in order to proceed.

Alexander was informed of the existence of talks between Branson and NTL only on Friday.

The coming together of Virgin Mobile and NTL, which is subject to the cable company's completing its £3.4bn merger with Telewest, will create the first company in the UK with the ability to offer a "quadruple play" package of mobile, fixed-line, TV and broadband services.

Customers will be able to cherry pick which services they want and will receive a single bill even if they choose to subscribe to all four. The enlarged group will also be able to offer its TV content on mobile phones.

BSkyB, following its £211m acquisition of Easynet, will be able to offer only a triple play of fixed-line telephony, broadband and pay-TV services.

Bankers in London will be kicking themselves at being largely excluded from the deal. Branson has relied on his own in-house corporate finance team for advice and NTL has been advised by Goldman Sachs in New York.

Branson is also determined that the new Virgin TV business will snatch Premiership football rights from Sky when they come up for auction next year. It could also compete in the bidding for other content such as movies and downloads.

The enhanced financial firepower of the enlarged cable group will alarm Sky, which is set to lose its monopoly on broadcasting live Premiership football following a European Commission ruling expected early next year. The commission proposes to break Premiership rights up into six blocks of matches, with no broadcaster allowed to win all six.

Duffy will remain as chief executive of the new Virgin group. It is believed Branson is optimistic that Alexander can also be found a role.

December 4, 2005 at 02:37 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

December 03, 2005

Bye Bye BlackBerry?

Bye Bye BlackBerry? - New York Times

By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA, Dec. 2 - What if your BlackBerry screen went dark?

To executives like Douglas M. Steenland of Northwest Airlines, the idea of doing business without a BlackBerry is about as appealing as reverting to rotary dial phones and Telex machines.

"It's the proverbial blessing and curse," Mr. Steenland said of his BlackBerry, which sends e-mail messages wirelessly. "It's a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It's a curse because there's no escape."

"It's the proverbial blessing and curse," Mr. Steenland said of his BlackBerry, which sends e-mail messages wirelessly. "It's a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It's a curse because there's no escape."

That is why there was so much anxiety throughout corporate America over this week's news that a long-running patent infringement battle between the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion, and NTP, a tiny patent holding company, might cause a service shutdown, perhaps within a month.

Indeed, the prospect of life without BlackBerries is so frightening to Northwest - a heavy user if ever there was one - that the airline immediately demanded a conference call with R.I.M. executives and one is scheduled for Tuesday.

"Everybody here hopes that somebody else will fix the problem," said Andrea F. Newman, Northwest's senior vice president for government relations. "But no one really knows what the problem is or what it will take to fix it."

R.I.M., which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, promises it has a solution that will keep its beloved BlackBerries humming even in the face of an injunction. While most analysts view the prospects of a shutdown as unlikely, they have little faith in the proposed solution, which has potential legal pitfalls of its own. What's more, the history of the struggle between the companies means that no outcome is certain. (R.I.M. declined to comment.)

In an interview early this year and more recently at an investors' conference in New York, James L. Balsillie, the chairman and co-chief executive, said that the company had developed a new software technology that did not infringe on NTP's patents and would provide a way to escape any injunction.

R.I.M. has offered little additional information about its new system other than to say that switching over to it would not require subscribers to acquire new devices or to alter their current units.

"On this subject they seem to have an attitude that they wish that people would stop talking about it," said Kenneth E. Hyers, a wireless research analyst with ABI Research who is based in Raleigh, N.C. The company briefed Mr. Hyers this week, he said, and indicated only in broad terms that the software modifications would be made at a network level.

"That begs the question, If they've been sitting on this all this time why haven't they implemented it?" he said. "Their answer is that this is a major network upgrade and nobody wants to mess with the network if they don't have to."

That, Mr. Hyers added, suggests that installing the software will not be as easy as R.I.M. suggested.

While the change, if it is made, will not require any action by subscribers, it's not clear if it will alter how the BlackBerry e-mail service operates.

Mr. Balsillie has said that the new system has been tested with focus groups but he offered no details.

Any changes to the experience of users, said Avi Greengart, the principal mobile devices analyst at Current Analysis in Sterling, Va., could undermine a chief reason for BlackBerry's success. There are 3.65 million BlackBerry users worldwide.

"You now have a very nice, seamless e-mail experience with BlackBerry," Mr. Greengart said. "If you want to do just voice and e-mail, it's hard to beat a BlackBerry."

There is one party who says he knows the details of the change but who also has a vested interest in the case. Donald E. Stout, the patent lawyer who is a co-founder of NTP of Arlington, Va., said R.I.M. showed him its alternative system.

While he formally agreed not to disclose its details, Mr. Stout said that R.I.M.'s alterative is not invisible to users. "It would differentiate their e-mail in a manner that there is a risk from the end-user standpoint that it takes away some of the things I like about the BlackBerry service," Mr. Stout said on Friday.

He acknowledged that R.I.M. might have since altered its software in a way that avoids those problems.

Mr. Stout said that he doubted very much that R.I.M. had found a way around his company's patents.

