Internet Changes Everything

We are all edge cases

I think Scoble is taking this personally! But this is something he should be proud of, and shrug off. It reminds me of the "geek' moniker in the 1999 timeframe when at first geeks were to be laughed at, but subsequently to be admired because of heir salary.

Relax Robert!

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » More on edge cases

Really, I sensed a tone of “don’t listen to Scoble cause he’s a weirdo.”

January 29, 2006 at 01:58 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (70) | Top of page | Blog Home

A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target

A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target - New York Times

By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: January 22, 2006

JOE HANSON, 22, of Chicago likes to watch television, but rarely on his TV. A folder on his computer lists an inventory of downloaded cable and network programming - the kind of thing that makes traditional media executives shudder.

"I've got 'Ali G,' 'Arrested Development,' 'Scrubs,' 'The Sopranos,' " Mr. Hanson told a visitor recently at his apartment on the city's Southwest Side. " 'South Park,' 'The Office,' some 'Family Guy.' "

From the avalanche of Nintendo games alongside his TV to his very roommate - acquired through the online classified site Craigslist - Mr. Hanson channels the characteristics of a generation weaned on digital technology and media convergence.

He is an avid gamer. He tinkers comfortably with digital media - from creating Web sites and blogs to mixing his own hip-hop music files - and like most people his age, he has nearly constant access to his friends through instant messaging.

In addition to thumbing his nose at notions of "prime time" by downloading his favorite shows (without commercials), Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.

"Papers are so clunky and big," he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today's marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.

The eldest of the millennials, as those born between 1980 and 2000 are sometimes called, are now in their early to mid-20's. By 2010, they will outnumber both baby boomers and Gen-X'ers among those 18 to 49 - the crucial consumers for all kinds of businesses, from automakers and clothing companies to Hollywood, record labels and the news media.

The number of vehicles through which young people find entertainment and information (and one another) makes them a moving target for anyone hoping to capture their attention.

Advertisers and media and technology companies, mindful that young consumers have migrated away from the traditional carriers of their messages, have begun to find new ways to reach them. They are creating advertising and short videos for mobile phones, for instance, cell networks with dedicated game channels, and $1.99 TV programs to download to iPods and PC's.

And while the emerging generation's deftness with technology is a given, researchers say the most potent byproduct may be the feedback factor, which only accelerates the cycles of what's hot and what's over.

"We think that the single largest differentiator in this generation from previous generations is the social network that is people's lives, the part of it that technology enables," said Jack McKenzie, a senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a market research and consulting firm specializing in the news media and entertainment industries.

"What's hard to measure, and what we're trying to measure," Mr. McKenzie continued, "is the impact of groupthink, of group mentality, and the tendency of what we might call the democratization of social interaction and how that changes this generation's relationship with almost everything they come in contact with."

For Mr. Hanson, even his new job is an Internet-based, media-intensive labor informed by feedback.

Mr. Hanson, who earlier took time off before earning his English degree at the University of Chicago to appear as a contestant in a reality TV show ("Beauty and the Geek"), left his ad agency internship last month to become a writer and producer at Current TV, Al Gore's media-converging experiment.

Before being hired, Mr. Hanson and Hassan Ali, a 20-year-old junior studying economics at the University of Chicago, were already submitting their own digital video shorts to Current TV, which allows Web audiences to vote content up the ranks at www.current.tv and, if it becomes popular enough, onto its cable television rotation.

Their signature series of jittery "Joe Gets" films, in which the white, diminutive and blond Mr. Hanson might, for instance, get a haircut in a predominantly black Chicago barbershop ("Joe Gets Cut"), were voted regularly into the TV rotation - so often that both Mr. Hanson and Mr. Ali were offered jobs.

"This was great!" wrote one visitor to their Current TV Web page. "I deff. feel you on this one, being a white guy who also gets his hair cut at a black barber shop. Convos are way more entertaining. ... Plus you can't beat the crispy fades!" Mr. Hanson and Mr. Ali had reached out to their peers, and their peers had spoken.

Other titles produced by Mr. Hanson and Mr. Ali include "Joe Gets Inked" (a tattoo) and "Joe Gets Bent" (yoga). "Joe Gets Slammed," in which Mr. Hanson attends a professional wrestling school, is expected to be shown soon online and on television.

At the Digital Edge

Karell Roxas, 24, a senior editor at Gurl.com, begins each day in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment with a diet of Gmail, Hotmail, work e-mail, NYTimes.com ("I haven't picked up a print newspaper in forever," she says) and blogs, in that order. She says it is a necessary regimen for maintaining a functional dialogue both at work and in her circle of friends.

Ms. Roxas, who grew up in Ontario, Calif., and earned a fine-arts degree in writing from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, says text messaging by cellphone is the default mode of communication for her set, surpassing e-mail, instant messaging or even talking on the phone itself.

It is all in keeping with recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which has found that while certain aspects of online life have become common across many age groups, it is the millennials who live at the digital edge.

Among those with access to the Internet, for instance, e-mail services are as likely to be used by teenagers (89 percent) as by retirees (90 percent), according to Pew researchers. Creating a blog is another matter. Roughly 40 percent of teenage and 20-something Internet users do so, but just 9 percent of 30-somethings. Nearly 80 percent of online teenagers and adults 28 and younger report regularly visiting blogs, compared with just 30 percent of adults 29 to 40. About 44 percent of that older group sends text messages by cellphone, compared with 60 percent of the younger group.

And as the millennials diverge from their elders in their media choices, so do the ways in which they can be reached and influenced.

The preceding generation may have thought that e-mail, newsgroups, Web forums and even online chats accelerated the word-of-mouth phenomenon. They did. But they are nothing compared with the always-live electronic dialogue among millions of teenagers and 20-somethings.

"What we're seeing is a whole different relationship with marketing and advertising which obviously has ripple effects through the entire economy," said Mr. McKenzie, who heads the Magid firm's Millennials Strategy Group, formed two years ago to serve clients desperate to know how to reach a new generation.

For the millennials, he said, "reliance and trust in nontraditional sources - meaning everyday people, their friends, their networks, the network they've created around them - has a much greater influence on their behaviors than traditional advertising."

Magid calls it the peer-to-group phenomenon - a digital-age manifestation of the grapevine.

"When someone wants to share it, forward it, record it, take a picture of it, whatever the case may be, that puts it into a form of currency," Mr. McKenzie said. "And when marketing gets to a level of currency, then it has achieved nirvana status."

And, he added, that status has "much more influence on the acceptance of television shows, or radio shows, or iPod offerings or jeans or whatever the case may be."

Some researchers, like Dr. Melvin D. Levine, director of the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, have expressed concerns about the group-mentality dynamics that the Internet and the instant-message age may be fostering.

"You've got a group of kids who are unbelievably, incredibly loyal to each other," Dr. Levine said. "They are very bound to ethics and values. But in a funny sort of way, it prevents some of them from developing as individuals." Along with finding technological dexterity in this group, and a highly developed ability to work in team settings, Dr. Levine said he had encountered concerns that some young people lacked the ability to think and plan for the long term, that they withered without immediate feedback and that the machinery of groupthink had bred a generation flush with loyal comrades but potentially weak on leaders.

Ms. Roxas would wholeheartedly disagree. Working at Gurl.com, she says that it is all too common for older people to dismiss the "MTV generation" as lacking concentration and wherewithal, as being team-oriented but bereft of individual ideas, and as being hopelessly addicted to the hive.

The relentless multitasking and interactivity are "just a different way of doing things," Ms. Roxas said, recalling that even as an undergraduate she would often seek help and counsel among her peers through instant messages on her computer. "I actually got more done that way," she said, "and I always knew when to sign off and get my work done.

"It's no different than eating and watching TV at the same time."

But when asked if she might ever be able to really disconnect for a while, Ms. Roxas paused and then laughed at herself. To really unplug, while an attractive idea in theory, she said, would be to risk being swept aside by a virtual torrent of information - or, worse, being forgotten.

"Say, if I haven't read what's going on every day, things are so interconnected, you might not know what everyone's talking about," she said.

"It's like, if you don't check your e-mail and you turn off your phone, it's almost like you don't exist."

Media on the Go

That existential quandary is giving marketers, media and technology companies and Hollywood some potential openings to reach young adults.

Marketers, for instance, have signaled a broad desire to bring television-style advertising to cellphones. As early as March, a limited number of Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel customers may begin seeing short video ads on their phones, in a test of consumer tolerance for the idea.

And two weeks ago, the cellphone start-up Amp'd Mobile announced a partnership with Electronic Arts, the world's largest maker of video games, aimed at bringing more than a dozen Electronic Arts-brand games to Amp'd cellphones.

The television and film industries, like the recording industry before them, are slowly recognizing that consumers - particularly young ones like Mr. Hanson - want to watch on their own schedules, in a variety of formats, and at a low price.

Clearly, if the market doesn't find ways to make programming simple, inexpensive and legal to download, millennials will continue to find solutions for themselves.

"Downloading is the poor man's TiVo," Mr. Hanson said in e-mail message, adding, though, that if he likes a show he generally goes out and buys it on DVD.

As if heeding the call, ABC, NBC and cable networks have found a new outlet by striking deals that make television shows available for $1.99 a download on Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, for playback on the new video-capable iPod or on a personal computer. Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said this month that the company had sold eight million videos and television shows online since October.

Still, such convergence is in its infancy. And aside from CBS's reported plans for a short "mobisoap" video drama, written exclusively for delivery on cellphones, original content for platforms other than television is rarer still.

But the writing is even on Hollywood's wall.

In November, as if to nudge the entire industry, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences rather hurriedly introduced a new Emmy award for "outstanding content distributed via nontraditional delivery platforms."

"Consumers have the capability of seeing television anywhere, anytime," said Peter Price, the president of the academy, in announcing the new award. "And as the technology continues to develop, it will be content - news, sports and entertainment programming - that drives consumer demand."

Millennials in Action

Wen-Wen Lam, 23, a marketing representative at LinkedIn.com, a professional networking site, said a colleague was bewildered by her decision not to take her laptop home one evening. "He said, 'But how are you going to talk to people?' " Ms. Lam recalled.

She rolled her eyes at the thought of people unable to cut the electronic umbilical cord and added that an average day of 8 to 10 hours of time spent online is "quite enough."

The T-shirt worn by one of her roommates, Diane Cichelli, calls out in agreement. "Ctrl, alt, delete," it reads, for the keystrokes typically used to reboot a PC - and also known as "the three-fingered salute," Ms. Cichelli said.

Ms. Cichelli, 24, and Ms. Lam have been friends since they were 13. They now share an apartment, along with a third roommate, in the upscale Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. Scattered about the living room and bedrooms are the indispensable totems of modern technological privilege: I.B.M. laptops, pink iPods, multiple flat-screen televisions and Ms. Cichelli's Treo 650, a combination cellphone and palmtop.

Indeed, the pair are cut from a marketer's millennial script. They are not fashioning careers as filmmakers or digital artists, but they are comfortable around digital media. They maintain blogs and create Web sites of their own. They download music and share short videos online. They watch their share of cable and network television, though rarely when it is scheduled, slipping to a neighbor's apartment to enjoy the liberating effects of TiVo.

They are avid blog consumers. They read celebrity gossip blogs like Defamer and PopSugar and shopping and travel blogs like Luxist and DailyCandy. And they learn of new sites through the tide of instant messages flowing into the pockets and onto the laptop screens of millions of young adults every minute of the day.

But popularity is often fleeting, and some of today's hot Web sites can quickly give way to others, further underscoring the challenge for marketers.

"The period of rapid change we've been experiencing, it's just been that much more dramatic," said Vicki Cohen, a senior vice president at Magid and one of the leaders on its millennial strategy team. "I mean every time you turn around there's something new on the horizon. And this group, as we've been noticing, is kind of the arbiter, quickly determining whether things are hot or not.

"And it's much more accelerated," Ms. Cohen added. "With the technology, the Internet - in terms of being able to facilitate the social networking, which is a big part of this younger group - there's just so much ability to quickly transfer information."

Near the end of the evening in Pacific Heights, Ms. Cichelli volunteers that she finds voice mail a wearisome time consumer.

"Why do I need to invest three minutes of my life listening to a message," she says, when she can just "ping" someone with an instant message or an e-mail message?

"Ping," as a computer term, seems to go back some distance. Does she know its linguistic derivation?

Ms. Cichelli speculates that it came from the game Ping-Pong and was applied to high-tech communication because people send notes back and forth.

"Let's Google it," Ms. Cichelli says.

"I love Google," Ms. Lam says.

The answer appears almost instantly: in computer jargon, "ping" was most likely borrowed from submarine technology and the sound that sonar makes when seeking its reflection points.

No one is surprised. The answer had already been suggested by Ms. Cichelli's friend in Albany, with whom she had been text-messaging throughout much of the night.

David Bernstein and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this article.

January 22, 2006 at 08:16 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Research: Internet Users Judge Sites in 50 Milliseconds

Research: Internet Users Judge Sites in 50 Milliseconds - Yahoo! News

Robin Arnfield, newsfactor.com Mon Jan 16, 4:06 PM ET

Those who surf the Internet typically make snap decisions about the quality of a Web site, according to a new research study.
ADVERTISEMENT

The researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's capital city, discovered that the human brain makes decisions in a twentieth of a second after seeing a Web page for the first time.

This finding came as a surprise to the researchers as they had thought Internet users would take at least 10 times longer to make a judgment about the quality of a Web site.

Academic Research

The Canadian university researchers' study was published in the academic journal Behaviour & Information Technology. The journal is published by Taylor & Francis of the UK.

"Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that Web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression," the Canadian researchers reported.

Gitte Lindgaard and her research team at Carleton University flashed up Web pages for 50 milliseconds and asked survey participants to rate the pages according to aesthetic appeal.

The participants then were asked to examine the site carefully and to provide a new rating. The two categories of ratings -- the first based on a quick glance the second on a detailed examination -- were consistent with each other, the research team found.

Commercial Impact

Lindgaard said in the report that her team's findings have broad implications for commercial Web sites. "Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," she wrote in the report.

According to Lindgaard, a visitor's first impression of a Web site has a lasting impact. The report argued that these quickly formed first impressions endure because of what psychologists call the "halo effect" -- a phrase that refers to the fact that a person's initial favorable bias toward something affects subsequent judgments.

In other words, if visitors think that a Web site looks good, then this positive attitude will influence how they feel about other areas of the site, such as its content.

According to Lingaard, because human beings like to be right, they will continue to use the Web site that made a good first impression because doing so will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

January 17, 2006 at 12:12 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (61) | Top of page | Blog Home

Web giants show the way in Vegas

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web giants show the way in Vegas

By Alfred Hermida
Technology editor, BBC News website in Las Vegas

Robin Williams, AP
Big stars such as Robin Williams were wheeled out during CES
Among the huge flat panel TVs, tiny MP3 players and stylish handsets on show at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, two newcomers were the focus of attention.

For the first time, web giants Google and Yahoo took their place alongside the big names in consumer electronics, such as Sony, Samsung and Toshiba.

It seems ironic that companies which have made a name for themselves by providing services should outshine others at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

But Google and Yahoo are seen as changing the way people access music or video and other forms of media.

And the makers of MP3 players, digital video recorders and other gadgets use to consume media want to make sure they are not left behind.

Media reinvention

Google and Yahoo made up a relatively small part of the 1.6 million square feet of exhibition space in Las Vegas.

Inside one of the halls, Google had a colourful stand, while outside Yahoo held court in a tent in the car park.

They proved one of the most popular destinations for many of the 130,000 people who came to CES to get a glimpse of the future.

The dominant theme at the show was how to make it easier for people to have access to the kind of content they want, when they want it and where they want it.

This is exactly where net services such as Google and Yahoo have succeeded.

Yahoo boss Terry Semel, AP
Yahoo plans to put its services on mobile devices
At CES they effectively repositioned themselves as media companies, announcing a host of deals that go beyond their roots in search.

These include providing TV shows and video to computers and mobiles, as well as linking up web services with traditional consumer electronic products such as the TV.

Google announces its online video store, which it hopes will become a full-fledged digital warehouse of media.

As part of the store, it reached agreement with US network CBS to offer hit shows like CSI and Survivor for $1.99.

"We're really the enabler," said Google boss Eric Schmidt in a briefing with journalists at CES.

"The important thing is to get the content out. Digital information should be available on every device all of the time."

Fun and games

Not to be left behind, Yahoo announced software that would enable its 450 million users to access their e-mail, photos, search and more from a TV or mobile phone.

"We are taking our essential services and connecting them to people's lives using their devices," Marco Boerries, Yahoo's senior vice president for connected life, told the BBC News website.

"The internet is changing from being a vehicle for websites to a delivery vehicle of consumer services."

Ipod in speaker dock, AP
Apple was absent from CES but its plans overshadowed the event
This trend is being echoed in the actions of mammoth tech companies such as Intel.

It sought to reinvent itself at CES, leaving behind its image as a chipmaker with its Viiv technology.

This is a processor and system that aims to bring together the worlds of computing and television.

"With all the digital content we are starting to see around us - music, movies, video, games - we are working to make sure there is a great PC platform specifically designed to do those things well," said Bryan Peebler, a program manager for Intel's Viiv system.

Intel's technology will be more visible to consumers in Microsoft Media Center PCs, which have so far failed to capture the public's imagination.

Microsoft is not giving up. At CES Bill Gates clearly laid out his ambition to put Microsoft at the heart of the digital era with Windows powering all sorts of connected devices.

But this is a crowded arena. Absent from CES was one of the most influential companies that marries technology and media, Apple.

It started its first moves towards the living room last year when it announced its Front Row software for Macs.

Apple is expected to step closer towards the idea of the computer as an entertainment centre at its Macworld Expo, which starts in San Francisco on Tuesday.

January 11, 2006 at 07:23 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Seasonal geekery

Courtesy of Leo Lewis - Times blog. I have been to Odiaba, and reading this makes me want to go back!

Technology: Seasonal geekery

For pure, unfettered geekiness Tokyo is the place to spend the festive season. Oh sure, Akihabara is great for shopping, but if you like your tech with an exclusive edge, where else, I ask you, could you pick up the phone to the world's biggest consumer electronics company, demand that they break off from their festive preparations to show you their most exciting new toys and be told "would this afternoon suit?"

Cut to the strange and remote reclaimed island (read massive earthquake hazzard) of Odaiba and the Panasonic Technology Centre. The vast building is arranged somewhat like those laboratories where they study infectious diseases, and my guide was ready to take me to the technological equivalent of the Ebola room.

The first floor is much as you would expect - the latest plasma screens (big, looked superb running a Blu-ray disc), digital cameras (one with a very effective anti-tremble setting) and car navigation systems that lock the house and feed live webcams from all the rooms in the house straight to your dashboard. All very nice.

On the second floor, they turned up the tech with a "kitchen table of the future". The concept here - and it was all in fully-functioning order - was that whoever sits at the table establishes their "seat" by putting their ID-chip enabled mobile phone on a little pad. The table itself is made of hardened glass, beneath which is a 60-inch screen facing upwards. Swimming around the screen are little fish with words such as "calendar" and "internet" on their back. Tap one of the fish and the relevant window opens. Once your phone is on the pad, little fish swim out of it representing the files (pictures, music etc) that you are now prepared to share with everyone else in the pond.

But the best, lurking behind a secret door on the third floor, was yet to come. Explaining that this had only been seen by a few researchers and corporate customers (so not that exclusive) Panasonic unveiled their concept home of the future, the centrepiece of which was an interactive screen occupying one entire wall of the mock-up house. The idea is that anything can be done on this screen. Kids want to scrible? Draw a square on the screen with a finger and it turns into a blackboard ready for action. Want to watch a film? Draw a square on the screen with a finger and it opens a screen of that size with your movie or TV running through it. ...you get the picture. Games ditto, internet ditto. Somehow nothing on sale in Akihabara quite matched up.

January 8, 2006 at 03:00 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | 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

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

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

Third Annual AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey

Third Annual AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey Uncovers IM Has Taken Over the Desktop; Parents Get into the Act While Users Dream of IM TV and Enjoy VoIP Services; One-Third Send Mobile Messages from Cell Phones

DULLES, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 2005--Instant messaging (IM) is up 19 percent year over year and is deeply entrenched in the U.S. with many Americans sending as many - if not more - IMs than they do emails. Meanwhile, at-work and mobile messaging have gone mainstream, according to the third annual Instant Messaging Trends Survey from AOL.

Today, multiple screen names, parental IM rules for teens and rampant "away messaging" are standard across all regions, genders and ages. Instant messaging has taken over as the communications vehicle of choice with 25 percent of users saying they would like to see entertainment content within IM and 20 percent saying they would like to make voice calls to landlines and cell phones directly from their IM service.

Top-line survey findings include:

Email is Old School: Thirty-eight percent say they send as many or more IMs than emails, and the younger users are, the more likely they are to favor IM. Two-thirds (66 percent) of teens and young adults (ages 13-21) say they send more IMs than emails, up from 49 percent last year.

Meet the Parents: More than half (53 percent) of teens (ages 13-17) surveyed say their parents now issue guidelines and rules about instant messaging. Teen boys (55 percent) are more likely to have parental IM rules than are teen girls (50 percent), and fully 65 percent of teens who have rules say they follow them.

Hit the Road: One in three (33 percent) IM users send mobile IMs or text messages from their cell phones at least once a week. This is a dramatic increase over 2004, when just 19 percent said they do so, and 2003 when the figure was 10 percent.

The Sound of Your Voice: Meanwhile, 20 percent say they currently enjoy, or would like to try, making live voice calls to other computers, landlines and cell phones directly from their IM service. Another 12 percent say they would be interested in an IM-based VoIP service that could replace their primary household phone line.

Another Day, Another "Away Message": Half (47 percent) of those ages 13-21 change their away messages every day, to let others know where they are (71 percent), to list a cell phone number or alternate way to be reached (47 percent) or to post a favorite lyric or quote (47 percent). Seven percent have even posted a call to action, like "Please donate to the Red Cross to help hurricane victims."

IM Too Busy: At-work IM users now send IMs to communicate with colleagues (58 percent), to get answers and make business decisions (49 percent) and even to interact with clients or customers (28 percent). Twelve percent have used IM at work to avoid a difficult in-person conversation.

I Want IM TV!: One in four (26 percent) IM users say that live streaming television is the one feature they wish was available on their IM service. Music on demand came in second (25 percent) and video on demand was third (21 percent).

"Instant messaging is a part of everyday life, with more and more people using their IM service as a starting point for all communications, from sending mobile messages to friends on cell phones to placing VoIP-based phone calls," said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president and general manager, AIM and ICQ, America Online, Inc. "Usage is spiking, and not just among teens. Parents, grandparents and professionals are all using instant messaging to stay in touch and enhance their day-to-day communications."

Nationwide and around the world, instant messaging use is growing, with nearly 12 billion(1) instant messages being sent every day worldwide, according to IDC. ComScore Media Metrix(2) reports that there are more than 300 million people across the globe - and more than 80 million Americans - who regularly use instant messaging as a quick and convenient communications tool.

The AOL(R) Instant Messaging Trends survey of more than 4,000 respondents ages 13 and over was conducted in partnership with Opinion Research Corporation from September 16-26, 2005.

Top 10 Cities and AOL's Third Annual IM Awards

This year's survey includes a listing of America's top ten cities for IM usage and a number of "awards" for unique instant messaging habits of IM users in various cities.

According to the survey, the top ten markets for instant messaging are: 1. Miami, FL; 2. New York, NY; 3. Boston, MA; 4. Chicago, IL; 5. Atlanta, GA; 6. Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX; 7. Detroit, MI; 8. San Francisco, CA; 9. Sacramento, CA; 10. Tampa, FL.

The AOL IM Awards include:

The Clark Kent Award: In Dallas/Ft. Worth, IM users are most likely to have multiple screen names in order to maintain an alter-ego (28 percent).

The CU L8R Award: IM users in Phoenix are most likely to use IM lingo when sending instant messages (67 percent), such as GR8 (great) or BRB (be right back).

The 'Here We Are, Now Entertain Us' Awards: Atlantans are most likely (34 percent) to want to watch live television on their IM client, while music on demand is the most desired addition (31 percent) for IMers in Houston.

To learn more about the top 10 IM cities and to see the Awards they have won this year from AOL, click here: http://www.aim.com/survey?source=US1

Teens and Instant Messaging

Ninety percent of Internet-savvy teens and young adults say they send instant messages, and 80 percent of those ages 22-34 say the same. Among those with IM rules, 43 percent say they can send instant messages only when their homework is done. Meanwhile, 24 percent can go online for a set amount of time each day or can only send IMs to a group of people known by their parents. Twenty-three percent can IM only at certain hours of the day.

In addition, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of teen IM users think they have about the same number or more buddies on their Buddy List feature as their friends. To get to the bottom of the debate, AIM(R) users can visit http://www.aimfight.com to pit themselves against their friends to find out once and for all who has the bigger Buddy List. To learn more about teens and instant messaging, click here: http://www.aim.com/survey?source=US2

IM in the Workplace

According to IDC, more than 28 million business users worldwide use instant messaging to send nearly 1 billion messages each day at work.(3) Meanwhile, the AOL Instant Messaging Trends survey revealed that more than three in four at-work IM users (77 percent) say that instant messaging has had a positive impact on their work lives. In addition, one in four (25 percent) of at-work IMers say that instant messaging enables them to check in on their children during the workday, providing greater peace of mind.

In addition, among those who use instant messaging for business purposes, 13 percent say they have their IM screen name printed on their business card, while six percent say they write it on the business cards they exchange. New Yorkers appear to be most hip to screen names, with 26 percent having their IM screen names printed on their business cards. To learn more about instant messaging at work, click here: http://www.aim.com/survey?source=US3

Mobile Messaging

One in three (33 percent) IM users say they also send SMS messages or mobile instant messages at least once a week from their cell phone. Nearly half (47 percent) of IM users aged 13-21 engage in text messaging and mobile instant messaging, while 42 percent do the same. Meanwhile, one-quarter (24 percent) of those aged 35-54 say they send messages from their cell phones. To learn more about mobile messaging, click here: http://www.aim.com/survey?source=US4

IM on a Global Scale

The interest in making PC-to-phone calls from the IM service is high around the globe, with Brazil leading the way. In fact, 60 percent of Brazilian IM users want to make PC-to-phone VoIP calls. Meanwhile, 48 percent of IM users in Hong Kong and 45 percent in Germans want to do the same. To learn more global IM trends, click here: http://www.aim.com/survey?source=US5

It's Who You Know: More than 47 percent of those surveyed say they use more than one IM application. However, AOL remains the leader, with 65 percent of users selecting AOL's instant messaging services, including the AOL(R) Buddy List(R) feature, the free AIM(R) service (http://www.aim.com) and the global ICQ(R) instant messaging service (http://www.icq.com).