"That's balderdash," he said. "They're just trying to keep the ball up in the air."

If NTP wins an injunction to end BlackBerry service and R.I.M. keeps BlackBerry service operating through the new software, Mr. Stout said his company would ask for an immediate judicial review of the changes.

If that hearing finds R.I.M. is still infringing on NTP's patents, Mr. Stout said NTP would ask that R.I.M. and every wireless carrier in the United States offering BlackBerry service be cited for contempt.

The dispute dates to the beginning of the decade when R.I.M. was still a relatively small company. Mr. Stout said NTP believed that R.I.M.'s system infringed on broad patents given to NTP's co-founder, Thomas J. Campana Jr., an engineer who is deceased, for a primitive wireless e-mail system he devised as a subcontractor during the 1980's at a company called Telefind.

In the lawsuit that followed R.I.M.'s initial rebuff of NTP, a jury in Richmond, Va., found in NTP's favor. That decision, largely upheld on appeal, required R.I.M. to pay a royalty that would have generated about $240 million to date.

In March, the two companies announced that R.I.M. would pay NTP $450 million to license its patents. But that deal collapsed over final terms.

Although NTP is now asking a federal court in Virginia to block BlackBerry service to everyone in the United States except government and aid agency account holders, most analysts say that the Canadian company can, and should, still settle out of court. The estimated price tag for that, however, is now pegged at $700 million to $1.5 billion. While such a settlement is large for a patent case, R.I.M. is estimated to have at least $1.8 billion in cash.

When an injunction would arrive is not clear. But Mr. Stout, in a view shared by others, expects that a ruling could come as soon as the end of this month or by mid-January at the latest. It is possible that R.I.M. may then be given a period, perhaps of several weeks, to shut down.

R.I.M. still has other legal options. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is reviewing eight of NTP's patents and has issued preliminary rulings against the company in several cases. But final rulings are unlikely to come for months and a two-part appeal process could extend the review for years. In any case, NTP needs only a single patent upheld to gain an injunction.

In addition, R.I.M. is preparing an appeal to the Supreme Court, although even it acknowledges that the court rarely hears patent appeals.

Even if the court accepts R.I.M.'s appeal, which hinges on the fact that its software resides on servers based in Canada where NTP does not hold patents, any Supreme Court decision is unlikely to come swiftly.

So far there has been little apparent impact on BlackBerry sales. Mr. Greengart at Current Analysis said that most BlackBerry purchases in the United States are made by corporate information technology departments that would be reluctant to change to alternative hand-held units from Palm, Nokia and Samsung, or move to wireless e-mail software from Good Technology and SEVEN because of the cost and the bother.

As well, he added, many corporations prefer BlackBerry because its software offers a high level of security and its devices cannot be used by employees for non-work-related tasks like listening to downloaded music.

As for Mr. Stout, he has no apologies for BlackBerry owners who may be cut off by his company's request for a shutdown or R.I.M. investors who will probably see their shares sink if the company loses a market that provides about 70 percent of its revenue.

Shares of R.I.M. closed at $64.50, down 52 cents.

"If this goes as far as an injunction, I won't feel sorry for them," Mr. Stout said. "No BlackBerry customer can say that NTP didn't offer a license. If R.I.M. turns that down, they have no one to blame but themselves for the consequences. BlackBerry users should tell R.I.M. to stop fooling around with their service and take the license."

December 3, 2005 at 06:25 PM in Corporate Blogging | Permalink | TrackBack (54) | Top of page | Blog Home

Wells Fargo ditches OneLook account aggregation service

Finextra: Wells Fargo ditches OneLook account aggregation service

US bank Wells Fargo is scrapping its free account aggregation service OneLook early next year due to poor customer uptake.
The bank launched OneLook in March 2001 to provide its online banking customers with single sign-on access to balances across multiple financial institutions.

Although uptake of the system was good in the first two years, only a small number of customers carried on using the service on a regular basis. As a result Well Fargo says the service will be discontinued in February next year.

Earlier this year Citigroup also abandoned its account aggregation service, called My Accounts, due to low customer enrollment. Citigroup spokesman Mark Rodgers told Reuters reporters that the bank had no current plans to reintroduce the service.

Increasing concerns over online fraud are thought to have led to customers abandoning some aggregation services, especially as to use the system customers have to provide user IDs and passwords for all accounts - including those from other institutions - to their bank.

The introduction of two-factor authentication in the US next year is also expected to impact negatively on the use of aggregation by online banking customers. A report released by Forrester Research in June this year predicted that the introduction of two-factor authnetication would be "the death knell" of account aggregation services as they are currently implemented.

December 3, 2005 at 03:35 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

The MySpace Generation

The MySpace Generation

They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing

podcast
COVER STORY PODCAST

The Toadies broke up. It was four years ago, when Amanda Adams was 16. She drove into Dallas from suburban Plano, Tex., on a school night to hear the final two-hour set of the local rock band, which had gone national with a hit 1995 album. "Tears were streaming down my face," she recalls, a slight Texas lilt to her voice. During the long summer that followed, Adams turned to the Web in search of solace, plugging the lead singer's name into Google repeatedly until finally his new band popped up. She found it on Buzz-Oven.com, a social networking Web site for Dallas teens.