Survey Methodology: Survey results are based on 4,032 respondents - Internet users aged 13 years and older - in the top 20 markets around the country. The survey was conducted September 16-26, 2005 by Opinion Research Corporation on behalf of America Online. The survey rankings are a compilation of several key factors, including the current percentage of instant message users; the number of people on their contact list; the number of instant messages sent per day; the average number of instant messaging conversations at one time; the number who customize their IM application; the number who have more than one screen name; the number who change their away messages; and the percentage who send more instant messages than emails.

About America Online, Inc.

America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world's leader in interactive services, Web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerce services.

(1) IDC Worldwide Enterprise Instant Messaging Applications 2005-2009 Forecast and 2004 Vendor Shares: Clearing the Decks for Substantial Growth

(2) comScore Media Metrix, August 2005

(3) IDC Worldwide Enterprise Instant Messaging Applications 2005-2009 Forecast and 2004 Vendor Shares: Clearing the Decks for Substantial Growth

November 11, 2005 at 05:52 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

Realtors Back Away From Plan To Restrict Access to Listings

Realtors Back Away From Plan To Restrict Access to Listings - Yahoo! News

By Kirstin Downey, Washington Post Staff Writer Thu Sep 8, 1:00 AM ET

In response to antitrust concerns, the National Association of Realtors plans to announce today that it will drop a plan to permit real estate agents to restrict access to home sales listings on the Internet.

Instead it will set rules ensuring that all real estate agents have access to the same information, the trade group said in a statement to be released today. Association officials had previously insisted on maintaining policies that allowed agents to control listings. They said they changed their minds because of a Justice Department investigation into whether the association's policy was stifling competition.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Regulators have been investigating an earlier Internet multiple-listing policy proposed by the trade group because of concerns it would effectively allow traditional real estate agents to steer potential sales away from new competitors working for smaller commissions. The Realtors association dropped its previously proposed policy in May and had said it was developing a new one.

Consumer activists and antitrust advocates have said the previously proposed policy was designed to make it harder for discount real estate firms to obtain the listing information they need to make sales.

Robert D. Butters, a Chicagoantitrust lawyer who was a deputy general counsel at the Realtors association, said the trade group appeared to be making a preemptive move in establishing its own rules, "whether the Justice Department likes it or not."

"The obvious conclusion is this is their bottom line, with or without government approval," Butters said. "What government now chooses to do is up to the government. It could be a lawsuit or it could be nothing."

Laurene K. Janik, general counsel of the association, acknowledged that the Justice Department is not completely satisfied with the new policy. "This is not an agreed-upon new policy; this a policy adopted by NAR," she said. "We've made every effort to accommodate their concerns, but at the end of the day, we did adopt the policy we thought was best for our own members and consumers."

The controversy has arisen as several new companies, or new units of established companies, have sought to break into the real estate market with cut-rate commissions, often by using the Internet to speed up transactions. Some of the new companies have lobbied federal antitrust officials for protection.

Real estate agents have been criticized for seeking to maintain their traditional 6 percent commissions as home prices soar. Home prices in the Washington region have roughly doubled over five years, so commissions have, too, for roughly the same amount of work.

State real estate groups, meanwhile, have pushed ahead with rules that require agents to provide a full set of services to consumers. Antitrust officials at the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have said those rules would hurt consumers because they would make it harder for the new kinds of business models, such as Internet-based firms, to offer services at lower prices.

The state groups have said they are the ones protecting consumers by limiting the growth of companies that offer poor service.

September 8, 2005 at 09:47 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

BBC plans to put channels on net

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | BBC plans to put channels on net

The BBC's TV channels could be made available on the internet, one of the corporation's top executives has said.

A simulcast of BBC One or BBC Two, letting UK viewers see programmes on the web at the same time as they go out on TV, is being planned.

A player to let viewers watch shows on the internet for a week after they have been broadcast on TV is in development.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Ms Bennett said she hoped to simulcast a channel within the next year.

'Wake-up call'

"It's a great way of getting public service content, which people have already paid for, out to people in a different way," she said.

The BBC received a "wake-up call" about the demand for new technology in March when the first episode of the new Doctor Who was leaked on to the internet, she said.

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A BBC spokesman said the corporation was aiming to simulcast a channel permanently but would restrict it to UK viewers only.

"These plans are subject to the approval of the board of governors and the resolution of rights clearance issues on content like music and imported shows," he said.

Internet debuts

As well as the simulcast plan, more shows are set to follow the lead of BBC Three comedy The Mighty Boosh and appear on the internet before TV.

Sketch show Titty Bang Bang, sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Johnny Vegas' show Ideal will be made available on the internet first.

Clips from the shows will also be made available on mobile phones.

The makers of the new Doctor Who series are among the producers who have been developing ways to use mobile phone and portable players.

And extra content has been filmed for broadband to accompany BBC One's autumn contemporary Shakespeare series.

August 27, 2005 at 12:44 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Councils 'to meet online target'

ePolitix.com - Councils 'to meet online target'

Local authorities are on course to meet the target for making all public services available online.

The latest report on implementing electronic government showed that all councils are on track to make the switch to electronic systems.

Local authorities increased services available online from 26 per cent in March 2002 to 77 per cent in March of this year.

By the end of next month, councils forecast that 93 per cent of all services will be available electronically.

Local e-government minister Jim Fitzpatrick said better use of new technology was already making an essential contribution towards the government's efficiency targets.

In nearly 200 councils citizens can now go online to submit planning applications or calculate their benefits entitlement, he said.

And near universal online coverage is now offered by councils in England for renewing library books, accessing public transport information and viewing council reports and committee minutes.

Security

The announcement came on the same day as new funding was announced to improve security in online services.

An IT project aimed at improving security for online transactions between public organisations will receive £7.5m of funding, Fitzpatrick announced.

The 'government connect' programme will be developed and rolled-out over 2005/06 said the minister.

Electronic service delivery by both central and local government should be made more effective under the scheme.

It focuses on supporting "personalised, joined-up, citizen-based services" to help improve community life.

"'Government connect' can become the catalyst for removing two major barriers to e-enabled government, firstly for citizens a single sign-on to government services and secondly, the ability to share data securely between local and central government in support of service delivery," explained Fitzpatrick.

Since its launch in March, he said, "good progress" has been made with 276 local authorities already registered.

"The programme aims to roll out services to up to 250 local authorities by December 2006 and all local authorities by December 2007," the minister added.

August 23, 2005 at 11:33 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Pew Internet: Teens and Technology

7/27/2005 | MemoReport | Amanda Lenhart, Mary Madden, Paul Hitlin

Today’s American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies; the internet and cell phones have become a central force that fuels the rhythm of daily life.

The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Compared to four years ago, teens’ use of the internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online.

Among other things, there has been significant growth over the past four years in the number of teens who play games on the internet, get news, shop online, and get health information.

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Not only has the number of users increased, but also the variety of technologies that teens use to support their communication, research, and entertainment desires has grown.

These technologies enable a variety of methods and channels by which youth can communicate with one another as well as with their parents and other authorities. Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging as ways to connect with their friends.

In focus groups, teens described their new environment. To them, email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges.

It is also used as a place of personal expression. Through buddy icons or other customization of the look and feel of IM communications, teens can express and differentiate themselves. Other instant messaging tools allow for the posting of personal profiles, or even “away” messages, durable signals posted when a user is away from the computer but wishes to remain connected to their IM network.

July 30, 2005 at 01:16 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Every Tube passenger is clocked by a dozen pairs of eyeballs

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

By Damian Whitworth
Our correspondent feels guilty at how he has been turned into a nervous, suspicious spy. But he is not alone
WE ARE all detectives now. On a normal day (remember those?) some three million passengers would use the London Underground. There were not quite that many yesterday, but there must have been a good 2½ million new recruits working for British Transport Police as suspicion, fear and panic spread like a virus through the Tube network.

The realisation that the events of July 7 were not an isolated conspiracy has changed the way that we travel on the city’s public transport system, probably for ever.

On the face of it, yesterday morning was like any other as I started out from High Barnet shortly after 8am. Commuters from this North London suburb grabbed cappuccinos from the small kiosk at the station and rushed to catch the Northern Line southwards. But a member of the station staff said that there were fewer people than usual. “The car park is half empty. It’s usually pretty full by now. After what happened yesterday, people here decided not to go to work today or are going by car.”

Those boarding the train expressed the same stoicism that characterised the reaction to the bombings a fortnight ago, but it was tinged with unease. Angela Leonard, a new mother, said that her husband had not been keen on her taking the Tube but there was no other feasible way of reaching her office, and in any case, “I just want to carry on with what I have always done”.

As the train trundled off past leafy back gardens passengers had their noses in Harry Potter and Su Doku books and women whipped out compacts to put their faces on as normal.

But the headlines on the fronts of the papers told a different story. And so too, if you watched for a couple of minutes, did the behaviour of the passengers. They frequently lifted their heads to scan the carriage. At each station, those entering and leaving were clocked by dozens of pairs of swivelling eyeballs.

However nonchalant we all tried to be, it was not subtle. The first thing that everyone looked for was the type of bag a new arrival was carrying. Anything bulky, anything that looked like a rucksack, warranted closer observation. And there was no question that passengers were profiling their fellow commuters in another way.

Yes, they were looking at the colour of their skin. A young Asian man, smartly dressed in a suit, got on with a bulky black rucksack. I cannot pretend that I did not give him a second look. No alarm bells rang, but I could see other people stealing glances too.

And so could the poor chap, who was probably looking forward to a nice weekend away somewhere. He fidgeted a little. Who could blame him, the way his fellow citizens were behaving? But the more he fidgeted, the more other passengers twitched. He got off after a couple of stops. The man sitting opposite raised his eyebrows at me. “You would think today he might have done without the rucksack,” he said.

Bizarrely for a rush-hour Northern Line train there were plenty of seats available, even at Tottenham Court Road, and then at Charing Cross we came to a halt. In more innocent times this would have been tedious, but the announcement that the line was being suspended because of a suspicious package at Kennington was a cause for more than irritation.

Giving up on public transport, I took a taxi. The driver was Muslim. I told him about the racial profiling I had detected and that I felt guilty about it.

His silence felt like a reproach, then after a minute he condemned the terrorists in the most forceful way I have heard from anyone. “If they catch them, they should torture them,” he said. “And if they won’t do it, they should give them to a country that will.”

July 23, 2005 at 06:48 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

LinkedIn launches paid service for member groups

LinkedIn launches paid service for member groups - Yahoo! News

Tue Jul 19,10:56 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Privately held business networking site LinkedIn released on Tuesday a new paid service called LinkedIn for Groups, targeting alumni, professional and other organizations that want to help members stay in contact.

The Mountain View, California-based company said separately it is aiming for profitability in the first quarter of 2006.

Users of the new LinkedIn for Groups service include the alumni associations of Caltech and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, as well as professional organizations like the Product Development and Management Association and the German American Business Association.

Industry conference organizers such as the Kelsey Group and the Delphi Group also may use the service to help attendees meet, schedule meetings and communicate after the events.

LinkedIn for Groups pricing runs from $5,000 to $25,000 for the first year.

LinkedIn, which provides basic networking on its site free of charge, also said it will roll out a premium subscription in August. Pricing was not disclosed.

The site has become a popular employment tool, attracting both recruiters and job seekers. In March, the venture-capital funded company started charging employers $95 for a 30-day job listing.

July 19, 2005 at 04:57 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home

PluggedIn: White lies help stressed computer users

PluggedIn: White lies help stressed computer users - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard Fri Jul 15, 2:46 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - High-technology tricks once seen as the purview of hackers are now in the hands of ordinary people.

Gadgets these days are full of surprises, and not just in the 'gee whiz' sense of unexpected possibility, but also in their growing powers to manipulate or deceive.

Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work.

"Instead of being a slave to technology, you can master it, you can make it look like you are working when and where you are not," said Marc Saltzman, 35, the author of "White Collar Slacker's Handbook" published in June.

Saltzman says computer trickery has become mainstream as the not-super-tech savvy people seek ways of coping with a 24x7 work culture and the increasing inability of people to dodge uncomfortable questions in an era of "always-on" broadband, mobile phone and instant messaging connections.

"Just because you can be reached everywhere doesn't mean you have to be in touch all the time," Saltzman said in a phone interview. "The question is how do you turn the tables?"

The book, published by technical publisher Que, provides a how-to manual for computer users to tell little white lies to deceive friends and colleagues.

But the ease with which technology can be used to bend the truth can just as easily be used for criminal activity such as identity theft and other crimes.

"Technology and computers have given dishonest people an ability to pretend that they're someone they're not," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner Group. "Now, if you have a minute amount of technical savvy you can wreak a lot of havoc."

He cited a recent case of nine-year-olds who scanned dollar bills into a computer, printed out the fakes and used them to buy snacks at their school's cafeteria.

"With an inkjet printer you can create virtually any document that you want to these days," Reynolds said.

REVERSING TIME

Missed a deadline? No problem.

One simple trick to "reverse" time is to backdate the clock settings on your computer. E-mails will then appear to have been sent earlier. Of course, workers need to remember to reset their clock to the correct time afterward.

"It will certainly prove that you sent the e-mail when you said you did," Saltzman said. "You can just blame the delay on the network."

In Japan, the land of a thousand "face-saving" apologies, consumers can invent convincing sounding excuses for bosses or spouses by using a small keychain device with prerecorded sounds that allows users to pretend to be where they are not.

"Alibi Intersection," as the device is known, comes with six buttons that generate noises such as driving a car, standing in a train station or hearing a front-door chime. A software version for mobile phones that goes by the name of SoundCover in Europe and Soundster in the United States is available.

The noises lend aural authenticity to excuses when played in the background of a mobile phone conversation.

Users of Microsoft Outlook, the most popular e-mail management program, can make their bosses think they are burning the midnight oil by composing e-mails that they set up to be sent out far later, say at 1 a.m.

In Outlook, under options, the user can check the box for "Do Not Deliver before" option. Then choose the time and each subsequent message will be held in your outbox until the appointed hour.

Another trick is to sign onto instant messaging systems from home to make it look you are already at work. If your boss isn't in the same office as you, it appears as if you are at work early. You can also decide whether to disable the away feature on your buddy list.

If you are really worried your boss may try to contact you, have the IM message forwarded as a test message (a separate mobile phone technology that works in similar ways to IM on computers), Saltzman suggests.

Analyst Tim Bajarin of research firm Creative Strategies said that while computer trickery has become a fact of life, it is concentrated among younger workers who are more comfortable with new technologies.

"The older computer user pretty much lets the computer lie. They won't tinker because they are worried they are going to screw the machine up," Bajarin said. "Most of this group hasn't figured out how to set their videocassette clock yet."

(Additional reporting by Duncan Martell in San Francisco, Reed Stevenson in Seattle and Kevin Krolicki in Los Angeles)

July 17, 2005 at 02:04 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sony takes bite out of Apple's iPod in Japan

Sony takes bite out of Apple's iPod in Japan - Yahoo! News

By Nathan Layne Thu Jul 14,12:33 PM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Don't call it a comeback yet, but Sony Corp. has a new lineup of digital music players that are slicing into the popularity of Apple Computer's iPod device in Japan.

Apple is still squashing Sony in Europe and North America, where the iPod has achieved iconic status and a big selling point is the availability of iTunes, an easy-to-use music downloading service that has not yet been launched in Japan.

While Apple remains the top seller of hard drive players in Japan, there has been a decisive momentum swing in the Japanese market, with Sony (6758.T) securing the top position for memory-type players in both May and June, knocking Apple and its iPod shuffle device into second place.

Translating that success overseas will not be easy, but boosting sales in Japan is an important first step for Sony as it tries to reclaim the lead in the portable audio market it helped pioneer with the Walkman cassette player 26 years ago.

"There is no question that Sony has the potential of being much more competitive," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, a U.S.-based research firm. "It could emerge as a more formidable rival to Apple over the next three years."

Launched worldwide in March and April, Sony's new lineup of music players includes several models equipped with flash memory chips able to store 256, 512 megabytes or 1 gigabyte of data, and two players with hard disk drives.

Of those, Sony's gains in the Japanese market have come primarily from one line of flash memory players that have won over consumers with a long-lasting battery -- it can play up to 50 hours on one charge -- and a stylish design.

Resembling a small perfume bottle, the players have a rounded body that strikes a sharp contrast with the shuffle's rectangular shape and flat front. Sony's players also feature a display to view what music is playing, while the iPod shuffle does not.

"Design is one of the main factors consumers now look at when buying a portable audio player. They have become like accessories, so having something that looks good is a must," said Shinichi Iwata, who oversees marketing of the Walkman in Japan.

Sony's players are more expensive than the shuffle, but enough consumers seem willing to pay the extra price.

According to market research company BCN, Sony's share of the Japanese market for flash memory players went from just 4 percent in March to 16 percent in April and shot up to 27 percent in May and June. Apple's share has fallen to under 20 percent.

TRYING TO CONNECT

Sony has not issued official sales forecasts for the new flash memory players, but Iwata said demand in Japan had so far been double what the company initially expected.

Sales of the hard drive units have been less impressive, but that is not surprising as Sony's only players on the market are 20 and 30 gigabyte (GB) models, leaving it without a product to go head-to-head with Apple's (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) hot-selling iPod mini device.

The mini comes in a 4 GB or 6 GB model, holding 1,000 or 1,500 songs -- just about right for many consumers who don't feel the need to carry around their entire CD collection. Sony players, for example, can store more than 10,000 songs.

Sony has made its new Walkmans compatible with the MP3 format, meaning consumers can now download and play back more common MP3 files. Some previous models had been compatible only with Sony's proprietary Atrac format, which hindered sales.

Despite the improvements, analysts say Sony's new Walkmans have not sold as well in Europe and North America and several hurdles remain to its success in those markets.

One is Apple's entrenched position. According to industry data, Apple holds 60 to 70 percent of the U.S. digital music player market and is also very strong in Europe.

Several low-cost Asian makers are also fighting for a piece of the market, which researcher In-Stat predicts will nearly quadruple to 104 million units a year by 2009.

Among the top players are Singapore's Creative Technology Ltd. (CREA.SI) (Nasdaq:CREAF - news),
South Korea's Reigncom Ltd's (060570.KS) iRiver, and Rio, owned by D&M Holdings Inc. (6735.T).

Another challenge for Sony will be developing more appealing jukebox software and a download service that consumers perceive to be just as easy to navigate as iTunes. Sony has not had much success so far with its "Connect" online music store.

"Based on the hardware they look very sharp. But Sony's big challenge has always been to create software that is easy to use right out of the box," said Jon Erensen, a U.S.-based analyst at research firm Gartner who tracks the music player market.

Erensen said lack of an iTunes online store aimed at users in Japan was a major reason behind Sony's success in its home market. That could change if Apple, as a newspaper reported, unleashes iTunes in Japan next month. Apple declined comment.

The job of coming up with a cohesive strategy to overtake Apple will fall on the Connect Company, a unit established by Sony late last year to bring together disparate software and hardware operations into one entity with common goals.

Analysts say prospects for gains in market share are much greater since Howard Stringer became Sony's new chief executive last month promising to break down the "silo walls" around individual business units.

Sony's problems in the portable audio market have been widely blamed on infighting between music and hardware divisions over antipiracy issues and a general lack of focus. Both the PC and Walkman units put out their own hard drive players last year.

"Because Stringer comes out of the entertainment business, he understands the ramifications of them losing the digital Walkman market to Apple. And I am convinced that he is obsessed with trying to beat Apple at their own game," Bajarin said. (Additional reporting by Lucas van Grinsven in Amsterdam and Duncan Martell in San Francisco)

July 16, 2005 at 06:21 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (74) | Top of page | Blog Home

Web users flock to UK sites for London blast news

Web users flock to UK sites for London blast news - Yahoo! News

By Jeffrey Goldfarb Thu Jul 7, 3:38 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Record numbers of visitors deluged British Web sites on Thursday as people around the world sought news of the blasts that rocked London's public transport.

Sites operated by public broadcaster BBC, satellite TV company BSkyB (BSY.L), news provider Reuters (RTR.L) and the Financial Times business newspaper (PSON.L) suffered longer delays on their home pages Thursday morning in London because of the volume, according to a company that monitors Web traffic.

"There was a significant amount of turbulence in terms of performance," said Roopak Patel, an analyst at Keynote Systems.

The BBC expects by the end of Thursday it will have had the most visitors in a single day in the history of its news Web site, though it won't have official data until Friday.

"We have had a huge surge in people using the site today," BBC spokeswoman Naomi Luland said. "We are pretty certain this is going to be our busiest ever day."

The bbc.co.uk Web site experienced some delays, she added, but handled the volume well.

"We haven't had any major problems. We've had consistency in service. There may have been a little slowdown earlier," Luland said.

Among the other popular UK sites were sky.com/skynews, ft.com and reuters.com.

By 3:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), Sky said it had registered 1.7 million unique visitors for the day.

"That's the equivalent of a month's traffic on the site," Sky spokeswoman Stella Tooth said.

"We had 25 million page impressions and the site was very robust and withstood the extra traffic," she added.

The Reuters sites at reuters.com, reuters.co.uk and others in Europe experienced a "technical fault" with their servers unrelated to high volume earlier in the day, the company said. The problem was fixed by the afternoon.

"In the morning, we saw five times the normal traffic for our global network of sites and from this afternoon it was about twice the normal traffic," spokeswoman Susan Allsopp said. "We saw huge traffic for the tsunami in Asia so I don't think we can say it's a record, but it's high peaks in our coverage."

A spokeswoman for the FT said it would not have any information about the number of visitors to ft.com until Friday.

Keynote's index of some 40 UK business Web sites showed an increase in delays, with the wait time for pages to load spiking to 17 seconds during peak usage from the normal average of 2 seconds. Reliability decreased as well as one in four attempts to load a Web page failed at peak times, according to Keynote.

"Users who were trying to access the information were seeing higher than normal delays, and at the same time some people weren't able to get through to some sites," Patel said.

He added that U.S. news sites saw no major delays because Internet infrastructure in the United States is more robust and most users were on the Web hours after the attacks happened.

At MSNBC.com, which is co-owned by General Electric Co.'s (NYSE:GE - news) NBC and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), a spokeswoman said data indicated that traffic to the site was about twice normal levels on Thursday morning. She also said the site was seeing twice the average number of streaming video viewers.

The spokeswoman added that the site did not experience any technical delays.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, many news Web sites were so overwhelmed with visitors that they could not be accessed, forcing on-the-fly redesigns to simplify homepages with fewer photographs and less advertising. (Additional reporting by Nicole Volpe in New York)

July 10, 2005 at 09:32 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Car navigation sector heats up

Car navigation sector heats up - Yahoo! News

By Niclas Mika Wed Jun 22, 1:06 PM ET

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Concerns that car navigation firm TomTom may be squeezed by cheap Asian competitors and by bigger players such as Microsoft and
Nokia are pressuring shares in the Dutch firm, analysts said.

Shares in TomTom, whose 469 million euro ($571.5 million) initial public offering on May 27 was Amsterdam's biggest in five years, have closed below their 17.50 euro issue price in six of the last nine trading days.

They stood at 17.20 euros at 1500 GMT on Wednesday, 10 percent below a high of 19.10 euros on May 30, while Amsterdam's main AEX index rose 4 percent over the same period.

"TomTom had an enormous cash cow in the form of the TomTom Go in 2004, which will probably last until 2006, but then you will see cheaper imitations coming out of Korea and Taiwan," asset manager Gert Jan Geels at broker Eureffect said.

The firm has captured a leading market share with the portable TomTom Go device that can easily be mounted on the dashboard and moved from car to car. Sales of the device accounted for about 70 percent of first-quarter revenues.

Even before the IPO, some analysts had warned of risks from competition, but the issue was forced on the table when UBS initiated the stock with a 12 euro price target earlier this month.

"UBS really made people think," Geels said.

TomTom Chief Financial Officer Marina Wyatt told Reuters that with only 6 percent of 200 million cars on Europe's streets equipped with navigation systems, there was enough space for competitors.

"I acknowledge that there will be more competition, but I also think there needs to be more competition to really drive the category," she said.

MARGINS

Analysts say they wonder whether TomTom can hold its operating margin, which stood at 22.6 percent last year.

"If you're a bit of a smart software engineer, you can do the same," Stroeve analyst Philip Scholte said. "I wouldn't be surprised if margins go down very fast in the coming two years."

Wyatt said TomTom would itself drive down prices to attract more customers while cutting costs to keep margins strong.

TomTom has forecast its revenues to double this year at stable operating margins.

There are no consensus estimates available for TomTom yet, but analysts' estimates imply a forward price-earnings ratio in the range of 21 to 26. U.S. competitor Garmin trades at 18 times estimated 2005 earnings, according to Reuters data.

Scholte said that, apart from cheaper Asian competition, established companies might also be a threat to TomTom.

He pointed to Nokia's announcement this week of a navigation pack consisting of a Nokia 6630 phone, a wireless GPS module and software from TomTom competitor Wayfinder Systems.

"I think it is a major competitive threat to TomTom if mobile phone makers start integrating navigation software onto a phone," Scholte said.

"Then I think TomTom may be in big trouble, especially if it's Nokia. They have a market share of 32 to 33 percent of the global mobile phone market."

Wyatt said companies like Nokia or Microsoft fight on many fronts. "We're focused, we've been doing this for a long time, and we understand the market." ($1=.8206 Euro)

June 22, 2005 at 09:44 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (50) | Top of page | Blog Home

Apple Shares Dip on IPod Sales Reports

Apple Shares Dip on IPod Sales Reports - Yahoo! News

Fri Jun 3, 6:09 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - Shares of Apple Computer Inc. slid nearly 5 percent Friday following reports that sales of its iPod digital music player appear to be slowing.

Investment firm Goldman Sachs said in a report Thursday that it expects shipments of Apple's digital music player to be flat this quarter. Internet news site AppleInsider also reported Thursday that Apple has a glut of most iPod models, especially the recently launched iPod Shuffle.

In afternoon trading, Apple shares fell $1.80, or 4.5 percent, to close at $38.24 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have traded between $14.15 and $45.44 over the past year.

AppleInsider quoted unidentified sources who said that shipments of most iPod models are "flat or declining" for the first time since the device was launched in 2001.The report also said Apple was overstocked in some models of personal computers and other products.

"We don't comment on rumors and speculation," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling responded.

The iPod has seen increased competition from rival digital music players in recent months as well as the emergence of handhelds devices that perform multiple tasks, such as store photos, receive e-mail and play digital music files.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., has historically shipped more iPods to retailers than expected but Goldman Sachs analysts predicted that Apple would likely only meet expectations this quarter.

Also Friday, the company announced an iPod recycling program in which customers can bring the portable music players they no longer want to Apple's U.S. retail stores for environmentally-friendly disposal. Those who drop off an iPod will receive a 10 percent discount on a new one.