Adams jumped onto the Buzz-Oven network, posting an online self-portrait (dark hair tied back, tongue out, goofy eyes for the cam) and listing her favorite music so she could connect with other Toadies fans. Soon she was heading off to biweekly meetings at Buzz-Oven's airy loft in downtown Dallas and helping other "Buzzers" judge their favorite groups in marathon battle-of-the-bands sessions. (Buzz-0ven.com promotes the winners.) At her school, Frisco High -- and at malls and concerts -- she passed out free Buzz-Oven sampler CDs plastered with a large logo from Coca-Cola Inc., () which backs the site in the hope of reaching more teens on their home turf. Adams also brought dozens of friends to the concerts Buzz-Oven sponsored every few months. "It was cool, something I could brag about," says Adams, now 20 and still an active Buzzer.

Now that Adams is a junior at the University of North Texas at Denton, she's online more than ever. It's 7 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and she has just sweated her way through an online quiz for her advertising management class. (The quiz was "totally out of control," write classmates on a school message board minutes later.) She checks a friend's blog entry on MySpace.com to find out where a party will be that night. Then she starts an Instant Messenger (IM) conversation about the evening's plans with a few pals.

KIDS, BANDS, COCA-COLA
At the same time, her boyfriend IMs her a retail store link to see a new PC he just bought, and she starts chatting with him. She's also postering for the next Buzz-Oven concert by tacking the flier on various friends' MySpace profiles, and she's updating her own blog on Xanga.com, another social network she uses mostly to post photos. The TV is set to TBS, which plays a steady stream of reruns like Friends and Seinfeld -- Adams has a TV in her bedroom as well as in the living room -- but she keeps the volume turned down so she can listen to iTunes over her computer speakers. Simultaneously, she's chatting with dorm mate Carrie Clark, 20, who's doing pretty much the same thing from a laptop on her bed.

You have just entered the world of what you might call Generation @. Being online, being a Buzzer, is a way of life for Adams and 3,000-odd Dallas-area youth, just as it is for millions of young Americans across the country. And increasingly, social networks are their medium. As the first cohort to grow up fully wired and technologically fluent, today's teens and twentysomethings are flocking to Web sites like Buzz-Oven as a way to establish their social identities. Here you can get a fast pass to the hip music scene, which carries a hefty amount of social currency offline. It's where you go when you need a friend to nurse you through a breakup, a mentor to tutor you on your calculus homework, an address for the party everyone is going to. For a giant brand like Coke, these networks also offer a direct pipeline to the thirsty but fickle youth market.

Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions also hang out at other up-and-coming networks such as Facebook.com, which connects college students, and Xanga.com, an agglomeration of shared blogs. A second tier of some 300 smaller sites, such as Buzz-Oven, Classface.com, and Photobucket.com, operate under -- and often inside or next to -- the larger ones.

Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they're already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions. In fact, today's young generation largely ignores the difference. Most adults see the Web as a supplement to their daily lives. They tap into information, buy books or send flowers, exchange apartments, or link up with others who share passions for dogs, say, or opera. But for the most part, their social lives remain rooted in the traditional phone call and face-to-face interaction.

The MySpace generation, by contrast, lives comfortably in both worlds at once. Increasingly, America's middle- and upper-class youth use social networks as virtual community centers, a place to go and sit for a while (sometimes hours). While older folks come and go for a task, Adams and her social circle are just as likely to socialize online as off. This is partly a function of how much more comfortable young people are on the Web: Fully 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, vs. two-thirds of adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Teens also use many forms of media simultaneously. Fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds average nearly 6 1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Net, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey. A quarter of that time, they're multitasking. The biggest increase: computer use for activities such as social networking, which has soared nearly threefold since 2000, to 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on average.

Aside from annoying side effects like hyperdistractibility, there are some real perils with underage teens and their open-book online lives. In a few recent cases, online predators have led kids into dangerous, real-life situations, and parents' eyes are being opened to their kids' new world.

ONE-HIT WONDERS
Meanwhile, the phenomenon of these exploding networks has companies clamoring to be a part of the new social landscape. News Corp. () Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has spent $1.3 billion on Web acquisitions so far to better reach this coveted demographic -- $580 million alone for the July purchase of MySpace parent Intermix Media. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures are pouring millions into Facebook and other social networks. What's not yet clear is whether this is a dot-com era replay, with established companies and investors sinking huge sums into fast-growth startups with no viable business models. Facebook, barely a year old and run by a 21-year-old student on leave from Harvard, has a staff of 50 and venture capital -- but no profits.

Still, consumer companies such as Coke, Apple Computer (), and Procter & Gamble () are making a relatively low-cost bet by experimenting with networks to launch products and to embed their brands in the minds of hard-to-reach teens. So far, no solid format has emerged, partly because youth networks are difficult for companies to tap into. They're also easy to fall out of favor with: While Coke, Sony () Pictures Digital, and Apple have succeeded with MySpace, Buzz-Oven, and other sites, P&G's attempt to create an independent network around a body spray, for one, has faltered so far.

Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year's peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline -- if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages "person-to-person, which is more credible," says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them. To understand how such networks get started, share a blue-cheese burger at the Meridian Room, a dive bar in downtown Dallas, with Buzz-Oven founder Aden Holt. At 6 feet 9 inches, with one blue eye, one brown one, and a shock of shaggy red hair, Holt is a sort of public figure in the local music scene. He started a record label his senior year at college and soon turned his avocation into a career as a music promoter, putting out 27 CDs in the decade that followed.

In 2000, as Internet access spread, Holt cooked up Buzz-Oven as a new way to market concerts. His business plan was simple. First, he would produce sample CDs of local bands. Dedicated Buzzers like Adams would do the volunteer marketing, giving out the CDs for free, chatting up the concerts online, and slapping up posters and stickers in school bathrooms, local music stores, and on telephone poles. Then Holt would get the bands to put on a live concert, charging them $10 for every fan he turned out. But to make the idea work, Holt needed capital to produce the free CDs. One of his bands had recently done a show sponsored by Coke, and after asking around, he found the marketer's company's Dallas sales office. He called for an appointment. And then he called again. And again.

Coke's people didn't get back to him for weeks, and then he was offered only a brief appointment. With plenty of time to practice his sales pitch, Holt spit out his idea in one breath: Marketing through social networks was still an experiment, but it was worth a small investment to try reaching teens through virtual word of mouth. Coke rep Julie Bowyer thought the idea had promise. Besides, Holt's request was tiny compared with the millions Coke regularly sinks into campaigns. So she wrote him a check on the spot.

DEEP CONNECTIONS
By the time Ben Lawson became head of Coke's Dallas sales office in 2001, Buzz-Oven had mushroomed into a nexus that allowed hundreds of Dallas-area teens to talk to one another and socialize, online and off. A middle-aged father of two teens himself, Lawson spent a good deal of time poring over data about how best to reach youth like Adams. He knew what buzzer Mike Ziemer, 20, so clearly articulates: "Kids don't buy stuff because they see a magazine ad. They buy stuff because other kids tell them to."

What Lawson really likes about Buzz-Oven is how deeply it weaves into teens' lives. Sure, the network reaches only a small niche. But Buzzers have created an authentic community, and Coke has been welcomed as part of the group. At a recent dinner, founder Holt asked a few Buzzers their opinions about the company. "I don't know if they care about the music or they just want their name on it, but knowing they're involved helps," says Michael Henry, 19. "I know they care; they think what we're doing is cool," says Michele Barr, 21. Adds Adams: "They let us do our thing. They don't censor what we do."

Words to live by for a marketer, figures Lawson, particularly since Coke pays Buzz-Oven less than $70,000 a year. In late October, Holt signed a new contract with Coke to help him launch Buzz-Oven Austin in February. The amount is confidential, but he says it's enough for 10,000 CDs, three to four months of street promotions, and 50,000 fliers, plus some radio and print ads and a Web site promotion. Meanwhile, Buzz-Oven is building relations with other brands such as the Dallas Observer newspaper and McDonald's () Chipotle restaurants, which kicks in free food for Buzzer volunteers who promote the shows. Profits from ticket sales are small but growing, says Holt.

Not so long ago, behemoth MySpace was this tiny. Tom Anderson, a Santa Monica (Calif.) musician with a film degree, partnered with former Xdrive Inc. marketer Chris DeWolfe to create a Web site where musicians could post their music and fans could chat about it. Anderson knew music and film; De Wolfe knew the Internet business. Anderson cajoled Hollywood friends -- musicians, models, actors -- to join his online community, and soon the news spread. A year later, everyone from Hollywood teen queen Hilary Duff to Plano (Tex.) teen queen Adams has an account.

It's becoming a phenomenon unto itself. With 20 million of its members logging on in October, MySpace now draws so much traffic that it accounted for 10% of all advertisements viewed online in the month. This is all the more amazing because MySpace doesn't allow those ubiquitous pop-up ads that block your view, much less spyware, which monitors what you watch and infuses it with pop-ups. In fact, the advertising can be so subtle that kids don't distinguish it from content. "It's what our users want," says Anderson.

As MySpace has exploded, Anderson has struggled to maintain the intimate atmosphere that lends social networks their authenticity. When new users join, Tom becomes their first friend and invites them to send him a message. When they do, they hear right back, from him or from the one-quarter of MySpace's 165 staffers who handle customer service. Ask Adams what she thinks of MySpace's recent acquisition by News Corp., and she replies that she doesn't blame "Tom" for selling, she would have done the same thing. She's talking about Anderson, but it's hard to tell at first because she refers to him so casually, as if he were someone she has known for years.