June 4, 2005 at 02:56 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Advanced workflow

Courtesy of Jeff here

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April 23, 2005 at 06:10 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

GTD - diagram

The David Allen Company

April 23, 2005 at 12:12 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Text messaging, emails not so GR8, study finds

TheStar.com - Text messaging, emails not so GR8, study finds

Researchers say it destroys mind faster than pot
But one manager feels he's sharper in `info-mania' era

SHARDA PRASHAD
BUSINESS REPORTER

Brad Simms sends and receives more than 50 text messages and 100 emails every day. He thinks his BlackBerry has sharpened his mental performance. He now has more free time to go to the gym.

And Simms laughs off a study that suggests people like him are losing their smarts � indeed, more so than if they smoked pot � because of the amount of time they spend sending electronic messages.

The University of London study found constant emailing and text messaging reduces mentality capability by an average of 10 points on an I.Q. test � five points for women and 15 for men.

"We tested office workers under `quiet' conditions, and then under `loud' conditions, which allowed them to access their email and text messages," said Glenn Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of London and author of the Hewlett-Packard-sponsored study. "The performance on I.Q. tests dropped by 10 points."

That's the same effect as missing a night's sleep, Wilson said. Smoking cannabis, by comparison, decreases mental capability by four points.

"This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," he said. "We have found that info-mania, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."

Info-mania, a term used to describe workers who constantly check text and email messages, is something to be taken seriously, Wilson said. It's a trend that, he predicts, is on the rise.

The negative effects reported in the study are temporary, Wilson explained, and performance will return when the technology is removed. However, Wilson said, if the culture of always needing to be "on" persists, info-mania could lead to permanent impairment in performance.

Simms, despite the evidence, disagrees with the survey's findings. Since acquiring his BlackBerry six months ago, he said he is more mentally astute than before. It's true, his CrackBerry � the name given to the addictive nature of the tool � is something he can't live without, but it's not ruining his ability to produce results at work.

"I think I'm a lot sharper," said the 31-year-old senior manager at Sapient, a business consulting firm. He keeps his BlackBerry on 11 hours every day. Being "on" for nearly half the day leaves Simms with an extra three hours of time every day to refocus. "It's a productivity saver. I don't have to sit in front of the computer. I can go to the gym and talk to my friends."

The study found British respondents weren't as disciplined as Simms. They didn't turn off their email or text messages when they left work � 62 per cent of survey respondents checked their messages when they were out of the office and on holiday.

Despite 89 per cent of respondents finding it "extremely rude" to answer emails and phone calls during face-to-face meetings, one in five respondents were "happy" to interrupt a business or social meeting to respond to an email or telephone call.

"The problem with this technology is that it disrupts our train of thought if you let it," said Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress and wellness expert. "A beep on the email, or a buzzing in the pocket, takes you away from what you're working on. It takes focus away from the long term."

Technology and email are consistently named as sources of stress for clients, Beuermann-King said.

"The problem is the volume (of messages) and the expectation that you need to respond within 24 hours," Beuermann-King said. "People need to set realistic expectation for themselves and others."

Wilson agrees, adding that employers should encourage a more balanced and appropriate way of working.

The Scotsman newspaper reported yesterday that the CEO of the Caudwell Group, the United Kingdom's largest independent distributor of cellphones, banned his staff from emailing last year, calling it "the cancer of modern business," and the Phones 4U chain told its 2,500 employees to abstain from cyberspace and opt for telephone or in-person communication � a practice reported to have had an "instant, dramatic effect."

Keywords
Blackberry
low IQ
iq
reduced intelligence
professor

April 23, 2005 at 09:01 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (39) | Top of page | Blog Home

GTD - The PigPog Method

GTD - The PigPog Method - PigPog Creativity Wiki

This article describes how I actually implement the GTD system using my iPaq and Outlook, though it could be done just as well with almost any computerised lists. It's my solution to the GTD problem of linking next actions to their project. If you don't know what GTD is, you'd probably best start with my introduction. If you do GTD, but use paper and pen, have a look at MarkTAW's Cascading Next Actions (http://www.marktaw.com/blog/CascadingNextActions.html) method - similar, but designed for paper users.

GTD is all based on David Allen's excellent books. You'll get far more from reading the books than from any web site. From Amazon US: - Getting Things Done (http://pigpog.com/aus.php?asin=0142000280), Ready for Anything (http://pigpog.com/aus.php?asin=0670032506). From Amazon UK - Getting Things Done (http://pigpog.com/auk.php?asin=0749922648), Ready for Anything (http://pigpog.com/auk.php?asin=0749924799).

Introduction

This article covers how I implement the GTD system - there's quite a few other ways, though - see GTD Methods - which you may also want to look at before reading this one.
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The Problem

There's a few problems that people have with GTD...
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Actually Doing Things

GTD is great at organising what you have to do, and keeping you on top of everything, but if you don't actually do any of the things, it's only of limited help. Anyone who knows me could vouch for the fact that I'm probably not the best person to advise on that ;)
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Weekly Reviews

A lot of people resist doing the weekly review. It's pretty much vital for GTD that you don't skip weekly reviews, but it's a problem for many people. My system reduces the impact of missing one a little, but only a little. By making the review a bit easier, though, it might make you resist it less. It might not, but it's worth a shot.
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Connecting Projects to Actions

Ah. This is the one for the PigPog Method. This we can help with. Read on.
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The PigPog Method
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Background

I should point out before I start that the PigPog Method was produced through a long discussion between quite a few people on the GtD_Palm Yahoo! Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gtd_palm/). It's by no means all my idea, and in fact even the post where I started it all off was just me pulling together a few ideas I'd picked up from the group. Too many people to remember had valuable suggestions that, put together, made this method, but special thanks should go to James Cameron, Gretchen, Ricky Spears (http://rickyspears.com/blog/), Harold (I think?), and Teri Pitman (http://www.spindlitis.com/).
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The Basic Setup

Personally, I implement this using Outlook Tasks, syncing with my HP iPaq hx4700's Tasks, but you should be able to apply the PigPog Method with almost any setup. It wouldn't be a convenient system with paper, though, it really needs a computer of some sort.

For the most part, my lists are pretty close to the standard ones David Allen recommends. I keep any non-action stuff in the Memos / Notes, rather than Tasks, so Someday/Maybe goes there. My @Action lists are...

* @Anywhere
* @Home
* @Internet
* @Other
* @Waiting For
* @Work

There's also 'Agendas' at the bottom of the list, for things I need to speak to somebody about.
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What? Where's the Projects List?

David Allen says we need a Projects list to keep track of all of those things we need to do that will take more than one action to be complete. That way, when we have ticked off the first action on that project, we won't forget about it altogether. However, these things will only get picked up once a week at the weekly review. There is the risk that you'll end up forgetting about something for up to a week, that really needed doing before. Also, I always found the 'projects' part of the weekly review to be annoyingly difficult and time consuming. For every project on the list, and it can be quite a few (David reckons 40-70 is common), you have to search for a matching action on one of the six (in my case - however many you have) @Action lists. If you don't find one, does that mean you just didn't look carefully enough, or is there really no action in your lists for this one? How do you know it when you see it? It's not so bad if you look at the project and can remember what the next action was - then you will probably know where to look for it, and can make sure it's there pretty quickly. If you can't remember what the next action was, though, you could have a tricky time trying to find one.

In the PigPog Method, we get rid of the Projects list entirely. In a computerised system, it's just not needed any more, and keeping track of it is a big waste of time. Using the example we used when forming the method on the GtD_Palm group, if your project was 'Conquer Albania', and the first action was 'Place Army Wanted Ad', the item on your tasks list would be Place Army Wanted Ad {Conquer Albania}. Your project and its associated next action are there together on the one line. This item goes in whatever @Action context list it belongs in. If you are going to place the ad on eBay, it would go in your @Internet list. Once you've placed the ad, you just edit the item to Responses to Ad {Conquer Albania}, and move it to your @Waiting For list.
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Planning and Keeping History

If you like to plan your projects a bit further, you can put planned future actions in the notes for the task, and just copy and paste them into the subject line when you're ready. I use a template that I insert using Pop! (http://www.digitalglyph.com/pop.html) (costs a little) on the Palm. You can also use TeikeiDA (http://www010.upp.so-net.ne.jp/quni/) (free) if you know enough about Palm DAs (Desk Accessories) to be able to deal with the Japanese documentation (or if you can read Japanese), or use Shortkeys Lite (http://www.shortkeys.com/lite.htm) (free) for Windows. Anyway, the template...

=Outcome=

=Plans=

=History=

=Notes=

Outcome is a statement of the desired outcome - how we'll know when the project is complete. I'm actually completely hopeless about filling this in. Plans is for any actions planned in the future. History is for actions that have been completed, or notes of things that happened that were connected with this project - I timestamp these using another Pop! (or Shortkeys Lite) shortcut. I keep less history now than I used to - it wasn't something I used often enough to need it, but you may be different - if so, remember to copy the information to somewhere else if you purge your completed tasks. Notes is for any other information. In the case of things like these blog entries, the notes will contain the actual article as I'm working on it. This is being typed into the Notes section of an Outlook task entitled Write {Blog: GTD: PigPog Method} right now. That way, all my work in progress is always with me in my Palm, ready to be worked on anywhere.
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Advantages

The biggest advantage for me is that I never have to worry about projects not having a next action. I'm forced to think about what I'm going to do next with a project before I can update the system to the fact that I've just done something. That helps to keep things moving. I'm slightly encouraged to do more than one thing, as that saves changing the item as many times. The Weekly Review is less daunting, because the hardest part of it is automatically taken care of. There's one less list to look at. When I find the item that says that I should write a blog entry about something, the notes from when I brainstormed about it are right there in the task item. When I come to review and proofread one I already wrote, the written article is right there ready.
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Disadvantages

There's only really one major disadvantage to this method - there can only be one next action. If you often have the sort of projects where you could do several different things next, depending on where you are when you have the time and inclination, this may be a problem. There's nothing to actually stop you from sometimes making a separate action that isn't physically attached to the project, but if you have to do that a lot, the PigPog Method may not work well for you. When you're new to the PigPog Method, there is also the danger that you could tick off a whole Project on 'auto-pilot', when you only intended to tick off the action. To work around this, you can keep completed tasks visible, and purge at the end of each week, so everything gets an extra check before it's actually gone. This also gives you a second chance to copy any history you want to keep to the calendar where it won't get purged.
[edit]
Conclusion

I find the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages, but then again, if I didn't, I wouldn't be writing this at all, would I? It takes away a lot of what I found unpleasant and difficult with GTD, and makes it all feel much more fluid. I'm a born fiddler, and I do keep trying different methods, but the simplicity of the PigPog Method has lured me back every time.

So far.

April 22, 2005 at 10:23 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (44) | Top of page | Blog Home

GTD Introduction

GTD Introduction - PigPog Creativity Wiki

Summary: GTD - Getting Things Done - is a book by David Allen, giving a series of principles for managing the day to day tasks and projects we all have to do. It is based on the idea that if we get everything that concerns us out of our heads, and into a single trusted system, which is then reviewed regularly, we will leave our minds clearer, and be better able to respond to new inputs.

GTD is all based on David Allen's excellent books. You'll get far more from reading the books than from any web site. From Amazon US: - Getting Things Done (http://pigpog.com/aus.php?asin=0142000280), Ready for Anything (http://pigpog.com/aus.php?asin=0670032506). From Amazon UK - Getting Things Done (http://pigpog.com/auk.php?asin=0749922648), Ready for Anything (http://pigpog.com/auk.php?asin=0749924799).

Introduction

This article is intended to cover just the basics of GTD, so you can understand what we're talking about here even if you've not read the book.. If you find the ideas interesting, though, I'd strongly recommend you buy the book, as it really does cover the ideas well, and in a lot more detail than I will here. Buy it through the links at the top, and PigPog will get a little cut ;)

David Allen's GTD involves clearing your mind of all the things you keep remembering and thinking about, that are nagging at you to do them. The idea is that if you can get these things written down, into a system you trust, and know that you'll be reminded of them at the appropriate time, you can get them out of your head, and use all that spare head-space for something more useful. Storing cheese, perhaps.
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The Workflow

One of the unusual things about GTD is that it gives you a full workflow for managing your 'stuff', rather than just a load of tips and tricks, or methods for dealing with one part of it.

David splits the process up into five distinct stages...
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Collect

First, we need to collect all the things that are worrying us, or that we need to do something about. David calls this a 'Mind Sweep' - sweeping everything that's on our minds into our system. He suggests one idea to a sheet of paper, and throw them all into an inbox to process later, but the actual method doesn't matter too much, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the flow of ideas. In DA's language, anything that holds some part of your attention is an open loop.

Personally, I collect new ideas in my iPaq, either using the voice recorder, or Pocket Informant's Alarm Notes, where you just scribble on the screen - it doesn't convert the scribbles into text, just stores them as scribbles. Machines from palmOne have Notes, which is very similar, or you can download Diddlebug (http://diddlebug.sourceforge.net/). Anything that can be used without needing to think much should do the job - index cards, sheets of paper, or whatever.
[edit]
Process

Processing is the act of going through all the items in your inbox, that you collected earlier, and deciding what they are, and what you need to do with them. They might need throwing in the bin, they might need storing somewhere for later reference, they might just need reading. For many things, though, you're going to need to actually do something about them.

The question to ask here for each item is "What's the next action?" This is the very next thing you would do about this item, if it was the apropriate time, you were in the right place, etc. If this one action would complete the item, then it's just an action to do. If it won't, then it's a project, and you'll need an extra reminder so that when you've done that action, you won't forget about the item.
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Organise

You need to keep organised lists of all the things you have to do, and although these could be arranged in various ways, David has specific suggestions for how to do this...
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Action lists

These are the lists of next actions you need to do. David recommends splitting these into a few lists, based around 'contexts'. A context is either a place you need to be, or something you need to have with you to be able to do that action. A list of phone calls could be one context, things you can only do at home or only at the office could be others. Your contexts are unlikely to be the same as mine, and we're probably both different from David. MarkTAW has a nice article on picking contexts (http://www.marktaw.com/gtd/ContextLists.html) - it's easy to get carried away.

David suggests placing an @ symbol in front of each of these lists - @ for Action - if you're using computer based lists (Outlook, Palm, etc), the @ sign will make them sort to the top, which is useful, as these are the lists you'll be referring to most often.
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Projects

I mention above the idea that some items will take more than just the next single action to be complete. These things are projects, and you need to keep a note of them on a separate list, and try to make sure that everything on this list always has at least one connected action on the action lists.

Linking projects to their associated next actions is one of the most discussed parts of GTD, and the trick I use has become known as the PigPog Method.
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Agendas

Things you need to talk to people about. If you group the items by person, when you're next speaking to that person, you can quickly get a list of all the things you needed them for.
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Waiting For

If you're waiting for someone else to come back to you, or waiting for delivery of something you've ordered, but it's something you still need to keep track of, it goes on this list. It's for anything that isn't for you to do, but that you need to remember about. You may need to chase some of these things up, but you'll pick that up when you review, and then they'll go into either an action list or your Agendas list.
[edit]
Someday/Maybe

This is the list for anything that you're not ready or not able to do yet, or just don't want to. If you want to learn Swedish at some point, but you don't have time to start yet, it goes here. If you have to prepare a report for your boss, but the relevant information isn't available until next month, you'd make a note here.
[edit]
Review

In many ways, reviewing is at the heart of GTD. If you don't review your lists, you won't be able to trust them, and your mind will worry about them again. That's what we're trying to avoid here. How often, and when, you review may depend on who you are and what you do, but David suggests a single review once a week. Many people find a smaller daily review helps a lot, too. The weekly review is where you tie up your projects with their actions, and make sure nothing has been forgotten about. It should also include getting all of your inboxes emptied, and all of your notes and messages processed.
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Do

This is kind of the point of all this. If you don't do things, you're not really Getting Things Done. You've got all the things you want to do listed - the only question is how to pick which one to do now. Again, David has advice - and it starts with the way we organised our action lists. If you went along with his suggestion, you have your lists organised by context, so you can probably only do things from one or two of the lists right now anyway - so the rest of the lists can be ignored. After that, it comes down to how much time you have, how much energy you have, and how important the things are.
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Results

Personally, I feel better organised using GTD than without it. I don't have the type or level of workload that really needs it, so I probably get less out of it than some other people do. Lots of people report very big changes, though, and I've yet to hear of anyone who didn't get anything out of it, unless they've been pushed into it without actually being interested.

April 22, 2005 at 10:22 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

filofax ideas

Forums - Using a Filofax

http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=726&start=15

I use:

“In-box�� for anything that comes to mind, new commitments etc;

Diary;

Context/Agenda lists: @on the road, @hardware store, @home computer, @wife (re: holidays, schools, finances etc), @parents, etc;

Personal Projects list;

Outline project planning – bullet points on a single page covering the main steps of a project, including desired outcome;

Someday/maybe list (depressingly long);

Reference, which includes birthdays, books I might buy (which could also be called @bookshop), CD’s I might get etc;

Phone numbers.

April 22, 2005 at 10:16 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home

The hipster PDA

Globetechnology: The hipster PDA

The BlackBerry generation, writes TRALEE PEARCE, is finding salvation in pen and paper
By TRALEE PEARCE
Monday, April 18, 2005 Updated at 9:16 AM EST

Globe and Mail Update
On BlackBerry-addicted Parliament Hill, NDP press secretary Ian Capstick turns heads with his newest organizational gadget: a stack of 3 x 5 index cards held together by a black bull clip.

His Hill-issued BlackBerry was starting to annoy him. He was drowning in unreliable notes at his desk. So when he stumbled upon a simple stack of index cards in a filing cabinet one day, he tried them out.

"I started to keep a few cards in my back pocket to write press requests on," the 24-year-old says. "Soon, it evolved into a way to keep the entire day's activities in order. Now, people are pretty used to seeing it in my hand."

A month into using his new system, he found an on-line community at a blog called 43 Folders (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/introducing_the.html). There, the file-card-and-clip system has been dubbed the "hipster PDA."

Advertisements

The site is a fetishization of all things analogue -- Moleskine diaries, index cards and other office-supply classics -- and an ode to a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Site founder and self-proclaimed "Web nerd" Merlin Mann, 38, has his tongue only partly in his cheek in recasting index cards and clips as the gadget du jour.

"I have a theory," he says from his home office in San Francisco. "There's been a lot of encouragement from all sides over the last 30 years to look at all of your problems as something that can be solved with a piece of technology."

The catch? We start to think about what tools we want to use before we think about what problems we want to solve.

Mann is fond of the old saw that with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. With a $400 piece of equipment, you'll force yourself into using its features even if they're not natural to you.

For Capstick, "the BlackBerry is a frustrating piece of technology. It doesn't always work. When I reach for my 3 x 5s, it works. I don't have to worry abut service interruptions or dropping it or recharging it. And you can sit on it and it doesn't hurt."

The cards fill up starting with the first meeting of the morning.

On the day we speak, he quickly lists off policy questions that take up a card each that he'll run by the MPs. There's a to-do card to link journalists and MPs on specific questions. If there's a new tack or new language, he'll write himself reminders.

And as backlash against the "CrackBerry" grows, Capstick says the hipster PDA reintroduced a little civility to work relations.

"When I'm standing next to Jack [Layton], it's a fantastic thing not to be typing into my BlackBerry looking like I'm disinterested and disoriented," he says. "You're much more in tune with the person you're talking to. I'm in politics. Politics is about people and technology can be a barrier. When I pull out my 3 x 5s they know I'm making notes about them, not checking my e-mail or surfing the Web."

He adds that people feel comfortable watching him jot down a note. He welcomes spell-checking, for instance. "Reporters can correct me as I'm writing something down. It would be considered rude to look at someone's BlackBerry."

He still has his BlackBerry, but uses it only for e-mail. Everything else is in the cards.

Mann stresses that he's not anti-Palm or anti-BlackBerry, he's just on a personal quest to use only the gadgets he really needs. As an early adopter of the PDA -- he's had four since 1997 -- he says he was using his for "information capture" not "information recall."

In other words, many of the things people have PDAs for -- calling up calendars, addresses, memos, wines you want to try -- he wasn't using. He was just using it to write things down in an elaborate way.

"I work at home at a computer. I don't need to call all that stuff up," he says. "I need a way when I'm in a bar, of writing down a music suggestion and handing it to somebody. And I need a way to write down a website someone wants me to visit. I put it in my little clip and I'm done."

Mann redefines the PDA from Personal Data Assistant to "Parietal Disgorgement Aid," referring to the lobes in the brain concerned with the reception and correlation of sensory information.

On his website, he instructs people to "1. Get a bunch of 3" x 5" file cards," and "2. Clip them together with a binder clip." And No. 3 is, "There is no step 3."

He attributes the hearty response to his system in part to a techie overload.

"When you look at what's happened in the last five years there are two digital appliances that have become very important," he says. "The cellphone. And increasingly, almost everyone I know under the age of 40 -- and many over 40 -- have some kind of personal music device like an iPod."

"So that means unless your Palm is integrated into your phone or your MP3 player you're gonna need a Chewbacca bandolier to keep all your stuff on," he says, betraying his nerdiness with a Star Wars reference. "Do you really need a sack with three pieces of equipment in it every time you go to a bar? There's something a little tragic about it."

Not to mention what happens when you sit down with a crew of fellow tech lovers, emptying your pockets onto a table.

"We call it Nerd Mountain -- I have a picture of it on my site."

But since we all love to make things as complicated as possible using techie computer lingo, his website goes on to list "Settings and Preferences" which in this case involves such things as coloured index cards to create categories and his pen of choice, the Fisher Space Pen. And the system dovetails nicely with his other fetish, Getting Things Done, famous for its "next action" system of time management.

Without having to get out a stylus, turn something on, recharge batteries and so on, Mann found his life simplified to the point where he can get a little evangelical.

"It's facile to say I'm a Luddite who just likes paper," he says. "It reflects a certain kind of decision about your life. You've looked at the tools that are available and you've chosen one that's more modest but does what you need in a more elegant way."

And he points out that computer programmers have been relying on index cards as a way to organize information for a long time.

"There's a development approach called extreme programming and index cards play a big role in that." He calls them "atomic units of information."

"They're inexpensive, they have a very satisfying feeling when you tear one in half and throw it in the trash when a task is done."

Mann and Capstick are clearly not alone. One the newest editions of the famous Moleskine bound notebook features a mini accordion file perfect for index cards. And the hip men's shopping mag Cargo has created pullout 3 x 5 cards with shopping info printed on them -- perfect to clip into your PDA.

Capstick says he had watched his roommate, University of Ottawa grad student Mark Greenan, 23, use the index card to catalogue notes for his thesis on philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Greenan says he has 100 to 200 index cards of his "scrawly chicken-scratch-like writing."

"There's something to be said for analogue," he says, adding that he's never owned a PDA, although he has eyed them on occasion. "I think this is more suited to me."

In his pocket currently are cards containing lists of people to e-mail, events he's going to, and notes from a lecture. He added a bull clip after Capstick revealed his hipster PDA.

"That was definitely a design improvement."

Mann and writing partner Danny O'Brien see the hipster PDA as part of a bigger trend they call "life hacks," emanating from the computer programming world.

"It's the idea that there are certain kinds of rules and practices that can work as excellent short cuts," he says. He defines a hack as a "frequently inelegant way of fixing a problem. A way of getting by."

For instance, O'Brien has written a script that pops up while he's surfing the Web asking if he should get back to work. Or how about a webcam to remind you to improve your computer-desk posture? They're known as "useful landmines."

Obvious maybe, but increasingly necessary to keep technology in its place.

He says many of us live in fear of our PCs, logging off correctly, fretting about not screwing them up, calling our IT departments in desperation.

"You start to think of yourself as a victim of your own technology. You end up having to buy books you gotta read, instead of asking yourself what will get you closer to where you want to be."

April 18, 2005 at 12:50 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

Company Develops Way to Restore Cookies

Yahoo! News - Company Develops Way to Restore Cookies

By The Associated Press

NEW YORK - The company behind those floating ads that dance across Web pages has developed a way to restore the data profiles that many privacy-conscious users try to delete from their computers.

Most users don't know what they are doing when they run antispyware programs that delete the profiles, known as cookies, said Mookie Tenembaum, founder of United Virtualities Inc.

By deleting cookies, he said, users thwart efforts by Web sites to prevent the same ads from appearing over and over. Tenembaum said visitors are also forced to repeatedly enter usernames and passwords, which are sometimes stored in the profiles.

United Virtualities calls the product Persistent Identification Element. It taps a separate profile system that's found in Macromedia Inc.'s Flash and that's not generally affected by antispyware programs.

Using the product, when a Web site discovers a cookie missing, it can look for a backup in Flash and restore the cookie.

Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., was critical of United Virtualities.

"Companies should respect people's choices," he said, "If a consumer makes the effort of getting antispyware software, they don't want this stuff."

Macromedia responded by issuing instructions for turning the profile system off: http://www.macromedia.com/go/52697ee8.

Tenembaum acknowledged that his product might displease what he described as the handful of knowledgeable users who had consciously deleted their cookies.

But "we cannot make everybody happy all of the time," he said. "We can make most of the people happy most of the time."

April 7, 2005 at 07:29 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Buying the future

Economist.com

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Now they have assumed power, what will consumers do with it?

FIFTY years ago, when products were more individual, manufacturers had the upper hand. They could charge a lot for successful items because they were made in small quantities. As competition increased and became more global, there were more products to choose from and they increasingly resembled each other. This gave retailers the advantage because they could pick and choose which products to sell, and demand the best prices from suppliers. Now the consumer is taking command.

Shoppers' rights have been beefed up by new legislation, and much more information is readily available from consumer reports and the like. All this has made it harder for merchants to rip consumers off or sell them shoddy merchandise. But above all, it is the arrival of the internet that is responsible for the big shift in power. The web makes it easy for people to discover what they want to know and who offers the best deal. This could still be a retailer, but it could also be a manufacturer selling directly to consumers, or a trader on eBay who has bought a job lot and is auctioning it off at bargain prices. So start with the internet to see where consumer power may lead.

E-commerce is growing rapidly. Online shoppers in America during the 2004 holiday season�the busiest time for retailers, from November 1st to December 26th�spent $23 billion online, 25% more than in the same period in 2003, according to a regular e-commerce survey carried out by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings. Spending patterns on the internet are increasingly coming to resemble those in the high street. Clothing was the most popular item bought online in America, accounting for 16% of online sales, followed by toys and video games with 11% and consumer electronics with 10%. Jewellery was the fastest-growing category, with the value of sales doubling to $1.9 billion.

These figures, however, exclude services, such as online travel bookings�a business estimated to have been worth $50 billion in America in 2004, up about 25% on the previous year. That includes bookings made with online travel businesses, through firms such as Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, and bookings being made directly on airline, hotel and car-rental websites. All this threatens the future of many high-street travel agents. Through their computers, consumers now have easy access to information that once only travel agents could lay their hands on.

But as firms making consumer goods, electronics and cars have found, the influence of the net extends well beyond buying goods and services online. A quarter of the people using search engines to get information about consumer electronics and computer products bought a product in the end�and 92% of those shopped offline, according to a joint study by Overture, a marketing company owned by Yahoo!, and comScore Networks, a firm that monitors consumer behaviour.

The group to watch closely is the younger generation. Young people are the most avid users of the internet because they have grown up with its benefits. In America, 18- to 34-year-olds make up 24% of the population, but account for 40% of all the web pages viewed. A joint study by comScore and America's Online Publishers Association provides a fascinating insight into their behaviour.

Tomorrow's world

More than any other group, the 18- to 34-year-olds access the internet from places other than home, school or work, especially if they are using a mobile phone. They seem to want to be connected wherever they go. They also see the internet as one of their most important sources of information and entertainment. Some 40% use the web to help them pick a film to watch, and to find out where it is playing. One-third use it to look up local restaurants and clubs. And every day, an average 30% of them visit an entertainment website, only slightly fewer than those who regularly read the arts and entertainment sections in newspapers. Perhaps less surprisingly, females are more likely to visit retail sites, whereas males surf the net in search of computer games, cars and sports.

For this age group, the internet will remain the most dominant medium in their lives, as it will be for the following generation�who even at primary school are using the web to do their homework. This does not mean they will reject the traditional retail environment entirely. Shops will be as much part of their scene as they have been for their parents or grandparents. But some shops may be used in different ways. One indication is the growth of brand showrooms, such as the Apple and Sony stores. Their main role is to demonstrate a range of the company's products, with knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff on hand who are under no pressure to clinch a sale. Where people actually buy the product in the end becomes of secondary importance.

Having achieved power, consumers will not give it up. �There's clearly no turning back,� says Dell's Mr George. �The market will get more fragmented, customers' needs will get more diverse, and sophistication and empowerment will continue to grow.� As marketeers adjust to this new environment, advertising may well have to become more permission-based. That could involve economic incentives, such as the bargain that has long paid for lots of free TV: in return for sitting through the ads, here are the programmes you want.

But the bargain with today's consumers will have to become more refined. Gmail, a free online e-mail service offered by Google, could provide a clue to the way things are going. It has lots of features and offers 1,000 megabytes of storage space, much more than its rivals. In return, users agree to allow small text ads to be placed in their e-mails. The ads are selected to match the subject matter of the e-mail, with Google's ad-placement software picking up on certain key words. An e-mail exchange about digital cameras, for instance, is likely to attract links to companies selling them. Despite some initial concerns about privacy, most Gmail users are savvy enough to know that it is the computer software, not a real person, which is reading their e-mails. Lots of people have volunteered for the service's experimental stage, so Google is expected to make it more widely available soon.

As media become increasingly interactive, consumers will be able to exercise ever more choice over which of them they consume, how, when and where. Getting advertising will be optional�so it had better be good, useful and relevant to their lives. But even mass-media advertising will continue to have a role, at least for the foreseeable future. For as Ogilvy & Mather's Mrs Lazarus points out, even those ever-connected young people do not want to be interactive all of the time. Sometimes they just want to go home, sink into the sofa, switch on the television and watch the Super Bowl�ads and all. Consumer power also means you can decide to take an evening off.

April 5, 2005 at 07:58 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (42) | Top of page | Blog Home

Target practice

Economist.com

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Advertising used to be straightforward. Now it has to be many different things to different people

IT IS not the sort of thing most people would notice, but for Madison Avenue, the spiritual home in New York of America's advertising industry, it signalled a sea change. In January, Advertising Age altered the rules for the trade publication's annual listing of top advertising agencies. Rather than covering just the creative side of the business, the list now includes companies with expertise in related disciplines, such as interactive advertising, direct marketing and public relations. Blame the pesky consumer for letting the low life in.

Adland is reacting to a glaring mismatch between dollars and eyeballs. Although most advertising expenditure goes on television and print, many of the people the ads are supposed to reach are not looking. Instead, they are playing video games, watching DVDs or, most popular of all, surfing the internet (see chart 5). Advertising agencies used to bill their clients on a media-commission basis, which gave them an incentive to recommend TV advertising because it was the most expensive and gave them the biggest commission. Now the agencies are mostly being paid on a fee basis, so they should be less reluctant to use other media. But business runs on numbers and advertising clients demand figures, especially on the return they can expect by spending their money in different ways.

The problem is measuring that return. �The research is lagging far behind the development of new media outlets,� says Mary Gerzema, head of communications planning at Universal McCann. And there are many other complicating factors that can skew the figures. The decision to buy something, for instance, might be made online, but if the purchase itself is carried out elsewhere, the customer might still change his mind. If he visits a shop, he may end up buying, say, an own-brand product because it turns out to be on special offer.

Some of the alternative forms of marketing can be measured reasonably well, such as the click-through response rate to internet ads. But how do you work out the return on investing in a sponsored hip-hop evening (a question another car company once asked Mr Farley of Toyota's Scion, who was stumped for an answer)? To make things even more difficult, media are now being delivered in lots of different ways. Yahoo!, for one, is steadily turning into an entertainment service. It is screening more shows on the internet, including premieres. �It makes media planning into much more of an art,� says Michael Wolf, head of media and entertainment for McKinsey, a management consultancy. �A lot of people try to apply science to it. The science is not working as well as the art.�

As Mr Wolf points out, increasing value is being placed on any medium that succeeds in aggregating a large audience of people with similar interests. Using adland's militaristic language, he explains that it is �no longer the shotgun approach, very much the rifle shot.� So which of the advertising and marketing businesses will prevail in this changing landscape? Here are the pitches.

Mine, all mine

Saatchi & Saatchi's Mr Roberts reckons there has never been a better time for the creative business. Agencies now have more freedom to express their ideas, he believes: �We are not going to be downtrodden by the research vampires because all the stuff they are looking at is no longer relevant.� Saatchi & Saatchi's strategy is to become �the hottest ideas shop on the planet�, he says.

By contrast, Mr Draft, the direct-marketing expert, insists that �the future is what we do.� He says the experience of direct marketeers and the information they have about consumers means that his type of agency is now best equipped to deliver measurable results. He uses a variety of media, including TV, specifically to garner responses, through reply cards, free telephone numbers or the internet. Direct-marketing techniques can also build brands, he says, pointing to successful campaigns Draft has run for Verizon, a huge American telecoms group.

Robin Kent, until recently chairman of Universal McCann, comes up with yet another angle: �The media planner is becoming the most important person on the planet.� He says that it is now impossible to create an advertising message designed for any particular group �if you have absolutely no idea how you are going to reach that consumer, where they are and what mindset they are going to be in.�

For his part, Richard Edelman, president of Edelman, bangs his own drum: �PR is now creating the runway for the advertising plane to take off.� Companies use PR firms to help them behind the scenes and to work their messages into the media. One example is Edelman's work on the launch of Halo 2, the second version of a hugely popular video game that runs on Microsoft's Xbox. Eighteen months before the game arrived in the shops, it was handed out to an �inner circle� of committed players in order to create a buzz of excitement. When Halo 2 was launched in November last year, it raked in over $100m in sales on its first day, thanks to pre-ordered copies�more than any movie has ever managed.

The elusive consumer they are all chasing is not only becoming more knowledgeable, but also demographically different from yesteryear's. From its skyscraper in Tokyo's Shimbashi district, Dentsu, Japan's biggest advertising agency, looks down on an ancient shogun hunting ground. Nowadays its clients' prey takes many different forms. Gone are the days when Japan mostly consisted of families of four, says Norio Kamijo, director of Dentsu's Centre for Consumer Studies. Today the market clusters around opposite poles. At one end is a greying population; at the other are people like the �parasite singles�, who live with their parents and spend whatever they earn on themselves, and the NEETS (not in education, employment or training). They all represent valuable consumer markets in their own way, but have almost nothing in common.

Other countries face similar fragmentation, and some of the groups are hard to place. Where, for example, would you pigeonhole Britain's �chavs�? They are young people likely to be found late at night in the centre of provincial British cities, probably drunk and behaving loutishly. Best avoided, perhaps, but as their uniform they have adopted certain styles usually associated with luxury brands, notably Burberry's famous beige check pattern. No matter that much of it may be fake, this has prompted Burberry to stop selling its beige check baseball cap and to give other colours more prominence.

With marketing becoming both more perilous and more complex, many companies are left �vastly confused and intrigued�, says Leslie Moeller of Booz Allen Hamilton. No matter how much you spend trying to promote a brand using mass media alone, �it is not going to get the job done.�

With numbers of viewers and readers declining, the future does not look very rosy for network television and newspapers. But even among these formats there will be winners and losers, says Mr Rutherfurd of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the media merchant bank, so it would be unwise to count out older media completely. Indeed, TV never killed radio and video never killed TV (see chart 6). Moreover, there are signs that the decline in TV's share of audience has started to flatten, just as the proliferation of cable services has reached possible saturation point, adds Mr Rutherfurd.

And old media can evolve. Some broadsheet newspapers in Britain are now produced in more handy tabloid sizes; and the TV networks can combat their rivals with big-budget programmes that pull in huge audiences, such as the Super Bowl, the Hollywood Oscars and some of the better reality shows. Cable networks cannot usually afford such programmes. Besides, you never know what may turn up. Satellite radio, which suddenly appeared in America in 2001, now has around 4m subscribers, providing a small but potentially interesting alternative audience to terrestrial radio.

Advertisers have to be prepared to use any media, argues Ogilvy and Mather's Mrs Lazarus. An agency's expertise will lie in knowing how to craft communications in each sector and be flexible about how to put all the pieces together for a particular client in a particular market. As an example, she points to a successful campaign her agency ran in India for Hutch, one of the mobile services of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa. It portrayed Hutch as a faithful puppy that followed his young master everywhere. Animals and children may be an advertising clich�, but this was a multi-media campaign, ranging from television to the internet and direct marketing. And it involved a media plan �as sophisticated as anything that runs anywhere in the world,� says Mrs Lazarus.

Measuring the unmeasurable

Whether advertising is an art or a science, people will not stop trying to measure it. After much criticism, Nielsen, part of VNU, a Dutch media group, is trying to overhaul its ratings system, which is widely used to measure TV audiences. Mr Fredericks, at TNS Media Intelligence, is also looking at new ways of tracking how and where ads appear. The effects of some forms of marketing, such as product placement, look next to impossible to measure. Most TV commercials are now tracked automatically, but making sure that someone who has been paid to consume a certain drink in a show on camera actually does so is a lot harder. The most ambitious effort to measure the effectiveness of advertising is Project Apollo, which is now recruiting 30,000 households in America to become the most closely studied consumers ever. Apollo, run jointly by Arbitron and VNU, will collect information on these families' lifestyles. To measure their exposure to electronic media, for example, they will carry an Arbitron device called a �portable people meter�. This device, the size of a pager, was initially developed to detect inaudible codes placed in radio and TV commercials. For Apollo, similar codes will be incorporated in other forms of electronic media as well, ranging from the cinema to background music in places like supermarkets and�where ads contain sound files�the internet.

A variety of methods will be used to find out how members of the households spend their day and what they buy. Nielsen's Homescan system, for instance, uses scanners to read the barcodes on all their purchases. Linda Dupree, in charge of new-product development at Arbitron, explains that although marketers gather up lots of information, it has always been difficult to put it all together to establish a link between exposure to ads and buying behaviour. This is what Apollo is designed to achieve. One of the first companies to sign up was P&G. Arbitron hopes that eventually several hundred of the top American advertisers will take part.

Mr Gossman, of Revenue Science, has his own ideas about the way advertisers will reach consumers in the future. His behavioural targeting software is already at work on many websites. For instance, it was used by the online edition of the Wall Street Journal to try to establish which readers were frequent flyers from their reading of travel-related stories and sections. Individuals using the websites remain anonymous, but they can be identified as discrete users by �cookies�, electronic tracers that show which websites they have visited. When the frequent travellers returned to the Wall Street Journal site, they were presented with American Airline ads in whatever sections they read. The response to the ads increased significantly, says Mr Gossman.

As most networked electronic media will probably be using internet-based technology and protocols, the same user could be tracked even when he uses different devices, such as a mobile phone or an interactive TV set. This, says Mr Gossman, allows audiences with common interests and passions to be grouped together, making them commercially attractive to advertisers, wherever they happen to be. �Networks used to be about distribution; now they are going to be about consumer information,� he says. Apart from delivering ads that are more likely to be relevant, the advertisers will also be able to limit the number of times an ad is shown to an individual in order to avoid irritating him. Some people may see this as an invasion of their privacy, but Mr Gossman says: �We don't know who you are, and we don't want to know who you are.�

�The consumer experience with advertising will improve,� predicts Arbitron's Mr Morris. The advertising industry must hope he is right. People are increasingly able to filter out ads. They can pay to avoid them, use technology to block them or simply ignore them. The average American is now subjected to some 3,000 marketing messages every day and could not possibly take all of them in. Two-thirds of consumers feel �constantly bombarded� with too much advertising and marketing, according to a survey by Yankelovich Partners, a firm of marketing consultants. Perhaps some of the back-door methods to reach consumers will get through. But many people can now spot an advert dressed up as editorial�and if they can't, there are hundreds of news groups and bloggers on the web who will happily point it out to them. Today's consumers have plenty of champions.

April 5, 2005 at 07:56 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Motoring online

Economist.com

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Buying a car will never be the same again, thank heavens

“THE good news is we have attracted them. The bad news is they are who they are—they're a handful.�� Jim Farley is talking about his customers. They are what marketing people call generation Y, a group born between 1980 and 1994. They have already turned some clothing, drinks and electronics brands into winners and losers. Now they are starting to buy cars. They have grown up with more choice than any other generation. They are busy and know how to shop around, both online and offline. They make 40% more complaints than their parents do about the same car. But then they never expect things to break, and refuse to put up with irritations an older generation would simply grin and bear.

It is not as though they are buying a Lexus, Toyota's successful luxury car, which can cost $50,000 or more. The division Mr Farley runs is Scion, an entry-level brand which the Japanese carmaker launched in June 2003. It is aimed at young people, with prices starting around $13,000. Mr Farley has found himself on a steep learning curve, but he thinks the lessons have been extremely useful. They could give Toyota a head start on its competitors, because by 2010 generation Y will be buying one in four cars in America.

Scion's marketing position was deliberately chosen to avoid being �mainstream�. Its range of cars, two small saloons and a boxy little van-type vehicle often seen scooting around the narrow streets of Tokyo, are certainly not the sort of car that generation Y's parents would drive; nor would the parents listen to the hip-hop music that Scion's customers enjoy. To connect with the youngsters, Scion takes its marketing to where they are: at cinemas, certain night clubs and listening to particular radio programmes before they go out in the evening. But Scion also tunes the �texture� of its marketing towards the more underground elements of that music scene. So when it sponsors nightclub events, it hires local rather than national hip-hop artists; and when it arranges test-drive sessions, it parks the vehicles outside the local charity shop rather than Virgin Records.

But however careful you are, you can still get it badly wrong. In what was thought to be a good advertising buy, Scion took a commercial spot during �The Bachelor�, an American TV reality show in which single men are teamed up with potential brides. Despite high ratings, the show turned out to be too cheesy for Scion's customers. �We got hundreds of e-mails from owners complaining,� confesses Mr Farley. �They were so upset with us for contaminating the brand in their eyes.� Now he would rather spend money on developing owners' clubs and helping them link up with similar ones in Japan.

It all goes to show that market research can be awfully unreliable. Many companies have stopped trying to elicit views on products from focus groups, because they can be skewed by one or two strong personalities. When Germany's BMW decided to launch the new Mini Cooper in America, it was faced with a pile of figures that showed Americans did not want a small car�and the Mini would be the smallest in the market. Sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and pick-up trucks had overtaken cars, and SUVs were getting bigger and bigger. But the company thought it would be able to find some customers for its car. �All our gut feeling, and some of our research, led us to believe these would be interesting people,� says Jack Pitney, who runs Mini USA. Its customers would not come from any particular demographic group, but they might share a certain �mindset�. They would be different ages, brand-conscious, but not interested in status. And they probably travelled a lot, read a lot and were very internet-savvy. �We also thought these customers would not react well to aggressive marketing,� adds Mr Pitney.

Such people like to discover things for themselves, the company concluded. But how do you point them in the right direction? The original 1960s Mini had been a big hit in Europe and Japan, but very few were sold in the United States, so only 2% of Americans knew about it. To start them thinking, the company took some of the biggest SUVs it could find and put Minis on their roofs. They drove these around some of the main towns and handed out small business cards. On one side was a picture of the Mini, and on the other it simply said: �Coming to America�. Below was the address of the Mini USA website. This sort of campaign is an example of �guerrilla marketing�, designed to intrigue people and direct them to a website to find out what is going on. Once on the site, they would find it rich in information and �viral marketing� elements. For example, you could build yourself a customised Mini Cooper online and e-mail the specifications to your friends.

According to Mini USA, three out of ten people who configure a car online end up forwarding the specifications to a dealer and buying it. Customers who have used the company's website account for 86% of buyers. Because they can order a huge variety of both factory-fitted items, such as different body styles and colours, and dealer-fitted accessories, such as alternative lighting, audio systems and wheels, few Minis are likely to be exactly the same. Buyers of Minis and Scions seem very keen on customisation, but only at mass-production prices. �That is going to have a fundamental impact on product planning for the car business in the United States,� says Mr Farley.

Both Scion and Mini are relatively small fry. The number of Minis sold in America last year was around 36,000, a drop in the ocean of 16.9m vehicles sold overall. Still, that is more than three times the number of Minis sold during the entire eight years that the original car was on sale in America. The Mini factory at Oxford in Britain is working flat out and has become BMW's most productive plant anywhere.

Moving Motown

But the internet has changed much more than the buying of niche vehicles: it has also transformed the mainstream car trade. Selling cars used to be a relatively straightforward business. Customers might see an advertisement in a newspaper, perhaps pick up a brochure, visit a couple of dealers, decide on a model, haggle over the price and the trade-in value of their own car, order and take delivery. �Those days are gone altogether,� says Chuck Sullivan, Ford's director of business-development marketing.

With so many of its customers using the internet to research their planned purchases, Ford is changing the way it is spending its marketing budget. Four years ago, most of its advertising dollars went on traditional media, such as television, print and outdoor billboards. Non-traditional forms, such as the internet, accounted for only around 2% of the total. Now the share is 20%. One of the attractions of the internet is that its effects can be measured. For instance, a click on a banner ad on a website can be traced through to the company's own website, the selection of a model, the response of a dealer and ultimately a sale.

A website works like a living brochure, says Mr Sullivan. For example, Ford's F-150 pick-up truck, of which some 900,000 were sold last year, is shown in graphic detail. There was even a series of videos in which rival trucks were cut apart and their components compared with those of the F-150, to support Ford's claim that its pick-up is the toughest. Users can check models and prices, browse through the inventory of local dealers or get a quote for the one they have designed for themselves using Ford's build-your-own option.

So why bother with dealers at all? �The dealership is even more important than it used to be,� says Mr Sullivan. �People want to touch the vehicle, to smell the inside, to kick the tyres and take it for a test drive.� Beside demonstrating the product, dealers are also needed to manage the purchase and after-sales support, such as servicing. Moreover, they can play a big part in customising cars for buyers, fitting anything from different wheels to instruments and DVD systems, all of which could make a handy contribution to profits.

Many car dealers initially resisted giving consumers so much power, says Jeremy Anwyl, president of Edmunds, one of the earliest websites in America to provide online car-buying services such as road tests, vehicle comparisons and average selling prices and trade-in values. But he concedes: �A lot of them are now realising there are efficiencies on the dealer side too.� Research by Edmunds and others shows that the consumers who have benefited most from using the internet when buying a car are those who used to get a raw deal in the showrooms, including women and minorities. �So it's a great leveller in that respect,� says Mr Anwyl.

Indeed, carmakers would do well to study the way people compare vehicles online. Edmunds has found that by tracking the behaviour of website users, it can predict with considerable confidence how many cars different manufacturers will be selling four weeks hence, and where. Edmunds uses special software in order to screen out car enthusiasts who are just looking for information.

The company also has a good idea of what people say about different cars. Its website receives 2,000-3,000 reviews a week from buyers of new cars who fill out an online appraisal form. They also suggest improvements to future models. Another part of the company's site is a free-for-all area on which some 500,000 people regularly post items. If there is anything wrong with a vehicle, complaints will soon pop up here. Edmunds is now developing new products to commercialise this information.

As the carmakers have discovered, a website has become an essential part of doing business with consumers, and almost all their advertising now gives their website address. That makes a lot of sense. William Makower, the chief executive of Panlogic, a digital-marketing consultancy based in Britain, explains that a typical television or print ad might get a few seconds of attention, but a website typically holds the browser's attention for 2-5 minutes. In Britain, he says, the internet is now the third most popular media form. This makes it rather puzzling that many companies devote only around 2% of their advertising budget to it.

April 5, 2005 at 07:55 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (38) | Top of page | Blog Home

Man's best friend

Economist.com

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Not a dog, but a mobile phone

SATURDAY morning in Myeong-dong, and the huge shopping district in the centre of Seoul, South Korea's capital, prepares for a long day and night. As the hawkers move in with their barrows, a man selling fried squid sets up his stall next to a woman displaying shawls with Louis Vuitton logos. Real or fake, just about every fashion brand in the world can be bought here, if not from the hawkers, then certainly from the hundreds of stores, shopping malls or the massive Lotte department store. A solitary preacher stands outside a Starbucks singing hymns, as if to steer the swelling crowds away from the path of Mammon. Eventually he packs up and leaves, drowned out by the music blasting from the sound systems of trendy boutiques. This is consumerism at its most strident. So where is the internet?

It is all around. Start with shops, many of which display signs showing their website address. Then watch the shoppers, especially the younger ones. They have acquired new skills: walking through a crowd while studying the screen on their mobile phone, or examining a rail of clothes while using their thumb to text a friend. Some will also be checking their bank accounts, getting sports news, keeping track of an online computer game, or downloading a new ring tone or avatar�a cartoon-like character that will appear as their digital representative on mobile-phone screens and in online games. Plenty will also be listening to music downloaded from the internet. South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world. That is why Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, the biggest online auctioneer, sees the country as a �window into the possibilities� of what might happen when high-speed broadband services are widely adopted in other places too.

In 1960, South Korea had only one telephone for every 300 people�barely one-tenth of the world average at the time. Today, more than 90% of households have a fixed-line phone, three times the world average. Moreover, three-quarters of the population carry mobile phones, which means that pretty well everyone has one, apart from tiny tots and a few elderly people. With government encouragement and the benefit of a densely populated, mainly urban environment, South Korea has been relatively easy to wire up. The country boasts one of the highest internet-penetration rates in the world, with more than 31m of the 48m population now having access to the web, most of them via high-speed services. Apartment blocks display government notices by the front door certifying the speed of their internet connection.

Those connections are about to get even faster. In January, the government licensed the country's three main telecoms firms, SK Telecom, KT and Hanaro, to offer a new high-speed wireless internet service called WiBro. From next year, this will allow mobile users to surf the internet at much higher speeds than they do now, as well as more reliably. Somewhat alarmingly, the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) says it will work even in a car travelling at 60km an hour.

For the country's consumer-electronics makers, this vibrant home market is an invaluable development laboratory. Samsung Electronics, South Korea's biggest consumer-electronics company, has already produced a mobile phone especially for watching high-quality video. Its rival, LG Electronics, has even unveiled one with a built-in personal video recorder, which automatically switches to �record� if the user needs to take a call. Lots of other new gadgets are coming, including phones that can read the radio-frequency identification tags that will eventually replace the barcodes attached to goods. These phones, says the MIC, could be used to check the expiry date of fresh produce, say, or pick up a signal from a poster advertising a new movie, which would then prompt you to download a preview.

There seems little doubt that South Koreans will flock to use many of these services: the MIC expects the number of WiBro subscribers to rise to over 9m within six years. But the way the locals use these new technologies may not translate perfectly to other countries. Watching video on your mobile phone already looks like a winner in Japan, because many Japanese face long commutes on public transport. But if you are stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 405 on your way to work in Los Angeles, you might do better to tune your phone to pick up high-quality satellite radio instead.

E-mail is so last week

A more intriguing question is what will happen to services that many people now take for granted. For instance, many young South Koreans would be bemused by mobile devices with keyboards such as the BlackBerry, which is popular with businesspeople in America for keeping up with their e-mail. The South Koreans already have handsets that can do this, but they do not think e-mail is particularly cool, and they do not like the spam that comes with it. They prefer to send text messages, which are more immediate and are certain to be delivered instantly. South Koreans in their teens and 20s increasingly look on e-mail as an old and formal means of communication, according to one study. �You would exchange e-mails with your bosses, but not your friends,� says a young South Korean marketing assistant. The arrival of more features could reinforce this trend further: a new Samsung phone uses voice recognition to convert speech into text.

However, some of the new features that mobile phones will offer look like being universally popular. Walk into the experimental coffee bar at the MIC's offices in Seoul, and the screen of a handset lights up with the menu. You can order two cappuccinos, pay electronically and receive a receipt, all on the handset. Mobile phones are already configured for some basic e-commerce activities such as downloading music, and in Asia a few can already be used to make some purchases in shops. �There is a future, not too far away, when the only thing you will need to leave home with is your mobile phone, because it will be your wallet and your key and all the things it already is,� says David Wheldon, global director of marketing and brand communications for Britain's Vodafone, the world's biggest mobile operator.

This summer, a new service will begin in Spain, and later spread to other European countries, to make mobile payments easier. Called Simpay, it is jointly owned by some of Europe's largest mobile operators. Simpay is designed to function as a non-profit organisation with a common brand. The idea is that eventually all of Europe's 70m mobile users will be able to click on a �buy with Simpay� logo whenever they use their mobiles to surf the web. Any purchases will then be charged to their mobile bill. If Simpay is anywhere near as successful as PayPal, eBay's online payments system, it might give the banks a jolt: PayPal now has more than 60m account-holders worldwide.

The leap from paying for a music download to paying for your groceries electronically is not very big. As mobile phones are increasingly used for shopping, their appeal as a medium for reaching consumers at the point of purchase will grow. Along with services such as global positioning systems, which some handsets already provide, and software that can monitor online behaviour, a handset could offer all kinds of novel things�even telling you where to find that item you are searching for in the supermarket, and that it is on special offer.