That's why Murdoch has vowed not to wrest creative control from Anderson and DeWolfe. Instead News Corp.'s resources will help them nourish new MySpace dreams. Earlier this month they launched a record label. In the next few months, the duo says, they will launch a movie production unit and a satellite radio station. By March they hope to venture into wireless technology, perhaps even starting a wireless company to compete with Virgin Mobile or Sprint Nextel's Boost. Says DeWolfe: "We want to be a lifestyle brand."

It's proof that a network -- and its advertising -- can take off if it gives kids something they badly want. Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noticed that the college students who make up most of his 9.5 million members were starting groups with names like Apple Students, where they swapped information about how to use their Macs. So he asked Apple if it wanted to form an official group. Now -- for a fee neither company will disclose -- Apple sponsors the group, giving away iPod Shuffles in weekly contests, making product announcements, and providing links to its student discount program.

The idea worked so well that Facebook began helping anyone who wanted to start a group. Today there are more than a dozen, including several sponsored by advertisers such as Victoria's Secret and Electronic Arts. Zuckerberg soon realized that undergrads are more likely to respond to a peer group of Apple users than to the traditional banner ads, which he hopes to eventually phase out. Another of his innovations: ads targeted at students of a specific college. They're a way for a local restaurant or travel agency to advertise. Called Facebook Announcements, it's all automated, so anyone can go onto Facebook, pay $14 a day, and fill out an ad.

SPARKLE AND FIZZLE
Still, social networks' relations with companies remain uneasy. Last year, for example, Buzz-Oven was nearly thrown off track when a band called Flickerstick wanted to post a song called Teenage Dope Fiend on the network. Holt told Buzzers: "Well, you can't use that song. I'd be encouraging teenagers to try drugs." They saw his point, and several Buzzers persuaded the band to offer up a different song. But such potential conflicts are one way, Holt concedes, that Buzz-Oven's corporate sponsorships could come to a halt.

Like Holt, other network founders have dealt with such conflicts by turning to their users for advice. Xanga co-founder John Hiler has resisted intrusive forms of advertising like spyware or pop-ups, selling only the conventional banner ads. When advertisers recently demanded more space for larger ads, Hiler turned the question over to Xanga bloggers, posting links to three examples of new ads. More than 3,000 users commented pro and con, and Hiler went with the model users liked best. By involving them, Hiler kept the personal connection that many say they feel with network founders -- even though Xanga's membership has expanded to 21 million.

So far, corporate advertisers have had little luck creating such relationships on their own. In May, P&G set up what it hoped would become a social network around Sparkle Body Spray, aimed at tweens. The site features chatty messages from fake characters named for scents like Rose and Vanilla ("Friends call me Van"). Virtually no one joined, and no entries have comments from real users. "There wasn't a lot of interesting content to engage people," says Anastasia Goodstein, who documents the intersection between companies and the MySpace Generation at Ypulse.com. P&G concedes that the site is an experiment, and the company has found more success with a body-spray network embedded in MySpace.com.

The most basic threat to networks may be the whims of their users, who after all are mostly still kids. Take Friendster, the first networking Web site to gain national attention. It erupted in 2003, going from a few thousand users to nearly 20 million. But the company couldn't keep up, causing frustration among users when the site grew sluggish and prone to crash. It also started with no music, no message boards or classifieds, no blogging. Many jumped ship when MySpace came along, offering the ability to post song tracks and more elaborate profiles. Friendster has been hustling to get back into the game, adding in new options. But only 942,000 people clicked on the site in October, vs. 20.6 million who clicked on MySpace in the same time.

That's the elusive nature of trends and fads, and it poses a challenge for networks large and small. MySpace became a threat to tiny Buzz-Oven last year when Buzzers found they could do more cool things there, from blogs to more music and better profile options. Buzzer message board traffic slowed to a crawl. To stop the hemorrhaging, Holt joined MySpace himself and set up a profile for Buzz-Oven. His network now operates both independently and as a subsite on MySpace, but it still works. Most of Holt's Dallas crowd came back, and Buzz-Oven is up to 3,604 MySpace members now, slightly more than when it was a stand-alone network.

Even if the new approach works, Holt faces a succession issue that's likely to hit other networks at some point. At 35, he's well past the age of his users. Even the friends who helped him launch Buzz-Oven.com are in their late 20s -- ancient to members of his target demographic. So either he raises the age of the group -- or replaces himself with someone younger. He's trying the latter, betting on Mike Ziemer, the 20-year-old recent member, even giving him a small amount of cash.

Ziemer, it turns out, is an influencer. That means record labels and clothing brands pay him to talk up their products, for which he pulls down several hundred dollars a month. Ziemer has spiky brown hair and a round, expressive face. In his MySpace profile he lists his interests in this order: Girls. Music. Friends. Movies. He has 4,973 "friends" on MySpace. At all times, he carries a T-Mobile Sidekick, which he uses to text message, e-mail, and send photos to his friends. Sometimes he also talks on it, but not often. "I hate the phone," he says.