Mobile-media consumption will overturn many assumptions about marketing

�Anything that is screen-based will be able to be used as an ad-serving mechanism,� says Andy Jung, director of advertising and media for Kellogg's. Other marketeers agree. The mobile phone is a very personal device: a faithful companion that nearly always stays with its owner. Technologists used to worry about how to win the battle for the digital home, but perhaps the bigger battle is for the individuals who live in it. Mobile-media consumption will overturn many assumptions about marketing, says Steve Morris, the chief executive of Arbitron, a New York-based media and market-research firm. �The notion that all this stuff takes place only in the home is so outdated.�

The mobile phone will become an even more powerful marketing medium, says Vodafone's Mr Wheldon. �But it is one where we proceed with gigantic caution.� People may use their mobile services differently in different countries, but consumers everywhere have one thing in common: they never seem to have enough time. If too many ads are pushed on to the screens of handsets, users could become dissatisfied with their service provider and get very annoyed with the advertisers, as they already do about �pop-up� ads on the internet. Whichever way mobile-phone marketing evolves, Mr Wheldon says it must be �hugely respectful� of users and their time. Another victory, then, for consumer power.

The mobile phone is itself a powerful brand builder, as Samsung's success has shown. From near-bankruptcy after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Samsung is now neck-and-neck with America's Motorola as the second-biggest maker of handsets after Nokia. In terms of market capitalisation, the South Korean company is worth a lot more than Sony, which has long been the king of consumer electronics. Samsung was seen as a producer at the low end of the price spectrum and had a poor reputation for quality, especially in South Korea itself. Yet by concentrating on making handsets that worked better than its rivals', at first in its home market and then for export, it improved its image. Good-quality handsets got people to look at Samsung's other products, such as digital cameras and flat-screen televisions. This was reinforced by astute marketing, using mainstream advertising as well as non-traditional methods, such as the product placement of futuristic gadgets in �Matrix Reloaded�, a cult movie. It was all part of the strategy of Samsung's chief executive, Yun Jong-yong, to move the company's brand upmarket and sell products that could attract a premium rather than slug it out in the discount chains.

This strategy has not escaped the notice of Chinese producers. Few people doubt that, given enough time, some Chinese brands will become world leaders. But a number of Chinese firms seem anxious to short-cut the process by acquiring western brands�although not necessarily very exciting ones. China's TCL, for example, has merged its TV business with France's Thomson, whose brands include RCA. Lenovo is taking a controlling stake in IBM's PC business, and Shanghai Automotive has been looking at Britain's MG Rover, which BMW discarded. Both Haier and Kelon, which make domestic appliances, also have global ambitions.

Give them what they want

There are three important stages in building a strong brand , says Bain's Mr Markey. The first is to have a deep insight into what customers really want�one that goes well beyond traditional market research. The second is relentless attention to making such products. Get the first two right, and the third follows as a matter or course: consumers become part of the marketing and sales force. This happens, says Mr Markey, because they are �so enthusiastic about a product or service they can't help but tell their friends and colleagues about it.� Word of mouth, as every marketeer will tell you, remains the most powerful form of product promotion.

But what if your brand has become tarnished and needs polishing up? That is the task confronting Philips, which in the 1990s lost its way in the consumer-electronics business. A sprawling European multinational that makes everything from light bulbs to televisions, it has been through numerous bouts of restructuring. What are its chances of gaining a new image against companies such as Samsung, and redoubled efforts by Japan's big producers, such as Sony and the Matsushita group, whose brands include Panasonic?

Andrea Ragnetti, Philips's new marketing boss, thinks it can be done. He previously worked at P&G and Telecom Italia, and has fastened on a hugely frustrating aspect of the digital world: getting all this stuff to work. Some products have become extremely complicated, with instruction books bigger than anything else in the box. Philips cites studies saying that some 30% of home networking products are returned because people cannot get them to work, and almost half the people thinking about buying a digital camera delay their purchase because they fear they might find it too complicated. So Mr Ragnetti's plan for Philips is to make things easier. His motto is �sense and simplicity�. This is not just a marketing slogan: all products, from heart defibrillators to coffee machines, must become easy and intuitive to use.

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, is already brilliant at turning consumers on. Apple has long had a small but fanatical following in the PC business. It has now become the leader in portable music, a business once dominated by Sony with the Walkman. Apple's stylish iPod is the most popular digital player, with more than 4.5m sold in the last quarter of 2004 alone, and it links seamlessly with Apple's music-download service, iTunes, which sells more than 1m songs every day. In January, Mr Jobs unveiled the Mac mini, a basic version of his Macintosh computer selling at $499. With this low-priced machine, Apple thinks it can tempt people who may have bought an iPod (and become fans of the company) to ditch their Windows-based PC and switch to an Apple machine, which uses a different operating system.

Another company that has used its brand to venture into new territory is Dell. The conventional wisdom was that selling PCs direct to consumers would not work: they were complicated products and customers would want to take a good look at them in a shop before parting with their cash. That turned out to be wrong. Much the same concerns were aired last autumn when the company decided to expand into consumer electronics and sell its own line of 42-inch flat-screen high-definition televisions. At $2,999, these were several thousand dollars cheaper than some rival products in stores. But surely people would want to see the picture quality before they bought?

Once again, not so. Consumers have become sophisticated and confident enough to understand technical specifications and did not need to see the picture, says Dell's Mr George. Many also put their trust in Dell's brand: if the Texas company could build good computers, it would probably make decent TVs too. This reveals another important change in attitude. �Consumers just don't have these historical brand affinities in the way they used to have them,� adds Mr George. But he is aware that brand value carries risks too: �We know it could be taken away from us at any moment.�

An important part of Dell's success has been that along with its direct-sales model it offers a customisation service. If a customer orders a PC online, he or she can ask for it to be configured in all sorts of ways. Yet when the order is placed, none of the components are in the factory. Within a day or so they have arrived from suppliers, been assembled into a PC according to the customer's specification and sent off to the delivery address. Carmakers may never be able to build a business as lean and as flexible as this, but they are working on similar lines to keep their customers happy.

April 5, 2005 at 07:53 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (31) | Top of page | Blog Home

Warfare in the aisles

Economist.com

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Competition in your local supermarket is getting vicious

NEXT time you are hurtling through a supermarket, slow down and look around the packaged-goods battlefield. There are the massed battalions of supermarkets' own labels—no longer just cheap stuff, but increasingly segmented into things like ready meals, “healthy�� options or pricey treats. Confronting them are goods from branded manufacturers, which must pay for the privilege of appearing in the grocery department. And surrounding everything are shelves heaving with personal-care products, clothing, books and DVD recorders.

Even if you can resist the smell of fresh bread from the in-store bakery, other forms of psychological warfare will entice you to spend more than you intended. Dairy products, which most people buy regularly, tend to be lined up at the back of the store, so shoppers have to pass along the aisles where temptation can be put their way. Positioning is everything: people typically spend at most six seconds selecting a grocery item, and if they cannot find it they may not buy it. The best slots are at adult eye-level, so that is where relatively expensive products are put, often to the right of popular items (to increase the chances that right-handed shoppers will pick them up). Price is not always the deciding factor: more than half the people leaving a supermarket cannot recall exactly what they paid for individual items.

Those rules apply in supermarkets no matter where they are. If you live in America, you might be shopping in a Wal-Mart, run by a company that has become the world's biggest retailer by driving down suppliers' prices and passing the savings on to its customers. In Britain, you could be in a Tesco store, owned by the biggest of four large supermarket chains that between them sell around three-quarters of the country's groceries. Tesco's recent growth has come mostly from expanding into non-food lines. In China, you could be in a Carrefour, run by the French-owned inventor of the hypermarket, which by the end of this year could have some 300 Chinese stores, making it the leading foreign chain in a hugely coveted developing consumer market.

Pity the shopper, says Saatchi & Saatchi's Mr Roberts�and in a supermarket the poor creature is usually a woman. There are so many items on offer and they are so jumbled up that she often cannot find what she is looking for. It is cold because fresh produce needs to be refrigerated on open shelves to make it easy to pick up. �The lighting is awful and she has to listen to Phil Collins,� he commiserates. �She can't wait to get out.� Mr Roberts knows a bit about consumer goods. He was a marketing executive with P&G, Gillette and Pepsi-Cola before becoming the head of one of the world's best-known advertising agencies.

Female supermarket shoppers' interests range from health, family matters and the environment to politics and social issues, such as the welfare of overseas workers making some of the products they buy. They also share and discuss the information they acquire, much more so than men. This is how they become attached to certain brands and products, says Saatchi & Saatchi. So it is no good simply to bombard shoppers with ads for items that are invariably billed as bigger, brighter, stronger and so on. It leaves them bored to tears, says Mr Roberts. In order to reach and influence them, packaged-goods producers have to engage them in many different ways�for example on the internet, where many women now spend as much time as they do watching television.

Who needs brands?

With so much choice and information available, why don't shoppers simply ignore brands and make a purely rational, economic decision about what to buy? Because that is not human nature, says Jez Frampton, chief executive of Interbrand, a London brand consultancy. �Brands offer trust,� he expands, �and they enable people to navigate through complex markets.� There is something in that. In the old Soviet Union, where all products were supposed to be the same, consumers learnt how to read barcodes as substitutes for brands in order to identify goods that came from reliable factories.

Consumer-goods companies invest in brands to convince supermarkets to stock their products and to get shoppers to buy them. This is never straightforward. Jeremy Bullmore, an advertising guru with WPP, once likened brand-building to a bird building a nest �by the scraps and straws they chance upon�. Consumers used to get most scraps of information from advertisers. Now they are more likely to find them by themselves.

To keep in touch with their customers, consumer-goods companies are shifting their spending away from traditional media, such as network TV and print, to other types of promotion. A decade ago, P&G used to put about 90% of its advertising budget into TV, but now it spreads the money more widely. For some new products, TV may account for only a quarter of total spending. P&G has long been an advertising pioneer: by sponsoring radio programmes, and later TV shows, as a way of promoting its detergents, the company helped to create a new term: �soap opera�.

Nowadays, advertisers want to do more than just sponsor a TV show

Nowadays, advertisers want to do more than just sponsor a TV show. Kellogg's, for instance, promotes its cereal brand, Special K, in co-productions with the Discovery Health Channel in America. The benefit of a strong brand is that it can convey information about a product very efficiently, reckons the company. Nevertheless, even venerable brands have to be worked on constantly to keep them fresh, says Alan Harris, Kellogg's chief marketing officer. �In some cases we have got to experiment and do things differently to learn how our brands can operate in this different environment.�

A brand may have only seconds to convey its message. �If I'm going to get shelf-space in the major retailers I need to stand for something, and that something needs to be relevant and it needs to be clear. That's what brand-building is at its most basic,� says Scott Garrett, the brand director for Heinz in Britain and Ireland. Some of Heinz's ads are classics. The company's �Beanz Meanz Heinz� campaign, for its tinned baked beans, first ran on British television in the 1950s, and many British consumers still recognise the phrase. But Mr Garrett accepts that it would be unrealistic to expect today's shoppers to march into a supermarket and demand his products. �I have to get people pre-dispositioned to the Heinz brand and then hope that the wavering hand on the shelf veers towards the turquoise can [the colour of the Heinz baked-bean label] rather than another one.�

To make things even more complicated, marketeers detect a growing trend towards �cross-shopping�: the same people buying very expensive and very cheap things at the same time. They might splash out on a $500 Gucci bag and then economise with a $5 T-shirt as they flit from Saks Fifth Avenue to H&M. Buying some things from discount chains is considered �smart�, even for people who can afford to shop elsewhere. Some chains, such as Target, an American mass-merchandiser, compete against Wal-Mart with a more carefully edited selection of goods and employ top designers for some own-label goods. Now Wal-Mart has taken global its successful George brand of clothing, initially developed by George Davies for the British supermarket chain, Asda, that Wal-Mart bought in 1999.

Will the big supermarkets take an ever-increasing slice of consumer spending? Target and others have shown that there are ways to counter-attack. Some people avoid supermarkets and buy their groceries online from firms such as Fresh Direct in America and Ocado in Britain. The internet has also enabled suppliers to go direct to the consumer. Riverford, a British organic-vegetables specialist based in Devon, runs a successful web-based home-delivery service. It entertains customers with recipes and nuggets of information about products�such as that supermarket carrots are mostly chosen for their ability to pass the �wellie test�. This means they can be bashed against a wellington boot without breaking, which shows that they will be easy to harvest, clean and polish. Riverford says its varieties are selected for flavour, and offers no apologies if they arrive with a bit of mud attached.

The big retailers like their private labels because they typically provide 5-10% more profit than branded products, says Euromonitor International, a market-research company. This limits the pricing power of the branded-goods producers: consumers may not be able to recall the price of an individual item, but they usually remember whether their purchase was more or less expensive than similar items.

Here today, gone tomorrow

But it is hard to stand out from the crowd. Every day an astonishing 400-700 new brands are added to the 2.1m brands tracked by TNS Media Intelligence. �It's very easy to get a brand out there,� says Steven Fredericks, the company's chief executive. But there is no guarantee that any of them will be noticed, he adds. �Consumers' attention is becoming a scarce economic resource.�

To boost their sales and negotiating power with the supermarkets, consumer-goods companies are concentrating on their most powerful �superbrands�. Unilever, Europe's biggest producer of consumer goods, has cut its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to around 400. P&G, which in 2000 had ten brands with annual sales of more than $1 billion each, by last year had increased their number to 16. Its $54 billion deal earlier this year to buy Gillette will add another five superbrands.

The merged group is also heavier on beauty and grooming products, which have strong growth potential, especially in the Chinese market. Having been sold many fake and shoddy products, Chinese consumers want brands they can both trust and afford. China is already P&G's sixth-biggest market and could in time become its most important after America.

With fewer brands, producers can concentrate their resources to better effect. This is especially necessary in Japan, the second-biggest advertising market in the world after America, and one of the most cluttered (see chart 3). Drinks and snacks are one of the hottest areas: hundreds of new ones are launched every year. Andrew Meaden, the chief executive of MindShare Japan, a media agency, calls the process �commercial Darwinism�. Newness matters at lot, so many products appear just to catch the moment. Most struggle and die, not only in their efforts to get noticed but also in the battle to find shelf space in Japan's small shops. And if you are selling to young people, �you have to be much more savvy about how you talk to them,� says Mr Meaden.

Some companies are trying to cut through the noise with a combination of old and new marketing techniques. Switzerland's Nestl�, for instance, has discovered that people get stressed by having to decide what to cook for dinner, so in Japan it provides recipes that its customers can download to a mobile phone, enabling them to pick up the ingredients on their way home. Other companies provide coupons over the internet and deliver them to mobile phones. Like the 251 billion coupons which TNS Media Intelligence says Americans religiously clipped last year from newspaper inserts, these electronic ones can be exchanged for samples or discounts on new products. In such ways, Asia is well ahead in its use of digital media for marketing.

April 5, 2005 at 07:51 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (114) | Top of page | Blog Home

The big idea: Sabeer Bhatia

The big idea: Sabeer Bhatia - The Net - Times Online

By Holden Frith, Times Online
The co-founder of Hotmail discusses the program that made him a multimillionaire and explains why the internet hasn't finished changing the way we live and work

What gave you the idea for Hotmail?

My partner, Jack Smith, and I were having a hard time communicating with each other. We already had our own personal e-mail accounts but ever since the company installed a firewall we couldn't get access to them at work, and we didn't want to use the company e-mail to send messages about our business idea. We ended up sending messages to each other on pieces of paper. Then I thought, what if we start putting our messages on the web, so that they can be accessed anywhere? It was the ubiquity of it that attracted me to the idea.

Not everyone saw the idea's potential straight away and you had trouble getting backing for Hotmail. Why was this?

There were a number of reasons. A lot of the venture capital community really did not believe that the internet would become a mainstream mechanism for doing business. Many of them had questions about how we could make money if we gave this away for free - they didn't think the advertising model would work. Others said, "I don't need another e-mail account, I have one with AOL." They didn't get the ubiquity of it. Luckily, even big companies such as Microsoft and AOL didn't think e-mail was a browser-based service. They didn't get the shared aspect of it - that people didn't even have to have a computer to use it.

For a lot of people, their first experience of the internet was setting up a Hotmail account. How influential do you think Hotmail was in getting people online?

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I think it was a big influence internationally. My friends and family in Bangalore hadn't even heard of the internet when I said they could communicate with me using it, so I took them to the internet caf� and set up accounts for them and said, "Why are you spending all this money calling me when you can send e-mails for free?" In the US I'm not sure it had such an effect because it was AOL that really got people online, but internationally, wherever there was shared use of computers, I think Hotmail had a big effect.

Why did you sell Hotmail when you did?

The offer was too good to refuse. When you're struggling to raise money for a company and someone comes along and offers you all that money it's hard to refuse. It made us fabulously wealthy and it was just too good to refuse.

The company you set up after selling Hotmail was Arzoo, which was intended to provide corporate subscribers with access to a network of IT experts. Why do you think this company went bankrupt? Was it just that it coincided with the bursting of the dot-com bubble?

That was just part of it. It was a very difficult time to start a company, but I'll tell you what the real truth was. If you want to have an A-class business you have to hire A-class people. A lot of the people who joined didn't join because they believed in the company - they did it because they wanted to get rich quick. Literally thousands of people descended on Silicon Valley from around the world. It was a gold rush, and it was so difficult to hire people. There were people who were coming out of school asking for Porsches as signing-on bonuses. We've lived through that now, and had we weathered the market, it might have survived. In any business, it takes a long time for a market to develop. A case in point is Google. There were seven search engines at that time and they were burning money, and Google was very frugal and very quiet and five, six years later, all the other search engines barring Microsoft and Yahoo are gone. First to market is the wrong philosophy. It really is the last man standing.

A few search engines are attempting to challenging Google. What do you make of their chances?

Google is not unassailable, nobody is. That's the beauty of technology - it's constantly evolving. It's a moving target and that's what I love about it. But Google has such a position of advantage and strength that any rival would have to be ten times better. If someone was 10 per cent, 20 per cent better, with the programming resources that Google have, they would catch up straight away, but if they were ten times better and have a year's advantage they could do it.

Ten years from now, more than half of internet users will come from India and China
Sabeer Bhatia

Is there anyone on the horizon to rival Google?

No, not on the horizon. I think it's going to be a little unknown company that neither you nor I have heard of it. I don't think it's going to be a Yahoo or a Microsoft � it'll be ten guys working in a garage.

Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?

I've got three companies. One of them is a company called TeliXO, and what it does is it converts every single cellular phone into a PDA. If you have a cell phone that can send text messages you can access all your contacts, appointments and data. Think of it as having all your personal information somewhere in the clouds and you can access it just by sending a text message. In the future, you will be able to store your music in the clouds as well.

The second is InstaColl, which turns every existing Office document you have into a live communication document that two people in different places can work on at the same time, over the internet, which is very good for people in the media, business people. I think it's the next logical step for the internet. We've stopped going to the store anymore � I bought a printer and I bought a laptop and I never set foot in the store. What we get together for is collaboration, but going back and forward you lose time. The internet is ideal for it but there is no mechanism to do it. With InstaColl, all your meetings can be virtual. You can have presentations where one person is presenting the document and the others can all see it on their screens. Let's say that I wanted to communicate to you an idea that needed more than words, needed more than what I could put in an e-mail or phone call. With this I wouldn't have to come to London, which means that I can be so much more productive with my time.

Then there's a third called HotSeasons. Say you want to travel to the US. You could go to Expedia but Expedia just gives you the information that the hotels give them. You want to know what other people have said about it. Let's say The Times has done a review of a hotel. We have technology that scours the entire web for articles and sources of information and places it on a page for that city or state or hotel. Think of it as a vertical search engine � if you type 'New York hotels' into Google you get 22 million responses, but if you type it into HotSeasons you just get content-rich, published information, plus what other people have said about the hotel.

The music industry is finally beginning to embrace the internet after years of living in fear of it. Have they left it too late?

The music industry can pull things back and the fear they had is unjustified. It's in their interests to come up with an interesting way of presenting music so that people will pay for it. Apple is a great example of how this can be done legally - one company has changed people's behaviour, but file sharing and peer-to-peer sharing is inevitable. They also have to price appropriately for different markets. One dollar per song is about right for people in the US but too much for sub-Saharan Africa.

How much of an effect will the internet have on the developing world?

Ten years from now, the largest number of internet users will come from two countries: more than 50 per cent will come from India and China. There is tremendous penetration and in some cases they have leapfrogged straight to newer technologies. Cellular technology is better in India than in the US. My cell phone works everywhere there, in every nook and cranny of the country, and the rates are lower. Broadband is $7 a month there, over here people pay $30 a month. The advantage they have is that they are late to the market so they are able to embrace these technologies at really low prices. Over here we are saddled with the development costs. We had earlier technologies and now we have to replace them, which is expensive, but they can go straight to the newest technologies at low prices.

What effect will the growth of the internet have on these and other developing countries?

It's a means for them to plug into the world economy. We're living in an information age and if you look at Boeing 747s or drugs or ships or cars, they're all being designed on computers. It's all information, and transforming it into reality is the last step. It's an important one, but that's moving to China anyway. But office workers can be in remote locations, and there is less of a need for people to live in cities, so they can live in smaller towns, with the people and places they're familiar with. It will help to prevent more transmigration of people. The internet has really enabled that: without the internet it wouldn't have happened in nearly such a fluid way.

April 1, 2005 at 07:38 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (76) | Top of page | Blog Home

Crowned at last

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3785166

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition
The claim that �the customer is king� has always rung hollow. But now the digital marketplace has made it come true, says Paul Markillie

IT IS the biggest advertising event of the year. On February 6th, half the households in America sat down in front of their televisions to watch the 2005 Super Bowl. Never mind the game: the Super Bowl is a showcase for television commercials, and more than a quarter of the viewers tune in just to watch the ads. For days before and after the event, these are discussed in the newspapers, on radio and on TV. At an average cost of $2.4m for a 30-second slot, a Super Bowl commercial is the most expensive pitch an advertiser can make. For some, such as Anheuser-Busch, it has become an institution. The brewer's decision to drop one of its ads from the ten slots it had booked made headlines. The commercial was a cheeky take on Janet Jackson's �wardrobe malfunction� (a slipping top) during the half-time show at the 2004 game. The resulting publicity prompted large numbers of people to visit Anheuser-Busch's website to look at the ad, which meant that probably as many saw it as if it had been screened.

The Super Bowl is a great excuse for a party, especially for the advertising industry. It shows that people still enjoy ads that are creative and entertaining. But it raises an awkward question: does it actually sell any more bottles of beer, cars or pills for erectile dysfunction? Although TV viewers tend to be able to recall a particularly good commercial, many cannot remember the product it featured. And for the most part they try to avoid the rising barrage of ads. Getting their attention is becoming increasingly difficult, because audiences are splintering as people use different kinds of media, such as cable television and the internet. The choice of products and services available is multiplying, but at the same time consumers have become more sceptical about claims made for products. In today's marketplace, consumers have the power to pick and choose as never before.

All-seeing, all-knowing

This new consumer power is changing the way the world shops. As this survey will show, the ability to get information about whatever you want, whenever you want, has given shoppers unprecedented strength. In markets with highly transparent prices, they are kings. The implications for business are enormous: threatening for some, welcome for others. For instance, the huge increase in choice makes certain brands more valuable, not less. And as old business divisions crumble, a strong brand in one sector can provide the credibility to enter another. Hence Apple has used its iPod to take away business for portable music players from Sony; Starbucks is aiming to become a big noise in the music business by installing CD-burners in its caf�s; and Dell is moving from computers into consumer electronics.

�I am constantly amazed at the confidence level and sophistication of the average consumer,� says Mike George, Dell's chief marketing officer and general manager of its consumer business in the United States. Dell soared to the top of the personal-computer business by cutting out retailers and selling directly to consumers. If Dell changes prices on its website, its customers' buying patterns change literally within a minute. �That tells you people are well-researched and knowledgeable,� adds Mr George.

Even buying a car, long considered to be one of the worst retail experiences anyone can have, is being transformed. Over 80% of Ford's customers in America have already researched their prospective purchase on the internet before they arrive at a showroom, and most of them come with a specification sheet showing the precise car they want from the dealer's stock, together with the price they are prepared to pay. Similarly, more than three-quarters of mobile-phone buyers in America do their research on the web, even though only 5% buy online, says John Frelinghuysen of Booz Allen Hamilton, a firm of business consultants. They still want to go to a shop to hand over their money and get their phone, but first they want to see exactly what the service package covers, and to read what other users say about their proposed purchase.

Disintermediation seems to be in the air

With consumers becoming increasingly empowered, how can the marketing, advertising and communications firms that companies use to promote their products hope to get their messages across? And what does it mean for media businesses relying on advertising revenue, the traditional channels for reaching this increasingly elusive audience? Disintermediation�the process of middlemen being cut out�seems to be in the air. The three big TV networks in America have all hedged their bets by acquiring cable channels. The advertising business is reorganising itself, seeking safety in size. Many agencies are now clustered into four big global groups: America's Omnicom and Interpublic, France's Publicis and Britain's WPP. In some ways they are recreating the big, vertically integrated advertising giants of the past, but with separately run companies to deliver the range of specialist marketing services they think their clients will need in the future.

So what will that future hold? �For the first time the consumer is boss, which is fascinatingly frightening, scary and terrifying, because everything we used to do, everything we used to know, will no longer work,� says Kevin Roberts, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of Publicis. Shelly Lazarus, head of Ogilvy & Mather, part of WPP, is more sanguine. �Advertising is as vibrant as it has ever been. It's just that the way you define it is so much broader now, with new ways to reach people,� she explains. �In the past you would keep pounding the creative message out into the market place and look at reach frequency,� says Howard Draft, a veteran direct-marketing expert and chief executive of his eponymous New York agency, part of Interpublic. �Well, basically that is dead. What you have today is an informed consumer who is taking control of the way he learns and hears about products.�

Companies with some of the world's biggest advertising budgets are beginning to look for new ways of attracting consumers' attention. Jim Stengel, global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble (P&G), is one of the advertising industry's harshest critics, awarding it a �C minus� for its ability to embrace new media. And Larry Light, who has been giving McDonald's a makeover as its chief marketing officer, says bluntly: �The days of mass marketing are over.�

Mass retailing, however, looks as healthy as ever. The supermarkets are taking an increasing proportion of consumer spending�and on a lot of things beside groceries. A growing part of Wal-Mart's business comes from people searching online for information on products such as consumer electronics, and then visiting a store to make a purchase. �I think it works to our advantage, because we are the price leader,� says Lee Scott, chief executive of the world's biggest retailer. �There's power for them and us.�

Consumers, of course, care not a jot about marketing machinations. They are delighted to have more choice, which makes it easier for them to turn their back on a company they do not like and buy elsewhere. For some this is sweet revenge. �Consumers have become jaded and cynical,� says Rob Markey, a partner at Bain & Company, a consultancy. �There is a pile of broken promises heaped on the floor.�

The ads we love to hate

In fact, consumers have been telling market-research companies for 50 years that they do not trust advertising. But they have become even more negative about it recently, says Eric Schmitt of Forrester, a research firm. Indeed, people are actively looking for ways to avoid ads, using tools such as pop-up blockers on web browsers and digital video recorders (DVRs) that allow them to skip the ads when they record TV programmes. Forrester found that 60% of the programmes watched by DVR users are recorded, and 92% of the ads on such programmes are skipped. The firm reckons that by the end of 2008, 36m households in the United States will be using DVRs. So what will happen to the $60 billion spent on TV advertising in America every year? Mr Schmitt thinks that if the TV industry can no longer guarantee its audiences, a lot of that money will move elsewhere.

For the moment, advertising expenditure gives no hint of trouble ahead. The business is bouncing back strongly from the slump that began in 2001, when the bursting of the technology bubble caused a sudden collapse in ad spending. Worldwide advertising expenditure on the mainstream media and the internet in 2004 grew by around 7% to $370 billion, estimates ZenithOptimedia (see chart 1). Universal McCann, a media-services firm, uses different measures but sees a similar recovery. It says that in America last year $264 billion was spent on national and local advertising and other marketing, such as direct mail (a $50 billion business), up 7.4% on the previous year. And it expects ad spending in the world's biggest market to grow by more than 6% this year.

But the way that money is spent is changing. In America, growth in ad spending is led by the internet, Spanish-language TV and cable networks, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a media-monitoring company (see chart 2). And as with P&G's $4 billion advertising budget, a growing proportion is shifting from mainstream media, such as television, radio and print, to new media and other forms of sales promotion, such as direct mail, public relations, promotions, sponsorship and product placement. Collectively this sort of spending, sometimes called �below-the-line� advertising, or marketing services, is already worth more than twice what is spent on traditional display advertising. Together, the two sorts of spending added up to more than $1 trillion last year, says WPP.

By comparison, the $10 billion or so spent on internet advertising in America last year looks tiny. But it was 32% up on 2003, according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. And that growth is accelerating, leading some forecasters to suggest that the online ad market could double in value this year. The internet is also becoming a lot more sophisticated as an advertising medium, beyond banner ads and pop-ups. In search advertising, companies buy words that, if they appear in searches made on sites such as Google or Yahoo!, will bring up a link to the company's website, displayed alongside the search results. The advertiser pays only if someone clicks on his links. This makes the results of search advertising reassuringly measurable, because tracking how many people go on to make a purchase is relatively easy. Google is beginning to work like an advertising agency, placing small text-based ads on other people's websites on behalf of its clients and splitting the revenue with the website owners. Google's software scans the sites to match the ads it serves up to the site's content.

Local search could be the next big moneyspinner on the internet�for whoever comes up with a winning formula. Microsoft's MSN site, for instance, will provide details about a local shop, and a map to get you there. A9, a new search engine from Amazon, has a feature called �Block View� with pictures of streets and their shop fronts, so if you have forgotten the name of the restaurant you are looking for, you may be able to recognise it in the picture. The next step will be a feature that allows users to �click to call�. Initially this service is likely to be free, but in time it could be developed into another big source of online revenue.

Media from dawn to dusk

Some changes in consumer behaviour that were already under way have been speeded up by the growing use of the internet. For example, consumers are spending more time with media of all kinds: currently about ten hours per person per day in America. According to Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a New York-based media merchant bank, this is likely to grow to 11 hours by 2008. James Rutherfurd, the bank's managing director, thinks this is due to a relatively new phenomenon he calls �media multi-tasking�: using different media at the same time. �This has enormous implications for advertisers and programmers,� he says. �It used to be that they were competing to get you to turn on the television. Now the TV may be on, but they are competing to keep your attention on the TV as opposed to the computer screen, the magazine or the iPod.�

Consumers are spending more time with media of all kinds: currently about ten hours per person per day in America

Fujio Nishida, chief marketing officer of Sony's electronics division, points out that this forces advertisers to think very carefully not only about which media to use for the market they want to reach, but what people are likely to be doing when their ad appears. In Japan, he says, in the past you could be fairly sure that 90% of your potential targets would be watching TV at some point between 8pm and 10pm; but now only 70% may be watching and 60% will be using the internet�many doing both at the same time. Advertisers can take advantage of this by putting on TV ads specially designed to encourage consumers to go straight to a website, as Sony has done.

�Who actually controls distribution in this type of world?� asks Bill Gossman. �The individual does. That's where the ultimate consumer power comes from.� His company, Revenue Science, is developing new ways of �behavioural targeting�. This involves analysing online consumer behaviour and then delivering ads that are likely to be relevant to groups with common interests. Mr Gossman thinks that as the world becomes more digital, his techniques will increasingly be used by all kinds of electronic media.

Amazon, which has long evolved from an online bookseller into a mass retailer, uses a form of behavioural targeting by suggesting products its customers might like, based on their past purchases. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, was among the first to spot that the transparent pricing and product information the internet was able to provide would allow people to shop just about anywhere. The trick was to make it easier for them, so Amazon's website now operates as a shop front for lots of other companies too. And it gives customers the chance to read not only the sales blurb but also other customers' comments on the products.

For some companies this is scary stuff�the same as throwing open your customer-relations files and hoping that people have said enough nice things about you. Companies can, of course, try to control everything that is said and written about them through advertising and public relations. But nowadays a web search can turn up all sorts of skeletons in the cupboard, especially from news groups where people post comments, from online journals (called �web logs� or �blogs�) and more recently from �podcasting�, in which individuals produce their own audio programmes for others to download to their Apple iPods or other MP3 players. Video versions of this are sure to follow. Not all of this can be dismissed as amateurish twaddle. Microsoft, for instance, is taking blogs seriously enough to have hired its own celebrity blogger, Robert Scoble, even at the risk that he might be scathing about the company's products.

This is a clever move. The less control a company has over its marketing message, the greater its credibility, says Pamela Talbot, an expert in consumer-product marketing and chief executive of the American side of Edelman, a giant public-relations firm. Indeed, Saatchi & Saatchi's Mr Roberts thinks marketing departments must accept that brands no longer belong to them, but to the people who use them. The most valuable users of a company's brand are what he describes as �inspirational consumers��people who are closely associated with a company and its products. It does not even have to be another company. Some of the most successful agents for generating a buzz�and plenty of free publicity�can be the people who run the business.

For example, the celebrity status of Sir Richard Branson has rubbed off on the Virgin brand, so his businesses, from music to airlines to space travel, get instant consumer recognition. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, a familiar face in Britain, founded easyJet, one of Europe's first cut-price airlines. Mr Haji-Ioannou, who describes himself on his business card as a �serial entrepreneur�, believes that a brand represents �a promise�. So whether he is attaching his name to a car-rental business, a new no-frills hotel chain or a new cruise line, the consumer knows what to expect from the person putting his reputation on the line. Donald Trump has also turned himself into a brand, but the New York businessman is especially well known for �The Apprentice�, a business reality show on TV. This is a huge hit in America (unlike Sir Richard's own show), and companies pay to be involved.

What is it worth to have the contestants on such a show design a new product for your business, as Burger King did? The fast-food chain then went on to mount a similar competition on its own website. Measuring the effectiveness of such marketing is not easy. The marketing profession has yet to catch up with new media, says Malcolm Hunter, chief strategy officer of Vizeum, a London agency set up to seek out opportunities from recent trends. �Consumers are real people, and companies that understand that can do well.� That might seem blindingly obvious, but he is right to remind the industry of it. Advertisers are still inclined to depict their activities as a form of warfare. Consumers are �targets� and ad �campaigns� are meant to �wear down resistance� and score �hits�.

The rise of consumer power can best be charted through three industries: packaged goods, consumer electronics and cars. In each of these three very different categories consumers carry increasing clout. As the cost of the product goes up, they spend more time and effort considering which make and model to buy. The battle for their attention and money begins at the supermarket.

March 31, 2005 at 08:42 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Power at last

Economist.com | Consumer power

Mar 31st 2005
From The Economist print edition
Armed with the internet, the customer has finally got on top
WHEN a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king, decreed John Wanamaker, who in 1876 turned an abandoned railway depot in Philadelphia into one of the world's first department stores. This revolutionary concept changed the face of retailing and led to the development of advertising and marketing as we know it today.

But compelling as that slogan was, in truth the shopper was cheated of the crown. Although manufacturing efficiency boosted the variety of goods and lowered prices, advertising provided most information about products. Through much of the past century, ads spoke to a captive audience confined to just a few radio or television channels or a limited number of publications. Now media choice has exploded too, and consumers select what they want from a far greater variety of sources�especially with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Thanks to the internet, the consumer is finally seizing power.

As our survey in this issue shows, consumer power has profound implications for companies, because it is changing the way the world shops. Many firms already claim to be �customer-driven� or �consumer-centric�. Now their claims will be tested as never before. Trading on shoppers' ignorance will no longer be possible: people will know�and soon tell others, even those without the internet�that prices in the next town are cheaper or that certain goods are inferior. The internet is working wonders in raising standards. Good and honest firms should benefit most.

But it is also intensifying competition. Today, window shopping takes place online. People can compare products, prices and reputations. They can read what companies say about products in far greater detail, but also how that tallies with the opinions of others, and�most importantly of all�discover what previous buyers have to say. Newsgroups and websites constantly review products and services.

This is changing the nature of consumer decisions. Until recently, consumers usually learned about a product and made their choice at the same time. People would often visit a department store or dealership to seek advice from a salesman, look at his recommendations and then buy. Now, for many, each of these steps is separate. For instance, Ford is finding that eight out of ten of its customers have already used the internet to decide what car they want to buy�and what they are willing to pay�even before they arrive at a showroom.

Know-alls

Of course, the amount of time people spend researching and checking prices tends to rise in proportion to the value of the product�and cars are expensive. But consumers are displaying similar behaviour when they purchase other things, such as digital cameras, mobile phones or fashionable clothes. And while supermarket shoppers may not research in this way all the individual items they drop into their trolley, many suppliers of the packaged goods sold in supermarkets are already acutely aware that their customers, too, are better informed than ever before about the value or health implications of the products they sell.

Reaching these better-informed consumers with a marketing message is not easy, and not only because they are more sceptical. Many people now spend as much time surfing the web as they do with television, magazines or newspapers. The audience for advertising is splintering and its attention is harder to attract. On top of that, many people are arming themselves with technology to avoid marketing messages, such as pop-up ad-blockers for the internet and personal video recorders that make it easy to skip TV commercials.

Despite the flood of product and price information suddenly available, consumers are unlikely ever to become wholly calculating. Tastes and fashion will differ. Brands are likely to remain popular. But brand loyalties are weakening. A slip or delay can cost a firm dearly and hand the advantage to an opportunistic rival. This is how Apple's iPod snatched from Sony the market leadership in portable-music devices.

Virtual shopping

Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Too many companies relaxed after the bursting of the dotcom bubble, assuming that the online threat had faded. This was a mistake. It is true that the vast majority of people still go to shops for most purchases (though online sales continue to grow). Before doing that, however, most have used the internet. More than 90% of people aged between 18 and 54 told America's Online Publishers Association in a survey that they would turn to the internet first for product information. The differences between the virtual and the bricks-and-mortar worlds do not worry consumers. But they should worry companies. Many consumers first encounter a firm through its website, and yet for too many firms, their online presence remains a low priority.

By contrast, some businesses have embraced the internet wholeheartedly, and been rewarded for it. Dell has by-passed retailers and used direct sales to become the world's leading supplier of personal computers. The web is also transforming the travel business, giving consumers the power to book flights, hotels and cars directly. And it has allowed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, from mom-and-pop stores to traders of collectibles on eBay, to reach a global market.

The explosion of choice that followed the opening of Mr Wanamaker's store is minuscule compared with the cornucopia already provided by the internet. But the consumer's choice is about to become even greater. Internet search firms such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN are now falling over each other to offer more localised services. These promise to open up a new goldmine in search advertising. And soon this facility will be available not just on PCs at home or work, but on mobile phones. At a touch, consumers will be able to find a local store and then check the offers from nearby outlets even as they browse the aisles, or listen to a salesman. When that happens consumers will truly be kings, and only those firms ready and able to serve these new monarchs will survive.

March 31, 2005 at 08:40 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

A nation of communicators

A nation of communicators - Connected Business - Times Online

Sara McConnell introduces a Times Online series that charts how communications technology is revolutionising our work and home lives

We have become a nation of communicators. Constantly plugged into laptops, mobile phones and computer networks, working from home has become commonplace as people cut out the commute and log into office IT systems from their spare bedrooms or living rooms. Even when mobiles or computers are off, voicemails and e-mails wait in message boxes.

More than half of all households in the United Kingdom now have access to the internet at home, up from 2.2 million six years ago. Nearly 60 per cent of adults surveyed this summer had used the internet either at work or at home in the previous three months, mostly for sending e-mails and buying goods and services online.

Over the next 10 weeks, Times Online will look at how communications technology and online connectivity are changing and shaping the way we live and work.

Growing numbers of people work from home using desktops and laptops linked up to fast broadband connections which makes downloading even complex documents with graphics quick and easy.

But new hardware and software has to work with existing equipment. Paul Magree, communications manager at Cable & Wireless, says: "You need to get the infrastructure right. It's more than just data. Technology needs to be an enabler."

The spread of broadband has made it much easier for employees working away from the office to work efficiently and for employers to keep track of what they are doing, says Mr Magree. An estimated 50,000 new subscribers are signing up for broadband every week. New figures from the Telecom Markets Broadband Subscriber Database show that there are now five million broadband subscribers in the UK.

In cities like London, Birmingham and Leeds, developers are responding to demand from buyers working from home some or all of the time for new apartments to be equipped with the latest wiring for broadband, sound systems and satellite connections. These are no longer just "boys' toys" � there is just as much demand for high tech homes from sophisticated women buyers.

Meanwhile employers are turning to smaller cities like Southampton, Aberdeen and Cardiff. According to research by Cable & Wireless, these cities have a winning combination of high levels of broadband access, good transport links and an educated workforce. Telecommunications companies have a key role to play in Government-backed efforts to entice businesses out of the overcrowded south-east.

Since the Disability Discrimination Act came into force on October 1, employers have had to make workplaces accessible for disabled workers, not only physically but technologically. E-mails which can be stored and heard as sound files for blind workers and voice mails which can be read as e-mails for deaf and hard of hearing employees are among the innovations being tested.

In the public sector, long criticised for bureacracy and inefficiency, communications companies are developing new systems. In one case, police forces across the country are linking up through Cable & Wireless's Criminal Justice Extranet system which allows e-mail and information sharing and access to the National Police Computer.

But computer hackers, online criminals and viruses are flourishing as more people get online. Companies selling goods and services online can be brought down by hackers accessing their databases and systems. Public confidence in buying and selling online can be destroyed by evidence of security lapses in holding data.

Businesses should be doing more to protect themselves from cybercrime and should see such risk management as a positive corporate selling point rather than a chore.

Those who see e-mails and text messaging as a great marketing tool should also think twice before firing off a stream of untargeted product announcements into the ether. Surveys show that people are irritated rather than interested when they receive unsolicited mailings. Even those who have signed up to be sent news or offers are turned off and companies which make no effort to tailor e-mails and texts risk alienating their customers permanently.

March 16, 2005 at 09:21 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Mobile phone gigs: they could be the next best thing to being there

News

Tomorrow night Natasha Bedingfield will perform not only to 300 at the ICA but also to thousands by phone
By Ian Burrell

14 March 2005

When Natasha Bedingfield takes to the stage at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London tomorrow night, it will not just be the 300-odd fans in the venue with their eyes on her.

The gig isn't being televised and nor is it being broadcast on radio, but some 2,200 viewers and listeners will be taking in the show by holding up their mobile phones.

Bedingfield is well used to having her fans holding their phones up to take pictures of her from the audience - but these ones will be as far away as Scotland and Wales, having paid �5 for a live feed of the gig.

This is the start of a form of broadcasting that could revolutionise the music industry, offering in effect gigs on demand, provided you have a phone with the means to pick up a signal.

Bedingfield, who has been selected by phone company 3 Mobile to pioneer the technology, seems suitably impressed. "Record companies should really keep their eyes on this because it could become much bigger," she says.

The singer, who has just come back from a tour of major venues, is excited by the prospect of playing a small auditorium such as the ICA and yet performing to a comparatively large audience. "Intimate gigs a re special - there's nothing like them," she says.

It might not be everybody's idea of fun to pay for the privilege of watching an entire concert on a tiny screen, but 3 Mobile claims that the quality of sound and vision is exceptionally high.

Graeme Oxby, director of marketing at 3, says the gig will be filmed by a company with a proven track record in music television. "We have a number of cameras with different angles, as you would for any decent gig," he says.

The audience are all 3 Mobile customers who were told of the chance to view the gig through a daily video messaging service "Today on 3". The first 2,200 to take up the offer will have �5 added to their regular phone bills. People from Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol are among those paying for the gig to be streamed to their phones.

Oxby says the audience is supposed to listen to the gig through their headphones (or "headset") but that use of speakerphone would allow more than one person in the room to hear the show (if not to see it).

"There is a lot of interest among artist management because there is a lot of potential here," he says. "Some of the more inventive record labels will start to push this whole thing."

Bedingfield was chosen to take part in the experiment because she is the most popular British artist among 3 Mobile customers for video downloads.

But whether your preference is for the mosh pit at the Roxy or a box at the Royal Albert Hall, you will have to wait a while before getting concerts on demand. Oxby admits that the potential for expanding the service to gigs nationwide is severely hampered by the lack of technology at most venues.

Very few can match the ICA when it comes to editing and video mixing desks and suitable connections to the phone networks. For the time being at least, most gig-goers will have to content themselves with getting off their backsides and actually going to the show.

March 16, 2005 at 08:22 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

The future, just around the bend

Economist.com | BRAIN SCAN

Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, but he is best known for his wild prognostications about the future. Is he as crazy as he sounds?

BLAME it on Tom Swift. For it was Swift, the fictional teenage genius who repeatedly saved the world with his scientific savvy, who inspired Ray Kurzweil to become the inventor, engineer and prognosticator he is today. �I started reading those books when I was about nine years old, and couldn't put them down,� he says. It wasn't just the solartrons, diving seacopters and triphibian atomicars that mesmerised him; it was the way the irrepressible Swift applied his mind, and the technology it conceived, to solve human, often personal, problems. �I was smitten by the power of ideas to change the world,� says Mr Kurzweil.

It is as good a way as any to explain how a shy boy growing up in a financially pinched household in Queens, New York, managed to transform himself into a restless thinker who has since founded nine businesses, written five books (with a sixth on the way), won the American National Medal of Technology and the Lemelson-MIT prize for invention and innovation, and who relentlessly preaches the gospel of accelerating technological advance that will soon strain our ability to comprehend what lies ahead.

Like his boyhood hero, Mr Kurzweil cannot seem to keep his fingers out of the future. He keeps venturing on to the bleeding edge�his critics say the lunatic fringe�of science to imagine futures where computers are as intelligent as we are, millions live in virtual reality and immortality is not only possible, but likely. It will all unfold, he says, over the next 25 years as overlapping technological revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics render the world radically different from the place it is today.

The futuristic landscapes that Mr Kurzweil paints have often been derided as outlandish. Nevertheless, he says he stands by his record. In his first book, �The Age of Intelligent Machines�, published in 1990, he predicted that in just a few years a global computer network would emerge. In late 1993, the web hit the mainstream and never looked back. He also predicted that a computer would defeat a chess champion by 1999: sure enough, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. �Well,� shrugs Mr Kurzweil, �I was off by a couple of years.�

Making predictions, particularly about the future, is a dangerous business, of course: long-awaited technologies such as flying cars, space hotels and videophones have yet to materialise (or, in the case of videophones, they have arrived, but nobody wants to use them). But Mr Kurzweil insists he is not trying to oversell the future. He works with a team of ten people, researching big technological trends, examining them closely, and then methodically plotting where they will lead. �I'm an engineer,� he says. �I like to measure things.� And if those measurements lead somewhere improbable, so be it. He is just passing the news along. He is not outlandish; the future is.

His predictions may sound wide-eyed, but Mr Kurzweil himself is not. As he sips a cup of green tea, his calmness makes it easy to imagine the shy, solitary boy who grew up reading books and tinkering with electronic circuits. And while he relishes wandering into controversial areas where he can play the role of agent provocateur, he maintains he has arrived at his conclusions scientifically. Being an inveterate measurer, he says he has looked back not decades, but eons, and has found that the organisation of information has been accelerating at an exponential pace for millions of years.

We are just beginning to see the results of this effect now, he argues, because we have reached the �knee of the curve�, where a slowly rising trend line suddenly rockets upward. That is why many of his predictions seem so implausible, he says: the notion that �exponential change is subtle� is what most futurists and scientists miss. Mr Kurzweil calls it the Law of Accelerating Returns, and it underpins most of his predictions.

�Ray takes ideas everyone accepts, and follows them to logical conclusions that almost no one accepts,� says Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Admittedly, at times Mr Kurzweil goes �a bit far� for specialists versed in the limitations of a particular field, �but he does it with care, and he does his homework,� says Dr Gershenfeld. �He filters out the clutter and identifies important trends with remarkable accuracy,� says Ralph Merkle, director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Centre and an expert in nanotechnology. Yet while accuracy is important, Mr Kurzweil's supporters say that his most important role lies in driving home to as many people as possible the idea that radical change lies just around the corner. �He plays at a valuable boundary between working scientists and futurists, visionaries and science-fiction kooks,� says Dr Gershenfeld. �It's useful to have such �points of infinity'.�

From the age of five, Mr Kurzweil says he knew he wanted to be an inventor. By the age of 12 he was building and programming computers, and as a young teenager he appeared on �I've Got a Secret�, a popular American quiz show. Mr Kurzweil walked on to the stage, played a classical piano piece for the celebrity panel and then shared his secret with the host and audience: the piece he had just played was written by a computer, and he had programmed the computer that created it. By the time he was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying computer science under artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and creative writing with playwright Lillian Hellman, Mr Kurzweil was finding ways to profit from his programming prowess.

�Mr Kurzweil plays at the boundary between scientists, futurists, visionaries and sci-fi kooks.�

In 1967, he hatched an idea for computer software that would help high-school students find a college that matched their interests and skills. Students filled out a form with 200 questions, and Mr Kurzweil's program compared their answers with a database of 2m facts about 3,000 colleges, all compiled by five Harvard students he had hired as researchers. After selling the resulting company in 1968, Mr Kurzweil went on to found Kurzweil Computer Products, where he developed breakthrough optical character-recognition technology that led to the world's first reading machine. Mr Kurzweil sold that company to Xerox in 1980.

Spot the pattern

Then came Kurzweil Music Systems, the result of a collaboration with Stevie Wonder, a blind musician who was the first private customer to buy one of his reading machines. Mr Wonder contacted Mr Kurzweil after he heard about the machine in news reports, and asked if there might be some way to apply the power of computer technology to music. That led to the creation of electronic keyboards able to imitate the sound of a grand piano. Mr Kurzweil sold the company in 1990 to Young Chang of South Korea, the world's largest piano-maker.

The list goes on: Kurzweil CyberArt, Kurzweil Educational Systems, Kurzweil AI, the Medical Learning Company. All are run out of an unspectacular four-storey building in the picturesque town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, the products of Mr Kurzweil's Swift-like curiosity and enthusiasm. Mr Kurzweil's most active current venture is FatKat, which uses pattern-recognition software to spot trends and automate stockmarket transactions.

As wide-ranging as these enterprises appear, one common theme unites them: a fascination with pattern recognition, which Mr Kurzweil argues is at the heart of human intelligence. Many of his inventions�from optical character-recognition software to CyberArt's paintings to FatKat's transaction engine�attempt to imbue machines with something like human intelligence, and often blur the line between art and science. Perhaps the most unorthodox example is Ramona, a computer-generated female singer who is also Mr Kurzweil's virtual alter-ego.

Not even Tom Swift could have come up with this. At the TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference in 2001, Mr Kurzweil wanted to demonstrate how virtual reality can allow people to reinvent themselves. �That is one of the benefits of virtual reality,� he says. �You don't have to be the same boring person all the time.� Motion sensors tracked his movements and linked them to Ramona, whose image was projected on a large screen as Mr Kurzweil put on a show, complete with a rock band. �As I moved, Ramona moved in exactly the same way in real time, and my voice was transformed into Ramona's voice. We got a standing ovation,� he says. A team from Warner Brothers saw the performance and, says Mr Kurzweil, used it as the inspiration for �S1m0ne�, a movie about a Hollywood director who creates a virtual actress who takes on a life of her own.

The way Mr Kurzweil sees it, Ramona is a glimpse into the future. In ten years or so, he imagines that millions of people will spend large chunks of their time interacting in virtual worlds with other people masquerading as whoever they choose�a kind of elaborate masked ball in cyberspace that will eventually evolve into a full-blooded parallel universe. (Already, millions of people play online games, which are becoming ever more elaborate.) �We will have full-immersion virtual reality by 2010,� Mr Kurzweil predicts. �The images will be written directly to your retinas from your eyeglasses or contact lenses.� By the late 2020s, he expects virtual reality will be implemented using nanobots injected directly into the brain that will bypass the input from the outside world and generate the signals needed to create an alternative reality.

If all of this seems too outlandish to be believed, Mr Kurzweil doesn't care. As unnatural as these ideas may seem to others, he says they are just part of a natural evolutionary progression. Apes would have seemed impossible to the first lungfish. A civilisation of humans literally melding with their technology may seem impossible as well. But, he argues, that does not mean it will not happen.

All of which leads to the 57-year-old Mr Kurzweil's most outrageous prediction: immortality. In his new book, �Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever�, he and his co-author argue, in sometimes dense scientific detail, that death no longer need be a fact of life. Current advances in medicine, they say, will lead to major breakthroughs in genetics between 2015 and 2020 that will extend life spans. Then, by the late 2020s, advances in nanotechnology will make possible truly radical life extension and rejuvenation. So to achieve immortality, people alive today merely need to survive long enough to reach the first of these breakthroughs, which will in turn enable them to benefit from the second.

Mr Kurzweil has no time for sceptics who argue that human immortality is impossible, or that mortality is what makes life precious. �That's nonsense,� he says. �What makes the human species unique is that we insist upon going beyond our limitations. We are not staying within the limits of our biology. Life expectancy was 37 in 1800, 45 in 1900 and now it's over 80. Ageing is not a graceful process and death is a great tragedy, a profound loss of knowledge, skill, experience and relationships.� When asked if he expects to live forever, Mr Kurzweil answers without hesitation: �Yes. I expect I will.� After all, when you have as many ideas as Tom Swift, you need all the time you can get.