Think of Ziemer as Aden Holt 2.0. Like Amanda Adams, he's also a student at UT-Denton. When he moved to the area from Southern California last year, he started Third String PR, a miniature version of Buzz-Oven that brings bands to the 'burbs. He uses MySpace.com to promote bands and chats online with potential concertgoers. Ziemer can pack a church basement with tweens for a concert, even though they aren't old enough to drive. On the one hand, Ziemer idolizes Holt, who has a larger version of Ziemer's company and a ton of connections in the music industry. On the other hand, Ziemer thinks Holt is old. "Have you ever tried to talk with him over IM?" he says. "He's just not plugged in enough."

Exactly why Holt wants Ziemer on Buzz-Oven. He knows the younger entrepreneur can tap a new wave of kids -- and keep the site's corporate sponsor on board. But he worries that Ziemer doesn't have the people skills. What's more, should Ziemer lose patience with Buzz-Oven, he could blacklist Holt by telling his 9,217 virtual friends that Buzz-Oven is no longer cool. In the online world, one powerfully networked person can have a devastatingly large impact on a small society like Buzz-Oven.

For now, the gamble is paying off. Attendance is up at Buzz-Oven events, and if the Austin launch goes smoothly, Holt will be one step closer to his dream of going national. But given the fluid world of networks, he's taking nothing for granted.

By Jessi Hempel, with Paula Lehman in New York

December 3, 2005 at 12:44 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (45) | Top of page | Blog Home

IE flaw lets intruders into Google Desktop

IE flaw lets intruders into Google Desktop | CNET News.com

By Joris Evers
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 2, 2005, 1:31 PM PST
A security researcher in Israel has found a way to steal information from unwitting users of Google's desktop search tool by exploiting an unpatched flaw in Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer.

There is a bug in the way the Web browser processes CSS rules, Matan Gillon wrote in a description of his hack posted on Wednesday. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a method for setting common styles across multiple Web pages. The Web design technique is widely used on many sites across the Internet.

The proof-of-concept method is an example of how security flaws in software can offer all kinds of access to programs on vulnerable PCs, including to Google Desktop.

"This design flaw in IE allows an attacker to retrieve private user data or execute operations on the user's behalf on remote domains," Gillon wrote in his description of the attack method. He crafted a Web page that--when viewed in IE on a computer with Google Desktop installed--uses the search tool and returns results for the query "password."

To exploit the flaw, an attacker has to lure a victim to a malicious Web page. "Thousands of Web sites can be exploited, and there isn't a simple solution against this attack, at least until IE is fixed," Gillon wrote.

Microsoft is investigating the issue, which it described in a statement as a problem affecting the cross-domain protections in Internet Explorer. "This issue could potentially allow an attacker to access content in a separate Web site, if that Web site is in a specific configuration," Microsoft said in the statement.

Microsoft is not currently aware of malicious code that takes advantage of the flaw, but is monitoring the situation, the company said. A security update or an advisory on the problem may be coming, it said.

Google is also investigating Gillon's findings. "We just learned of this issue and are looking into it," Sonya Boralv, a spokeswoman for the search giant, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

While Gillon in his example uses the IE flaw as a means to get to Google Desktop, this flaw and other software bugs could be used to covertly access virtually any application on a compromised computer.

"It is like any other flaw within IE, but he got creative and used it to launch Google Desktop to retrieve data," security researcher Tom Ferris said. "You can bet we will see this one being used to steal users' Quicken data, database files, etc."

Steve Manzuik, a security product manager at eEye Digital Security, agreed. "This definitely looks like a flaw in IE and not a Google bug. He is using Google Desktop as to retrieve data, but it is IE that makes it possible," he said.

While IE is vulnerable, Gillon found that Firefox and Opera are not. For protection, Internet users could use one of those browsers or disable JavaScript in IE, Gillon suggested.

It has been a busy week on the Microsoft security front. Four examples of attack code were released for flaws in the Windows operating system, and a Trojan horse is finding its way onto PCs through another yet-unpatched flaw in IE.

December 3, 2005 at 12:36 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

Keep the Change Offers Consumers Opportunity to Save

A New Survey Shows Most American Adults Don't Save for the Holidays

CHARLOTTE, N.C., Nov. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- For millions of Americans, holiday shopping is top-of-mind, which brings about money concerns from saving to spending to saving again. This holiday, Americans will spend nearly $750 on average for holiday gifts this season. Despite the strong desire to save while holiday shopping, not many Americans will. According to a new survey commissioned by Bank of America and conducted by Harris Interactive(R), about three-quarters (76%) of U.S. adults agree they don't save as much money as they should.

So, how can consumers save for themselves while they spend on others this
holiday season? For the 48 percent of U.S. adults who say they plan to use
their debit cards to make purchases for the upcoming holidays, Bank of America
offers an automatic solution with its new savings feature, Keep the
Change(TM).
"The Keep the Change program is a great way for consumers to save money
while they spend this holiday season," said Diane Morais, Deposits and Debit
Products executive at Bank of America. "More than half of those surveyed said
they could use some help in learning about good ways to save money. We hope
that educating consumers about this program and other ways to automatically
save money will help them to begin turning this year's holiday purchases into
savings."
Keep the Change is a quick and easy way to start saving immediately. When
a customer signs up for this program, the amount of every purchase they make
with a Bank of America debit card is automatically rounded up to the nearest
whole dollar and transferred from the customer's checking account into their
savings account at the end of the day. For example, when purchasing a coffee
with a debit card, the difference between the $2.85 cost and $3.00 -- or 15
cents -- would be transferred electronically. In addition, Bank of America
will match 100 percent of the Keep the Change transfers for the first three
months a consumer participates in the program. After that, the bank will
contribute five percent a year. The maximum match is $250 annually.
"Nothing destroys a year of being smart with your money like over-shopping
during the holidays. My recommendation during the holidays is to start smart!
Consider keeping the credit cards at home and use a debit card, cash or
checks. You'll spend less and avoid going into debt," said financial expert
and best-selling author David Bach. "By participating in an automatic savings
program like Keep the Change during the holidays and all year round you can
see the savings really add up -- and make next year's holiday spending even
easier on your budget."
The survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults also found:
- Close to nine in ten U.S. adults (89%) do not have a separate account
where they save money for holiday shopping.
- Nearly seven in ten (68%) put their spare change in a change jar or
piggy bank.
- Just over four in five U.S. adults (82 percent) have a savings account,
but less than two-thirds (64%) saved money in the past year.
- Nearly all U.S. adults (98%) regularly take measures to save money,
most commonly by making meals at home instead of eating out (76%),
conserving energy (73%), and waiting for items to go on sale before
purchasing (69%). More than nine in ten (92%) save spare change, yet
two-thirds (66%) do so specifically as a means of saving money.
- U.S. adults typically think they could save just over $100 (median =
$103) just by saving their spare change over one year.
- Only a third of U.S. adults (33%) regularly transfer funds from an
account into their savings account.

http://www.bankofamerica.com/ktc

Keep the Change matching funds are paid annually after the anniversary of
enrollment up to a maximum of $250 on accounts that remain open and enrolled.
Eligible savings accounts include regular savings, which requires a minimum
opening balance of $100 and pays a variable annual percentage yield that was
0.50% as of November 16, 2005. Fees could reduce earnings. Patent pending.

About Bank of America:
Bank of America is one of the world's largest financial institutions,
serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large
corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and
other financial and risk-management products and services. The company
provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving more than 38
million consumer and small business relationships with more than 5,800 retail
banking offices, more than 16,700 ATMs and award-winning online banking with
more than 14 million active users. Bank of America is the No. 1 overall Small
Business Administration (SBA) lender in the United States and the No. 1 SBA
lender to minority-owned small businesses. The company serves clients in 150
countries and has relationships with 97 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500
companies and 79 percent of the Global Fortune 500. Bank of America
Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Member
FDIC.

Survey Methodology
Harris Interactive(R) fielded the online survey on behalf of Bank of
America between October 5 and 7, 2005 among a nationwide sample of 2,180 U.S.
adults ages 18 and over. The data were weighted to be representative of the
total U.S. adult population on the basis of region, age within gender,
education, household income, race/ethnicity, and propensity to be online. In
theory, with probability samples of this size, one can say with 95 percent
certainty that the overall results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3
percentage points. This online sample is not a probability sample.

SOURCE Bank of America
Web Site: http://www.bankofamerica.com/ktc
http://www.bankofamerica.com
Photo Notes: NewsCom:
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050720/CLW086LOGO-b AP
Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org PRN Photo Desk,
photodesk@prnewswire.com

December 3, 2005 at 10:19 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (31) | Top of page | Blog Home

McNealy: Why "Sun Is Back"

McNealy: Why "Sun Is Back"

The CEO believes giving away software will attract developers and customers alike. Still, Sun is under pressure to "put up the numbers"

In recent years, Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) Chief Executive Scott McNealy was widely criticized for sticking too closely to Sun's longtime business model. Its model: Spend big on loads of in-house technologies, from chips to operating software, then try to sell products at a high enough price to cover the investment and still crank out a hefty profit.

He clung to the approach even as corporate buyers started snapping up cheaper machines based on Intel-style microprocessors that ran free open-source software, including the Linux operating system. Until 2003, McNealy kept on pushing only gold-plated systems featuring Sun's own processors, its Solaris operating software, and various other so-called middleware programs that are used to connect and deliver separate applications.

But even if investors still have reason to grouse about Sun's depressed stock price, they certainly can't say McNealy is stuck in the mud anymore. In February, Sun began offering free downloads of Solaris. In September, it announced innovative new servers built around Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD ) Opteron chip.

RECAPTURING PAST GLORIES? The company claims the systems, designed by fellow Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, offer far more performance while running much more coolly than rival machines (see BW Online, 11/14/05, "Sun: Back to High Performance").

And Sun has divulged a radical new chip design -- called Niagara -- that could provide similar benefits for a different class of server. Systems based on these chips, which should be announced by the end of the year, are designed to help big Internet companies such as Google (GOOG ) or Yahoo! (YHOO ) process millions of relatively simple transactions -- say, execute a search. That's in contrast to most processors, which were designed to handle hugely complex computing problems, such as forecasting the weather.