March 15, 2005 at 09:33 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Europe, U.S. Separated by Telephone Cultures

Yahoo! News - Europe, U.S. Separated by Telephone Cultures

By David Lawsky

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European and American culture differ in language, automobiles, sports and -- less obvious but no less important -- the way they use telephones.

Choices made by governments and companies can mean that teenagers in Athens, Georgia, talk on their fixed line phone for four hours a day while those in Athens, Greece, are sending four text messages on their mobile phones.

The European Commission (news - web sites) in Brussels is proud of its role in helping promote a uniform telephone standard across the European Union (news - web sites). The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) in Washington is proud of its role in letting the market decide.

Europe touts the broad use of the GSM standard as a measure of success. It is now used in more than 100 countries around the world and has ushered in sophisticated multimedia telephone service in many countries.

The GSM system exists in the United States but so do other, inconsistent systems, reflecting the U.S. policy of letting the market decide what technology to adopt.

"Wireless communications is by far the most competitive and innovative market in the Commission's purview," FCC (news - web sites) Chairman Michael Powell said last year.

An FCC report said American mobile users talk more and pay less than Europeans, citing it as "evidence that the U.S. market is effectively competitive" compared to Europe and Japan.

But eight of 10 European Union residents have mobile phone numbers while only six of 10 Americans do.

And Western Europe mobile operators pulled in $142 billion of revenue in 2004, compared to only $104 billion in the United States, according to Marta Munoz of Ovum a consulting firm in London.

But the United States is catching up. U.S. revenues grew at 11 percent, compared to only 9 percent for Western Europe, Munoz said.

SPUTTERING PHONES

Europe's single-standard GSM, which stands for 'global system of mobile communications' reaches a broader audience than America's multiple-standard system.

"You can't use every phone everywhere in the United States, so that puts a limitation on the end user," Munoz observed of the three incompatible American systems.

U.S. cell phones sputter and fail in an apartment near the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, a U.S. agency created to set consistent standards, and in ranch houses in the Los Angeles suburbs. A land line is a necessity.

Europeans can skip fixed lines altogether. Why bother? A GSM works nearly everywhere -- not just in houses, apartments and offices but at the bottom of a salt mine in Poland or on a wind-swept beach in County Donegal in northwest Ireland. The only real problem occurs on trains.

GSM includes the short messaging system (SMS), which works on every phone in Europe. Some Americans have SMS or BlackBerry Wireless, but not everyone.

Americans have made voicemail a way of life, where it often replaces the busy signal. A conversation can be supplanted by voice mail exchanges.

Europeans often skip voicemail, although they have sophisticated versions. Their mobiles automatically send a note saying "1 missed call," and tell them who called. People call back even without a message.

People often use SMS to leave messages, which have a "feel" different from voice mail, e-mail or snail mail.

MINUTE BY MINUTE

Telephone charges are primarily responsible for shaping the different telephone cultures in the U.S. and Europe.

"Price affects behavior with telephones, just as it does in every other aspect of life," said Dermot Glynn, chairman of Europe Economics, a consultancy based in London.

Europeans traditionally pay by the minute for both fixed lines and mobiles. Teenagers save money using cheap SMS messages instead of mobile calls, and pay nothing to receive. Those Americans who have SMS must pay to send and receive.

Americans traditionally paid a monthly flat rate for unlimited local calls on wireline. But now they can pay to extend that to the whole country, no matter how many calls or for how long.

As a result of the differing economics of the phone systems, there are different practices:

--Americans talk more. Flat-rate charges also helped get the Internet off the ground there because dial-up lines were not charged by the minute as in Europe.

--Europeans give out their cell phone number and put them on their business cards. They pay nothing to receive mobile phone calls in their home country.

--Americans traditionally have paid to receive mobile phone calls and tend to be less free about giving out cell phone numbers.

--American mobile subscribers get an allotment of minutes for a monthly fee and competition led to packages offering free nationwide calls nights and weekends.

--Europeans buy more limited packages -- especially geographically. Despite investigations by the European Commission mobile phone companies in Europe charge as much as one euro per minute to send or receive calls abroad.

--Europeans buy their own phones and easily switch phone companies or numbers by swapping tiny SIM card chips. So travelers sometimes buy inexpensive SIM cards to use abroad, receiving calls for free on a new, local number.

But a sun-seeking Briton in Spain is more cautious about making mobile calls than a sun-seeking Minnesotan in Florida.

Now, the advent of 3G high-speed data phones will soon create its own cultural changes -- likely to be different in the United States than Europe.

(additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington and Kirstin Ridley in London)

March 13, 2005 at 12:14 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Good quote from Gates re "communities" at CES 2005

Internet Changes Everything: Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation

BILL GATES: That's right. Gaming is becoming more of a social thing, and all the different genres, including some that will draw in older people, draw in really everyone [who] will use this rich communication. So if you look at what's going on with e-mail, instant messaging, blogging communities, and now this live entertainment, if we can integrate all that and make it seamless so you can see a person's presence across that, invite them to do different things, then we will have created something that's quite phenomenal.

January 8, 2005 at 11:45 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (33) | Top of page | Blog Home

Clarke condemns the 'Luddites' over identity cards opposition

Times Online - Britain

By Greg Hurst, Political Correspondent
CHARLES CLARKE overcame his first test in the Commons as Home Secretary last night as he steered the Government’s plans for identity cards past opposition from both the Labour and Tory back benches.

The Identity Cards Bill was given a second reading by 385 votes to 93 after Mr Clarke earlier branded opponents of the plan �Luddites� and argued that he had a duty to use technology to protect citizens.

In a combative Commons performance, the new Home Secretary confronted head-on the doubts of a succession of Labour backbenchers to plans for biometric identity cards.

He was challenged by Kate Hoey, the Labour MP for Vauxhall, to rule out a role for Capita � the support services company involved in several controversial public computer contracts � in creating a national identity database.

But Mr Clarke told her bluntly: �There is a Luddite tendency in this House that says we should have no IT projects because there have been mistakes in the past. That is a legitimate position to take but it is not one I am able to support. There are large numbers of areas where the use of technology should be a major asset.�

Mr Clarke told MPs that he was not prepared to exclude any bidder from the process.

Mr Clarke further denied claims from MPs of all parties that a national identity database amounted to a fundamental increase in the power of the State over the citizen.

Bill Cash, the Tory MP for Stone who disagreed with his own party�s backing for the Bill, brandished a copy of George Orwell�s 1984 as he argued that it represented a sea change in the relationship between the individual and the State.

Twice Mr Clarke compared the proposed national identity register to the introduction in 1837 of the requirement to register the birth of every child in England and Wales.

MPs pressed him to explain how identity cards would help to combat terrorism when they had not prevented the Madrid train bombings this year.

Mr Clarke said: �It is clearly the opinion of the police and all the other security services that this Bill will make the identification of people easier and that is why we support it.�

Others, such as the Tory MP Francis Maude, pressed him to say how the supposed benefits of an identity card scheme could apply unless it became a legal requirement to carry a card at all times. The Home Secretary admitted that the Bill could indeed lead to a compulsory identity card scheme, if Parliament approved, but said that it did not create police powers to require people to identify themselves.

Although the Conservative front bench supported the Bill, there were rebel motions opposing its second reading from six Tory MPs led by the former Cabinet minister Douglas Hogg and by 15 left-wing Labour MPs, including Clare Short. Instead, the Tories tabled a separate motion calling for the Bill to be referred to a joint committee of MPs and peers rather than a standing committee of MPs. Under a timetable motion, its committee stage will finish on January 27, two and a half weeks after the Commons returned form the Christmas recess.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary who had privately expressed doubts about the Bill, spoke of the need to balance security against liberty, saying that the duty to protect life must be weighed against the protection of our way of life.

He told MPs that he would not have countenanced identity cards before the September 11 terrorist attacks. �After 9/11, I accept we have to consider them,� he said.

He set out five tests on which the Conservatives would judge the Bill during its passage. Challenged on whether the Opposition would continue to back it at its third reading if the Government refused to make changes, Mr Davis replied: �We will make a judgment � and, if it hasn�t changed at all, I think we will make a judgment which is pretty sceptical of it.�

THE CARD DEAL

2002: Home Office launches consultation on identity cards

2003: Home Office research and surveys

2004: Government launches ID Card Bill

2005: Bill should pass into law

2005-07: Technology to be tested and agreed

2008: First cards issued

2013: Cards could become compulsory

December 20, 2004 at 10:24 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Tech's future: It's all about fun

Tech's future: It's all about fun | csmonitor.com

From iPods to Web-surfing TVs, consumers clamor for digital toys.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WALNUT CREEK, CALIF. – There is no ambiguity about Kimberly Meyer's marching orders. Her daughter does not want just any MP3 player to listen to the music she downloads from the Web. No, her Christmas list is as precise as a Martha Stewart recipe for Bundt cake: She wants an Apple mini iPod - and she wants it in lime green.

Mrs. Meyer's daughter is not some tech-geek devotee of all things Apple. In fact, Meyer can't think of a single Apple item in the entire house. But this isn't about gigabytes and USB ports. It's about Madonna, Michelle Branch, and 10,000 songs in your pocket.

With its iPod, Apple has tapped into what many analysts say is the future of American technology: entertainment. And this holiday season, the computer industry as a whole is making its first significant foray into the world of digital cameras and plasma-screen TVs.

The momentum has been building for a while, as tech companies look to new markets now that sales of personal computers have slowed. But the recent rise of the Internet, combined with the explosion of digital media, has fueled the shift by turning every photo, song, film, and TV into nothing more than a package of digital information that can be moved around and played at will.

Now, as technology companies step in with an array of products that give consumers more control over their movies and music, they are recasting Silicon Valley's business sense and revolutionizing an entertainment industry still baffled by the realm of bits and bytes.

"Technology companies understand how to move a word document file around," says Rod Bare, a tech analyst at Morningstar in Minneapolis. "It doesn't take much more effort to move around a music file ... and if you're sitting in a tech company, you're looking at all the information that can be digitized."

Everyone is a movie producer, DJ

In the broadly defined universe of entertainment, that's almost everything - from photo albums to episodes of "The Biggest Loser." Hewlett-Packard, a leader in printing, has already jumped into the digital camera and photo printing markets. Microsoft, which introduced its XBox game system several years ago, has reintroduced a brand of Web TV that allows users to surf the Internet by TV. And Dell now sells MP3s and flat-panel TVs on its website.

It's just the beginning. This year, both Dell and HP are offering Media Centers - computers that work like a normal machines but are specifically tailored to help users manage their digital music and photos. The next generation media center, which is just now entering the market, is a computer that hooks up to the TV and looks like a VCR. Through a remote control, users can record TV like a TiVo, play music like an MP3, and show movies that are saved on a computer in the den through a wireless Web connection.

"It's a growing trend," says Venancio Figueroa, a spokesman for Dell. "If you look at the usage model ... the PC is moving from a productivity tool to an entertainment platform."

On one hand, as computers become a more seamless part of everyday life, it moves America closer to the digital home. Yet it also underscores the increasing importance of entertainment and the individual in contemporary culture, as the ever more on-demand world spawned by the Web allows users to tailor every aspect of the media to their tastes.

"It turns out, the Internet revolution was not a technology revolution but a media revolution," says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "It's a shift from mass media to personal media."

Speaking cosmically, he is by no means certain that this is an entirely good thing: "Digital technology is so bewitching that it risks turning everything into entertainment ... and the lesson from Rome onward is that all great civilizations fail by turning everything into entertainment."

Certainly, it will put more power in the hands of each consumer. He suggests that the greatest symbol of the mass media was the TV. "It delivered the world to your living room, but all you can do is press your nose to the window and watch," he says.

Personal media makes each person a participant. Recording TV on a computer allows users to potentially edit out commercials and watch programs any time they choose. With music, people can download one song at a time and build their own albums. As the more tech-savvy members of society have begun doing this on their own, Silicon Valley has jumped in to make it easier for everyone.

Creating buzz with new gadgets

Moreover, Apple has found that makina a foray into entertainment can create a buzz that boosts stock prices. "If you want to be highly valued, you have to be visible and people have to like what you sell," says Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif. Today, with laptops little more exciting than toasters, he says, businesses are looking for "a popular product people get excited about."

The excitement about the iPod has shown itself in ways both familiar and peculiar. With Apple's MP3 on virtually every hot gift list, sales are strong. Market analysts forecast that Apple will sell 3.5 million iPods during the Christmas quarter. Yet one schoolteacher's love for the iPod has taken a unique twist. He has created his own 60-second commercial for the iPod. Although it was only posted a few weeks ago, the online ad has already drawn 37,000 hits, according to Wired News. It's the first consumer-generated ad industry watchers can recall.

Consumers in control

While the ad might help Apple, the personalizing of the media hints at something more troubling for the entertainment industry. If computer users can mix and burn their own CDs, for instance, why would they buy CDs from the store? If TV viewers of the future can program their recorders to skip ads at will, how will networks pay their bills? In many ways, technology companies are fueling a future that Hollywood is desperate to avoid.

"The control-points are broken," says Mike McGuire, an analyst for Gartner G2 in San Jose. "What these [tech] companies are doing is reacting to the phenomenon that the consumer is in absolute control."

By the looks of it, Meyer's daughter is in control at home. Meyer, who refused to give her real name, says she has already bought an iPod for her husband with the idea that he and his daughter could share. Her trip to the Apple store here in Walnut Creek, Calif., suggests that didn't work.

The same is true in front of the Apple store a half hour away in Emeryville, where Ron Kirk says it took him 3-1/2 weeks to find an iPod for his daughter last Christmas. This year, he's here to buy her a new carrying case. "She loves it," he laughs.

December 13, 2004 at 07:29 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Britons growing 'digitally obese

BBC NEWS | Technology | Britons growing 'digitally obese'

Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in "weight".

Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found.

It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK "digitally fat".

"Virtual weight" measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams.

He calculated physical comparisons for digital data in the mid-1990s.

He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.

The amount of data people are squirreling away on their gadgets is clearly a sign that people are finding more things to do with their shiny things.

'Digitally obese'

If digital hoarding habits continue on this scale, people could be carrying around a "digitally obese" 20 gigabytes by next year.

"Britain has become a nation of information hoarders with a ferocious appetite for data," said Martin Larsson, general manager of Toshiba's European storage device division.

"As storage capabilities increase and the features and functionalities of mobile devices expand to support movie files and entire libraries of multi-media content, we will all become virtually obese," he told the BBC News website.

The survey reflects the increasing trend for portable devices with built-in hard drives like music and media players from Apple, Creative Labs, Archos, iRiver and others.

This trend is set to grow, according to analysts. They suggest the number of hard drives in consumer electronics gadgets could grow from 17 million last year to 55 million in 2006.

"Consumers are driving the move towards smaller devices that have greater functionality, and industry is trying to keep up," said Mr Larsson.

"People are looking for more than just phone calls and text messages on the move, they want things like web browsing, e-mailing, music, photos and more."

Bigger please

Many are finding memory keys and memory sticks are simply not big enough to hold everything.

"Floppies and memory keys have their place, but they don't have anything like the capacity or flexibility of a hard drive so are unable to meet the demand for more and more storage capacity in consumer devices," said Mr Larsson.

The cost of making hard drives has dropped and is continuing to do so because of improved technologies so they are proving to be more cost-effective than other forms of memory, he added.

The amount of data that can be stored has grown by 400% in the last three years, while the cost for every gigabyte has fallen by 80%.

It is also getting easier to transfer files from one device to another, which has traditionally been a slow and problematic area.

"Transfer of data between different memory types has improved significantly in recent times, and will be further helped by the standards for hard drives which are currently being developed by the major manufacturers," said Mr Larsson.

According to technology analysts IDC, a fifth of all hard drives produced will be used in consumer electronics by 2007.

December 13, 2004 at 07:28 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Study: Big Growth in European Broadband

Yahoo! News - Study: Big Growth in European Broadband

Fri Dec 3, 4:44 PM
More than half of Europe's Internet users now enjoy a broadband Web connection at home, according to a market research report from Internet audience tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

The growth of broadband has helped to expand the number of European Internet users past the 100 million mark, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

UK and Italy Ahead

As of October 2004, 54.5 million Europeans accessed the Internet via a broadband link, up 60 percent from 34.1 million a year earlier, according to the research firm.

The greatest growth was seen in Italy, at 120 percent, and in the UK, where the number of broadband users almost doubled. Consumers have been drawn to broadband because of lower prices and more offerings for broadband services, which offer fast and always-connected Internet access.

In Europe, as in North America, consumers have the choice of cable TV broadband services and telephone-based digital subscriber line (DSL) subscriptions.

Overall Internet Growth

Along with a rise in consumers changing their slow, dial-up accounts for broadband subscriptions, there has been a growth in the overall number of Internet users in Europe.

The total number of European Internet users rose by 12 percent to 100 million in the 12 months to October 2004, led by consumers in France, Italy, the UK and Germany, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

"Twelve months ago, high-speed Internet users made up just over one third of the audience in Europe," Gabrielle Prior, European Internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, says in a statement.

"Now they are more than 50 percent -- and we expect this number to keep growing. As the number of high-speed surfers grows, Web sites will need to adapt, update and enhance their content to retain their visitors and encourage new ones."

Internet use in the United States has followed a similar trend. "In October 2004, 53 percent of the American online population connected via broadband compared to 41 percent in October 2003," according to Marc Ryan, senior director and analyst, Nielsen/NetRatings.

Lower Estimate

The Yankee Group has a more cautious stance on broadband Internet usage in Europe than Nielsen/NetRatings, while agreeing that there has been a sharp rise in broadband subscriptions.

"We forecast 31.1 million paid broadband subscribers at the end of 2004 for Europe, a 62 percent increase from 2003," Patrick Mahoney, a Yankee Group analyst, told Newsfactor.

"The reason this differs so much from Nielsen is because our numbers reflect paid residential subscriptions, not users -- one subscription can have many users."

December 4, 2004 at 01:45 AM in Internet evolution, Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home

Self-service IT goes bananas

ITBusiness.ca

11/26/2004 5:00:00 PM - An important training lesson learned in the check-out lane

by Neil Sutton

Let's face it: self-service is a relative term.

It seems fairly appropriate when you're at the gas pump or the salad bar, but less so at the grocery check-out, even when you're swiping bar codes across a scanner yourself.

I had my first "self check-out" experience at a Loblaw's superstore
that opened up recently just north of Toronto. Practically any new big box retail outlet will draw crowds for its first couple of weeks either through its sheer novelty or the promise of grand opening bargains. Such was the case at this Loblaw's -- the place was teeming with overeager shoppers and the line-ups were daunting. It was then that I spied two lonely check-outs, curiously bereft of cashiers.

These self check-outs had all the usual features -- a scanner to capture the bar code information, scales to weigh produce, and a display that totaled the purchases.

A man with a small child was trying his hand at one, but was having difficulty getting the bar codes to scan. I lined up behind him and thought, "Man, this is amateur hour." I could have had this guy's stuff scanned and bagged in two minutes. He muddled through, trundled off with child in tow, and I stepped up to the plate.

Easy-peasy. I'll be done with my cart of groceries in no time while the rest of these losers wait in line. I was doing pretty well and had a decent rhythm going with the swiping and bagging. Then came the produce. Never has a bunch of bananas so befuddled a human being since apes descended from the trees and started walking upright.

No bar code.

In a move that ultimately takes the "self" out of self check-out, two employees who were waiting in the wings stepped forward and instructed me to manually tap in a four-digit code to indicate "banana." The apples and tomatoes sitting in my cart followed suit.

These women have stations in the store to aid the checkout-challenged. When a banana-wielding luddite can't figure out when to do next, they swing into action.

This really isn't unlike practically any enterprise scenario in which employees are presented new technology -- the basics are pretty self-evident, but throw a banana problem in the works and it's time to put a call in to the help desk.

Companies spend vast amounts of money sending employees on training excursions to figure out how to handle the banana problems of IT. Whether it's an HR portal, a business intelligence suite or a new PDA, staff require time and training in order to master the technology's potential.

Here at ITBusiness.ca, we devote a reasonable amount of our coverage to "training" stories since it's a universal issue within the industry. Many enterprises are using e-learning tools to communicate IT changes to their staff. It's a relatively cost-effective way of doing it and users can generally learn at their own pace. Others prefer more hands-on training and actual classroom sessions. Those tend to be more expensive and time-consuming, but the personal attention can often yield better results.

Then, of course, there's the help desk and dedicated IT workers who provide ongoing support -- answering questions, smoothing over problems and just generally troubleshooting.

The patient young women who presented me with a solution to the banana problem in the Loblaw's are the equivalent of help desk, but surely their jobs are just transitory. Sooner or later, people are going to have to figure out how to scan bananas for themselves or self check-outs will never take off.

I first heard of the technology when I started working at ITBusiness.ca almost five years ago. NCR provided a briefing at its Atlanta office and talked about the impact self check-out would eventually have on the retail industry. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see an awful lot of these devices out there.

The problem is, there really isn't any training for the public at large. Most people have watched enough cashiers swipe bar codes to intuit how do to it themselves, but the nuances of self-checkout are somewhat baffling. (I haven't even mentioned the "bagging platform" that chirps at you if you remove a bag before you've finished swiping all of your groceries. Then there's the bizarre array of payment options. Coin-feeder, anyone?)

Maybe we'll get there eventually -- after all, pumping your own gas was once considered unthinkable -- but for now, self-checkout's going to be playing second banana.

November 26, 2004 at 10:50 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age (USA)

A Nation Online: Broadband Age

NationOnlineBroadband04.pdf

November 22, 2004 at 10:52 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

Report: Fast-Internet Use Doubles in U.S.

Yahoo! News - Report: Fast-Internet Use Doubles in U.S.

By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

WASHINGTON - The number of Americans using fast Internet connections doubled from 2001 through late 2003, still below some expectations and especially low among minority groups and people in rural areas, according to a report by the Bush administration.

During the election campaign, President Bush (news - web sites) advocated affordable access to high-speed Internet services for all Americans by 2007.

The Commerce Department (news - web sites) report, prepared in September but undisclosed until after the election, said use of fast Internet connections grew dramatically through October 2003 to 20 percent of U.S. households. The report praised such services for fueling online banking, entertainment and commerce.

Some experts said growth was disappointing, far behind countries that include South Korea (news - web sites), Taiwan and Canada. The report also identified troubling figures for use or availability of high-speed Internet services among blacks, Hispanics and people in rural areas.

"It shows we continue to have a significant divide between urban and rural America in the infrastructure for the economy of the 21st century," said Gregory L. Rohde, who was top telecommunications adviser under President Clinton (news - web sites).

Only one-in-seven blacks and fewer than one-in-eight Hispanics lives in a household with fast Internet service, said the report, titled "A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age."

One in four white Americans used high-speed connections at home. In urban areas, 40.4 percent of households used fast connections; only 24.7 percent of rural users did.

Significant numbers of rural Americans said they couldn't subscribe to high-speed services because none was available. Most Americans who did not use fast connections said service was either too expensive or they did not need it.

"This is lousy," said Harris Miller, head of the Information Technology Association of America, a leading industry trade group in Washington. "We're just not keeping up with our competitors. We're not even keeping up with countries we don't consider competitors. It's not acceptable."

The government's report was prepared in September. But the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (news - web sites) did not disclose its findings � based on the Census Bureau (news - web sites)'s population survey of 57,000 U.S. households � until Friday, when it published the report on its Web site.

"It takes us awhile to get these reports prepared and compiled and published," Commerce spokesman Clyde Ensslin said. "We are occasionally questioned about the timing of reports. That comes with the territory. The review and approval process was not complete in September."

___

On the Net:

Report: www.ntia.doc.gov/reports/anol

November 22, 2004 at 10:48 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface

Policing Sgt. Thomas Navin of the San Jose Police Department enters data into a patrol car's computer system. The system has baffled some officers.

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: November 11, 2004
AN JOSE, Calif.

SAN JOSE has a reputation as one of the safest large cities in the nation, with the fewest police officers per capita.

Yet a number of the 1,000 officers in this city of 925,000 in the heart of Silicon Valley have been worrying about their own safety of late. Since June, the police department has been using a new mobile dispatch system that includes a Windows-based touch-screen computer in every patrol car. But officers have said the system is so complex and difficult to use that it is jeopardizing their ability to do their jobs.

Policing Sgt. Thomas Navin of the San Jose Police Department enters data into a patrol car's computer system. The system has baffled some officers.

Officers complain that routine tasks are so difficult to perform that they are discouraged from doing them. And they say that the most vital safety feature - a "call for assistance" command that officers use when they are in danger - is needlessly complicated.

"Do you think if you're hunkered down and someone's shooting at you in your car, you're going to be able to sit there and look for Control or Alt or Function?" said Sgt. Don DeMers, president of the San Jose Police Officers' Association, the local union and the most vocal opponent of the new system. "No, you're going to look for the red button."

Officers also say they were not consulted about the design of the user interface - how information is presented and how commands are executed using on-screen and keyboard buttons. Many have said they wish the department had retained and upgraded the old system, in place since 1990.

Such complaints have a familiar ring. Anyone who encounters technology daily - that is to say, just about everyone - has a story of new hardware or software, at work or at home, that is poorly designed, hard to use and seemingly worse than what it was intended to replace. Yet because the safety of police officers and the public is involved, the problems in San Jose are of particular concern.

At the heart of the dispute is the question of how much the technology itself is to blame, how much is a training problem and how much can be attributed to the predictable pains associated with learning something new.

Any new technology, whether it is a microwave oven or the controls of a Boeing 777, has a learning curve. And often the user interface, the all-important gateway between person and machine, is a dizzying array of buttons or keys that have to be used in combinations. It can take weeks, sometimes months, of training and adapting for people to become comfortable with a new system.

Police department officials in San Jose have acknowledged that the off-the-shelf system, which cost $4.7 million, has had some bugs, yet they say the software vendor, Intergraph Corporation, of Huntsville, Ala., has fixed many of them.

"The city and Intergraph have worked together to iron out the software and work-flow issues that sometimes accompany the introduction of a new system," said Alice Dilbeck, vice president for customer services at Intergraph.

And at public safety agencies elsewhere in the country where similar software has been introduced, employees have eventually grown used to the new technology.

Still, questions and complaints remain, not only among patrol officers but among dispatchers who say that with the new system, unlike the old, they are unable to perform several tasks at one time.

With the system, officers in the field can receive orders, send messages, write reports, call up maps of the city and, using the Global Positioning System, see not only where they are but where other patrol cars are at any given time.

When first installed, the system was unstable. A day or two after the new system went into operation, it crashed, and for several days it was periodically down. "That didn't engender a lot of trust," said Sergeant DeMers of the police union.

Ms. Dilbeck acknowledged, "That was a really bad start."