Maybe the most radical change of all came on Nov. 30, when Sun said it would give away almost all of its software products -- either individually or as part of a soup-to-nuts bundle called the Solaris Enterprise System. The goal is to rekindle the virtuous cycle that propelled Sun to greatness in the past.

RISKY MANEUVER. For starters, giving away the software could persuade more entrepreneurs and corporate programmers around the world to develop products to run on Solaris. Beefing up the developer base raises the odds that tomorrow's hot programs will run best on Solaris.

That could lift demand for Sun servers, as occurred in the late 1990s. Then, interest in Solaris and Sun's Java programming language lured buyers to its servers and gave Sun a chance to sell its other products as well.

And even if the software is free, big corporate buyers almost always buy the accompanying large service contracts to ensure they get proper customer support, such as bug fixes. This is how open-source software companies, such as Red Hat (RHAT ), make money. The move puts Sun in sync with the way software is being developed, and with how customers want to pay for it.

Still, it's a huge risk. If Solaris doesn't gain market share or if Sun can't find enough ways to get customers to pay for services to cover the cost of software development, the move could backfire. Sun has yet to win back the allegiance of investors who exited its stock after the Net bubble burst. Despite all McNealy's model-busting announcements in the past few years, Sun shares still sit at just $3.88, down from $4.14 in early December, 2002.

McNealy is nonetheless hopeful. Famous for his outspoken opinions and humor-laced digs at competitors, he has adopted a lower profile since naming Jonathan Schwartz president of Sun in April, 2004. But there's plenty of fight, and fun, remaining in McNealy, as is clear from a Dec. 1 interview with BusinessWeek Computers editor Peter Burrows. Edited excerpts follow:

It has certainly been a busy news week for Sun, given the information that you plan to give away much of your software.
Hey, we've had a busy year! You've got to give us credit for that. How many companies have been as interesting to watch as Sun over the past 18 months -- outside of Google, I suppose.

How can you make money on free software? Isn't 'We'll make it up on volume' one of the oldest formulas in the book for certain failure?
Go ask {CEO] Eric Schmidt over at Google about that. Not too long ago, everyone was wondering, how can they do [all those searches] for free? But there's lots of ways to monetize [heavy usage of a technology]. And if we build a large Solaris community, who do you think is going to benefit the most? Look at Java.

Still, the market data indicate that Sun lost share in servers in the third quarter, while most of your rivals gained.
Look at it this way. We've gone from No 99 -- nowhere -- to No. 4, or maybe even No. 3 in the last three years in sales of x86 (Intel-style chip) servers. And we're growing faster than IBM (IBM ), Dell (DELL ), and HP (HPQ ) combined. No one disputes that.

And we've gone from 0 to 3.4 million downloads of Solaris since February. That is orders of magnitude greater volume than any previous generation of Solaris. That is huge.

Maybe so, but how can you be sure that those downloads are going to turn into real applications, ones that will drive volume for Sun gear?
Programmers don't take the time to download a complete enterprise operating system unless they are going to do something with it. And when they do [create a program and want to run it on their corporate network], their boss is going to say: "Do you have a support contract?" And if it goes into production, the company is going to need some computers to run it on.

But can you make as much money per customer as you currently do?
You mean, what's the razor and what is the razor blade? Well, the software is the razor. The razor blades are the servers, the storage, the memory, the service contracts, the archiving services, the tape cartridges, the integration, the consulting services. The whole deal.

Have you now made all the big changes required to put Sun back on the comeback trail so it can start gaining share and lifting its stock price?
We've completely redone our product line and our strategy. What we need to do now is get the image of the company back to where it was. But we're making progress.

The noise around the company has changed. You haven't asked me: "Is Sun going to survive?” I haven't been asked that in 18 months. Now people ask: "Is Sun back?” Once people are comfortable with that, our sales cycles should get shorter. If we can show a little bit of sustained growth and profitability, we can turn this whole thing around.

So why do you think Sun is the only one of the big computer companies making such bold changes to its business strategy? We don't see IBM giving away its software like this.
It happens to all of us. It happened to us at Sun. We were paralyzed by [the huge success during] the first phase of the Internet [in the 1990s], until someone came and hit us upside the head.

So then we made the move to Opteron, and to open source and to all the other things we've done. Well, Dell and IBM and some of the others are all thinking: 'Hey, we're on a roll.' But Sun is back. Those guys are in trouble, but people just haven't figured it out yet.

But again, it's so hard to know when that day is going to come. The company always has so many interesting technologies and bold initiatives, and you're always so optimistic. For example, you said earlier in this interview that "Sun is back.” Do you really think we're at that point in time? Have you said that before?
Probably every day for the last five years [Laughing]. That's my job.

So far investors don't seem to be buying the story. Why not?
We have to put up the numbers. But a lot of this is also related to what our competitors are saying about us. A lot of this is people kicking us while we're down, and I don't blame them. I'd do it, too. But we'll have our day in the sun.
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December 3, 2005 at 10:12 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home