When the system was running again, a number of bugs were discovered, said Aaron Marcus, president of Aaron Marcus & Associates, a user-interface design consulting firm in Berkeley, Calif., that studied the new system at the request of the union.

Some of the map information, it turned out, was inaccurate, screens were cluttered with unnecessary information, the on-screen type was difficult to read and officers could not easily perform one of the most basic tasks - the license-plate check.

"This is almost a casebook study of what not to do and how to do it wrong," Mr. Marcus said.

Perhaps the biggest misstep of all, Mr. Marcus said, was that the officers themselves were not consulted beforehand, especially when it came to the design of the interface.

Jakob Nielsen, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting company in Fremont, Calif., agreed.

"It's a prescription for disaster to develop a big system without testing it with users before it's launched," Mr. Nielsen said. "There are always issues in the user interface that need to be smoothed over."

The San Jose police chief, Rob Davis, said that those who were in charge of planning for the new system "have reviewed it and in retrospect would probably agree that if they had involved more of the end users during the planning phase it would have made the rollout easier."

Since the complaints first arose, Intergraph has fixed bugs and streamlined some of the more cumbersome tasks such as the license plate checks. Ms. Dilbeck and others have spent weeks at a time in San Jose working to eliminate bugs.

"I'm getting very good feedback about the upgrades," Chief Davis said.

Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the San Jose officers had grown used to the city's 14-year-old text-based system.

"It's a debatable issue as to whether you should fix the old or go for a new paradigm," Mr. Marcus said, "because the old software wasn't off the shelf, it was customized."

The amount of training that was initially given to officers, three hours, was considered by many to be inadequate. "You expect our officers to be able to operate in life-and-death situations with three hours' training?" Sergeant DeMers said.

Sgt. Thomas Navin, supervisor of the department's systems unit and the person who has been most responsible for training on the mobile systems, acknowledged that training was "bare-bones basic." Additional training has since been offered.

But the fact that the system is based on Windows complicated the issue, since not everyone was familiar with pull-down menus and other basic features. "There are people who are Windows savvy and those who aren't," Sergeant Navin said. Officers in their late 50's and early 60's tend to resist the new system more than younger officers do.

Also, officers were trained on desktop computers with track pads on the keyboards, not the touch screens they would eventually be using.

Another point of controversy was the red Code 99 command, used when an officer is in danger and needs help. Originally the system had one key for Code 99, but it was later changed to a two-key combination because the single button code was resulting in too many false alarms. Now it is the two-key method that prompts some complaints.

Over all, the new system is an improvement over the old, some department officials say, in part because it contains a mapping feature based on global positioning data provided by the city. But the maps contain errors, Sergeant DeMers said.

Officers say they are being distracted by the tasks they are expected to perform on the new system when their full attention should be given to what is happening outside the patrol car. Sergeant DeMers said one officer recently was so distracted by what he was doing on the 12-inch touch screen that he crashed into a parked car.

During a recent tour of the system with a reporter in the passenger's seat, Sergeant Navin typed in a message to another officer, Sgt. David Bacigalupi, asking his opinion of the Intergraph system. "You can't print what I think," came the officer's response.

Later, as Sergeant Navin drove through the streets of San Jose, his taps on the screen inevitably led to some swerving, inadvertently bearing out his colleagues' claims - even though he was clearly well versed with the ins and outs of the system.

"In practical reality, especially when responding to an emergency call, they have to do some of these things while en route," Mr. Marcus said.

The fact that the officers and police dispatchers were not consulted about their preferences and requirements has come back to haunt the city. In July, the union asked for meetings to discuss the new system, saying it was having an adverse impact on officer safety. "Legally, they can't just implement something like this unilaterally," said John Tennant, general counsel for the union.

Even after some extensive tweaking, there still seem to be some fundamental bugs, Mr. Marcus said. "Much of the design was incorporating a Windows desktop graphical user interface with complex menu hierarchies, which just doesn't make sense in a vehicle."

Dispatchers have been similarly unhappy, citing delays with the new system that could endanger officers.

It takes longer to give officers information about the prior arrest record of someone they have just caught, said Melissa Albrecht, a San Jose dispatcher for 15 years. "Does that two extra minutes make a difference when they're standing there with a felon?" she asked. "It could.'' In September, Ms. Albrecht sent a six-page memorandum to the police chief listing her concerns.

She credits Intergraph with many improvements. But the system still does not allow dispatchers to perform several tasks simultaneously, and this causes delays. "What they keep throwing at us is that the system works as designed, and my question for them is, 'Does this design work for us?' " she said.

For perspective the San Jose department might do well to borrow a page from a city to the south.

The San Diego Sheriff's Department has had the Intergraph touch-screen system in place for six years, and although there were bugs and resistance at first, the kinks have been ironed out and the deputies are now used to it.

"Some of our people had never done anything with a computer," said Hanan Harb, who manages the department's dispatch center. "We had to do basic Windows training, and it's hard to make that leap if you're not computer literate to begin with. It's a big learning curve." Now that people have grown used to it, and now that this is what they know, "it's very easy for them," Ms. Harb said.

Dr. Nielsen said the Chicago Police Department had similar problems in 1999 when it rolled out an ambitious computer system without having tested it with on-the-beat police officers first.

"Chicago learned its lesson and now has a much better system, developed with user involvement," Dr. Nielsen said. "It's sad that the San Jose Police Department had to learn the same lesson all over again. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

November 10, 2004 at 09:24 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home

Even Digital Memories Can Fade

The New York Times > Technology > Even Digital Memories Can Fade

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: November 10, 2004
The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages

Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.

"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.

So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for digital preservation.

Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.

"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration.

In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3�-inch diskettes, even the larger 5�-inch floppy disks from the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's and other backup formats.

But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature.

And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.

"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.

Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.

Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.

Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.

Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental about," he said.

Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's, especially the rewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a half ago they started to deteriorate, and become unreadable," he said.

And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.

"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"

For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving, means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.

Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said.

Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes in long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum approach might be the most feasible answer.

"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer available," said Mr. Schwartz, whose company has worked with the Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.

"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," Mr. Schwartz said. "There's going to be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus."

Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the printout method.

Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates her own Web sites and she spends much of her day online.

Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents' house 100 miles away.

"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers," she said, "I actually think there's something about the tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."

Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to preserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographs printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer photographic papers can last up to 200 years.

There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive.

Today's formats are likely to become obsolete and future software "probably will not recognize some aspects of that format," Mr. Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture, but there might be things in it where, for instance, the colors are different."

The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress, are working to develop uniformity among digital computer files to eliminate dependence on specific hardware or software.

One format that has uniformity, Mr. Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where it often makes no difference which browser is being used.

Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method, especially when it comes to photos. Shutterfly.com and Ofoto .com have hundreds of millions of photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the site.

The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line," said David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.

But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business?

Mr. Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side, but offered this bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll always make people's images available to them."

Constant mobility can be another issue.

Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep the amount of paper in his life to a minimum, and rarely makes printouts.

Dr. Quinn has a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980's, when he started out on an Amstrad computer.

All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says) and other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his daily diaries.

At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his children, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disks more than 20 years ago. He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.

"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with," Dr. Quinn said.

That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people might use, it is sure to be temporary.

"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck, who is working at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and stacks of old Zip disks.

"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep a box of everything I did in first grade."

November 10, 2004 at 04:57 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

BlackBerry, Bluetooth Miss a Shot to Move Into More Hands

Yahoo! News - BlackBerry, Bluetooth Miss a Shot to Move Into More Hands

Sun Oct 3, 4:08 AM ET

Add to My Yahoo! Technology - washingtonpost.com

By Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post

BlackBerrys and Bluetooth share an embarrassing trait -- these two uses of wireless technology have remained stubbornly irrelevant to many mainstream users, despite the benefits they might offer and the hype they often get in the press.

Many busy executives have become utterly dependent on the always-on e-mail access provided by Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry handhelds, but these devices' high costs and business-oriented features haven't constituted an attractive bundle for people who mostly use their cell phones to talk.

In a similar manner, Bluetooth has drawn a fervent following among enthusiasts who use it to link their phones to headsets, computers and even cars -- but it has remained invisible to customers of the nation's largest carrier, Verizon Wireless, which until recently did not carry a single Bluetooth phone.

These two technologies, however, just got another shot at breaking out into the mass market. RIM's new BlackBerry 7100 is the first BlackBerry that looks and acts more like a phone than a palm-sized computer, thanks to a crafty little keypad that works for both dialing numbers and entering text. Motorola's V710, meanwhile, finally brings Bluetooth to Verizon customers -- along with such high-end features as a built-in camera, camcorder and MP3 player.

The 7100, sold by T-Mobile for $300 (with a $100 mail-in rebate available), is easily the more remarkable device. At first, it looks as if it uses a painfully miniaturized keyboard in the usual QWERTY layout. Not so; the phone has a standard numeric keypad, plus a column of keys on either side. Most of the keys bear two letters apiece.

To free you from the awkward process of having to press a key twice to get the second letter on it, the 7100's SureType software looks at the words you could spell with any given series of key presses, then offers the likeliest match. For instance, if you press 8 (B, N), 3 (U, I) and 2 (T, Y) in order, SureType will suggest the most common word those letters spell out, "but." Other possibilities -- "buy," "bit," "nut," "nit" -- appear below for you to select with the 7100's jog-dial control.

This is the same concept behind the predictive-typing software on other phones, but here you can type on a keyboard layout that feels familiar.

The trick is to avoid constantly looking at the screen as you type, or you'll be too distracted by the alternate spellings. Just bang away at the keys, and most of the time SureType will be uncannily accurate -- it's even smart enough to add an apostrophe when you type "theres" or look into the phone's address book to see if you're trying to type somebody's name. I had few problems instant-messaging with a friend.

Sometimes I did have to enter a word manually, and in a few cases SureType offered some out-of-left-field spellings. But overall, it's an amazing piece of work. It's the best idea in handheld text input since the Graffiti software on Palm handhelds.

If only the rest of the 7100 was as smart as this. RIM's software, the weak point in earlier BlackBerry handhelds, hasn't gotten much stronger on this model. Although the 7100 includes the same type of address book, calendar, to-do and note-taking programs as Palm or Pocket PC handhelds, it's not close to competing with them -- thanks to RIM's unwillingness to learn basic principles of interface design.

The 7100's control menus are clogged with irrelevant and confusing options, it's too easy to lose data or settings, and even such basic actions as adding an appointment to the calendar take too many steps.

The Web browser included on this phone can display standard Web sites, but it frequently hangs up while trying to download their content. Like other BlackBerry devices, this one can access your e-mail -- but RIM has yet to offer non-business users the option of turning off mail delivery. As long as the 7100 is on T-Mobile's network, your e-mail will keep piling up in your inbox, whether you care to read it or not.

The 7100 ships with Windows-only desktop software to synchronize the 7100's applications with Microsoft Outlook and a few other applications via a USB cable. The Bluetooth on the 7100 -- a first for a BlackBerry -- does not allow data transfer between computers; the only thing I could do was use a wireless headset.

And that brings me to the Motorola V710. Verizon, having decided to offer Bluetooth for the first time, made the same mistake as RIM, but much more so -- it went out of its way to take away Bluetooth capabilities.

Specifically, the V710, sold by Verizon for $300 with a one-year contract, can't use Bluetooth to synchronize its address book with the one on your computer, nor can it transfer files to and from your computer -- even though Motorola built in both features.

Instead, the V710's Bluetooth support is limited to allowing a connection to a computer as an external modem -- a task so poorly explained by Verizon's documentation that I resorted to a Google search for help, which turned up usable instructions in somebody's weblog -- and linking the phone to Bluetooth headsets and hands-free kits.

Brenda Raney, a Verizon spokeswoman, said the company will release a software update that would restore address-book synchronization, but she did not explain why that feature got cut in the first place.

File transfer, however, won't be added, even though that would be the simplest way to move pictures and video taken with the V710 to a computer. Why? Verizon is afraid people would steal the downloadable programs sold through its "Get It Now" service.

But if people want to use Get It Now programs without paying, they can link the phone to a computer with a cheap USB cable and transfer all the stuff they want.

This is an embarrassing debut for Bluetooth on Verizon. Much like the woeful software on the BlackBerry 7100, it risks turning off newcomers to the technology entirely. That would be a sad waste, but the wireless industry works like that sometimes.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.

October 4, 2004 at 01:54 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (40) | Top of page | Blog Home

Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks

Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks

Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks by Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli
What is the network form of online discussion groups? What are the topological parameters delineating the interaction on such groups? We report an empirical examination of the form of online discussion groups. We are interested in examining whether such groups conform to the Small World and the Scale Free models of networks. Support for these expectations provides a formal expression of growth, survival potential and preferential attachment in the connection patterns in discussion groups. The research questions were tested with a sample of over 8,000 active participants, and over 30,000 messages. We find that the social network resulting from discussion groups is indeed a Scale Free Network, based on In, Out and All Degree distributions. We also find that, for the same sample, discussion groups are a Small World Network too. As expected, the clustering coefficients for these groups differ significantly from random networks, while their characteristic path lengths are similar to random networks. Implications of the topology for the design and understanding of discussion groups include the stability and control of such groups, as well as their longevity.

Contents
Background
Asynchronous Forums
Social Networks
Scale Free Networks
Small World Networks
Methodology
Results
Discussion

September 17, 2004 at 05:32 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Smart Mobs

Smart Mobs - Book Summary

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks. At least one key global business question is part of it - why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy-protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?

September 17, 2004 at 05:28 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Employers Begin to Get The Message

Yahoo! News - Employers Begin to Get The Message

By Leslie Walker
Jonathan Anderson and Varghese George take opposite approaches to workplace use of instant messaging, an electronic method for exchanging quick text messages between colleagues.

Both bought special tools to reduce the risks their companies face from the software, such as preventing hackers from riding the channel to sneak inside corporate computer networks, or stopping employees from using the systems to send confidential reports to people outside.

George, chief executive of Westex Group of Rockville, said he bought technology to block all instant messaging by his company's 20 employees. "I saw instant messaging as a killer of time," he said, adding that some folks at his equipment and material supply firm were using their computers for idle chit-chat.

But Anderson, who manages security for TEC International of San Diego, gave his company's 110 workers a souped-up messaging program from Microsoft Corp. so they could chat more securely. He said he uses monitoring tools mainly to control who can transfer files via the messaging systems.

"We've been pushing instant messaging because it allows instant communication between people who are not necessarily available by other means," said Anderson, whose firm helps chief executives do professional networking.

Anderson and George illustrate the debate percolating in workplaces about how to confront the growing popularity of instant messaging (IM), which typically sneaks into offices under the radar of corporate technology departments and only gradually wins official blessing. While some managers think messaging makes workers more productive, others worry that any business benefit may be more than offset by the introduction of nasty computer worms and viruses and other problems.

As a result, a new crop of software tools has arrived to help businesses get a grip on instant messaging. Some simply let companies block message traffic or specify which IM programs their employees can use.

Others store a copy of every sent message and let the company decide which of the higher-ups can read them.

"People are still figuring out what their corporate policy will be on IM," said Eric Rohy, product manager for Websense Inc. of San Diego, which sells tools for monitoring instant messaging and Web surfing. "I would say it is fairly evenly divided among those who block it and those who don't."

Jon Sakoda, co-founder of IMLogic, a software maker started in 2001 to address the IM challenge, agreed. "Last year, instant messaging was the sleeping giant, and companies were literally asleep at the wheel," he said. "This year, people are awakening to the problem, but haven't necessarily come up with solutions."

Workers who download and start using free IM software programs from America Online or Yahoo on their company computers without permission from the boss can be "disruptive," said Kailash Ambwani, chief executive of messaging vendor FaceTime Communications Inc. of Foster City, Calif. "The problem is that all of the policy and control and management infrastructure that you have with e-mail does not exist with instant messaging," he said. Viruses can spread faster through messaging than e-mail, he argues, because while IM messages are received instantly, it may take days for people to open their e-mail.

FaceTime and IMLogic offer free, downloadable programs that will tell companies how many employees are using messaging and how often, a tactic designed to persuade them to buy IM management software. This week, IMLogic went further and released a free download that not only reports on usage, but also allows managers to block both IM traffic and peer-to-peer file transfers.

Websense is better known for its Web-monitoring software, which watches and records all the sites employees visit and lets companies block access to particular sites, such as those offering pornography or gambling. Or they can generally set quotas dictating how long employees can spend online visiting certain areas. Last year, Websense added a feature that lets managers determine which IM software workers can use, and in February it added the ability to specify which employees may send and receive attachments.

In addition to IMLogic and FaceTime, software makers specializing in IM include Akonix Systems Inc. and Stellar Technologies Inc. Pricing varies, with one-time licensing fees ranging from $15 to $60 per user, plus annual maintenance charges of 20 percent or more.

Stellar's software, which Westex Group uses, enables managers to monitor who's doing what online -- both with IM and Web surfing -- from reports displayed on Web pages. Charts show the top IM users by employee name, along with their IM screen names and how many messages they have sent. Bosses can click on a screen name and read transcripts of each message, word for word. Clicking on a message brings up a box with even more information -- including the sender's network log-on, the address of the computer from which it was sent, time of transmission and which IM program was used. Managers can set filters to flag messages containing words or phrases, such as "job hunt" or "I hate the boss."

Don Innis, president of Stellar Technologies of Naples, Fla., said companies are often taken aback to learn how many workers are sending sexual or otherwise inappropriate messages: "We all like to think these things don't happen in the workplace, but they do."

FaceTime's tools are often bought by firms in regulated industries such as financial services and health care, where federal laws require companies to audit and archive all electronic communications in a searchable format so they can produce records if necessary. As a result, many financial and health care companies are years ahead of other corporations in grappling with IM.

Companies that don't face strict archiving rules often buy a more general monitoring program, such as one sold by Websense. A typical customer is Golden State Foods of Irvine, Calif., one of the largest manufacturers and distributors for McDonald's. The company gives employees an IBM Lotus Notes messaging tool called Sametime and uses Websense to block IM programs except AOL's.

With about 3,000 employees at far-flung distribution and manufacturing centers, Golden State Foods also needed controls for the Internet kiosks it installed in lunchrooms so workers could do personal business during breaks. Websense enables Golden State to set time quotas and to enforce them by automatically logging off workers when the time is up.

"We give them 90 minutes of quota time to go do shopping and banking and get other personal things done," said Mike Bourque, the firm's information technology director.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.

September 16, 2004 at 07:56 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

Web data transfer to handsets made easier

By MAY WONG
Associated Press
PALO ALTO, Calif. � Have you ever gone on-line to get driving directions, only to leave the printout behind? Have you made movie plans, but forgot to jot down the show times? Or do you simply need an easy way to feed phone numbers to your cellphone?

A trio of entrepreneurs believe they have a solution.

With cellphones becoming more like computers and people carrying them wherever they go, the founders of Vazu Inc. have developed what they consider an easy way to transfer phone numbers and other data from PCs and the Internet onto handsets.

They quietly released their first product earlier this year for users to transfer contact information from desktop address books without any special cables or software. With little publicity, "Vazu Contacts" won rave reviews and garnered thousands of users in 40 countries.

But cellphones are becoming more of an anchor tool in daily life: part mobile phone, part personal digital assistant, part camera, part MP3 player � and one day, with the arrival of mobile commerce applications, part wallet as well.

Vazu hopes to capitalize on that trend by creating a channel for folks who want to easily populate their phones with data.

So at this week's elite DEMOmobile tech show in San Diego, Vazu is launching more ambitious products designed to turn cellphones into even handier reservoirs of information.

Instead of just phone contacts, the new applications promise to deliver any snippet of information from a website to a mobile phone with ease, from street addresses to train schedules and driving directions.

"It's the power of the Web and connecting it to your phone," said Ramiro Calvo, Vazu's chief executive and co-founder. "And we've gone from personal addresses to searchable content to anything on the Web."

"Vazu Click" is a free, plug-in application for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser. It lets users highlight and send Web text to cellphones. It also automatically tags phone numbers on a Web page so users can send the number to their cellphones by simply clicking on the Vazu icon.

With "Vazu Seek," which is still in a "beta" test mode, users can go to the Vazu website, search phone directory listings and send the results to their handsets.

Later, the company aims to feed cellphones with song files and images.

"Contacts is the beachhead, and we're expanding to other digital content, breathing new life into the phone," Mr. Calvo said.

PocketThis Inc. and Xpherix Corp. have similar PC-to-phone technologies, but sell their services through wireless carriers. Vazu is targeting cellphone users directly, regardless of their mobile provider.

With "Vazu Contacts," users send an e-mail with an attachment containing address book information to an on-line Vazu account. From there, it is delivered to the cellphone via text messaging. Users can even send data directly to a friend's Vazu account or cellphone.

Because Vazu keeps a record of what users send, contacts can be transferred to a new handset with just a few keystrokes should an old one get lost or upgraded. No more thumbing in contacts one by one.

The service currently works with address books for Microsoft's Outlook, Apple Computer Inc.'s Mail and Novell Inc.'s Linux Evolution e-mail programs. All you need is a cellphone that supports text messaging � and most phones do.

"It's cool," said James Cox, a British information technology consultant who recommended the service on his Web journal after trying it out. "I uploaded about two dozen phone numbers, and within a minute or so, they were all on my phone."

Cox had previously used Apple's iSync software to transfer some of his contact numbers, but complained it didn't work smoothly. He said he's looking forward to using Vazu when he upgrades to a new phone soon, something he does about once a year.

Vazu's products are free for now, though users still have to pay wireless carriers for text messages. The Palo Alto-based company may later charge either a subscription or usage fee, or possibly for premium services such as restoring archived data. Vazu is also exploring advertising and partnerships with Internet portals and wireless carriers.

The vision behind Vazu took shape about two years ago after Mr. Calvo, Soujanya Bhumkar and Ken Thom � all Silicon Valley veteran managers � started to meet weekly. After many nights of pizza, their hodgepodge of brainstorming ideas whittled down to the mobile phone application. The trio brought engineer Jay Geygan onto their founding team and set out to work.

The founders hope the name � derived from the Spanish word "va" and the German word "zu," both of which roughly mean, "go to" � will become a vernacular verb similar to "Google" and "TiVo."

"In the end," Mr. Bhumkar said, "we want people to say `Vazu me,' and it will mean, `send to my phone.'"

September 10, 2004 at 07:05 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (35) | Top of page | Blog Home

A New-Age Reference

Yahoo! News - A New-Age Reference

By Leslie Walker
One of the Internet's more fascinating social experiments was born at a time when it seemed all the dot-coms were dying. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia started in January 2001, has since surprised Web watchers by maturing into a popular reference site.

Wikipedia's success is particularly remarkable because unlike regular Web sites, it is created entirely by the people who visit it. With more than 340,000 English-language articles, this community-edited encyclopedia is already considerably larger than its leading rival, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which offers 75,000 articles online in a subscription service.

The free Wikipedia also features a publicly authored current-events page recapping the day's top news, and it is rapidly expanding into other languages -- more than 10,000 articles have been created in each of roughly a dozen languages besides English.

Yet some worry that because it charges users nothing, this new-age reference work may siphon readership away from old-school encyclopedias and take a devastating bite out of their revenue -- without delivering the same levels of accuracy and quality.

Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, pays 20 in-house editors to work with 2,500 outside advisers on writing assignments. Wikipedia contributors, by contrast, are unpaid volunteers who can write and change anything they want on the site -- and often rewrite each other dozens or hundreds of times. Many are anonymous, too, identified only by their computer's numerical Internet address.

But Wikipedia's founders say what others regard as a weakness is part of the site's real strength -- that it is a community. The same openness that allows vandals to wreak havoc, they contend, also enables other contributors to restore order and self-police the site.

"The interesting thing about a community is that it scales inherently," said Jimmy Wales, the site's founder and chief executive. "The more people who come to the Web site and cause problems, the more people we have who are dealing with them."

Wales, a former options and futures trader based in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the free online encyclopedia is being developed under the auspices of a nonprofit foundation named Wikimedia. It has raised about $100,000 from contributors so far, far less than producing the encyclopedia has cost, according to Wales, and the company will need more money if it is to achieve its ambitious aim of producing print and CD-ROM copies for distribution in Africa and elsewhere.

"It is our goal to put the sum of all human knowledge in the form of an encyclopedia in the hands of every single person on the planet for free," said Wales, who modeled his idea of a free encyclopedia created by volunteers on the efforts of software developers who created the Linux (news - web sites) operating system.

Yet Wikipedia also owes its existence to a special type of software invented by programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995. His software, which takes its name from "wiki," the Hawaiian word for "quick," allows groups to jointly create and edit Web pages, using a special formatting style that is different from the HTML format used for regular Web pages.

Anyone visiting a Wiki page can click on a link that says "edit text of this page" and change the words or links by entering text in a box that opens up and clicking "save." They can review prior changes by clicking on a "recent changes" link. Since past versions are archived, contributors can undo edits if they think someone has injected inaccurate or biased information.

This results in tugs of war, especially over hot-button issues.

Wikipedians -- as the site's 9,000 regular contributors are called -- are constantly removing what they call "vandalism" from pages, including a posting on the "abortion" entry in July that said: "ABORTION SHOULD BE ILLEGAL, IT IS VERY HARMFULL FOR THE WOMEN. WOMEN HAS SO MANY OTHER CHOICES OTHER THAN ABORTION. This is a warning!!"

Such diverse points of view have led some to question the reliability of Wikipedia's entries. Britannica's editors are among those who take a skeptical view, noting that Wikipedia publishes a disclaimer stating that it does not vouch for its own validity. "We very much take responsibility for all the content we include in any of our products," said Britannica editor in chief Dale Hoiberg.

He added that Britannica subjects its articles to an editorial review process with at least six stages and works to ensure the content is accurate, comprehensive, balanced, consistent and full of context.

Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., conceded that at its best, some Wikipedia entries reflect the collective wisdom of many contributors. But he added: "The problem with an effort like that is that at other times, it may reflect just the wisdom -- or lack of wisdom -- of the last contributor."

Wales conceded that Wikipedia's quality may not be up to the level of Britannica, but he added that the 236-year-old encyclopedia had better watch out. Wikipedia is proposing to implement editorial controls soon that Wales thinks will put it on par with Britannica.

"That kind of quality is important, and we do believe we can reach that kind of quality within a year," he said. Within a few weeks, Wales plans to propose a review process that would essentially allow certain articles to be flagged as "stable" so they could be included in print or CD-Rom versions. The way Wikipedia works now, anything can be edited almost endlessly. Editing could continue, but a new layer would be added that identified certain entry versions as attaining an editorial standard.

Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, said the unlimited public editing process can have a downside. "I was recently looking at some of the philosophy articles that have been edited and re-edited. I actually think some of them have gone backwards lately," he said. Sanger teaches philosophy at Ohio State University,

Yet Sanger shares Wales's view of Wikipedia as a living community with an amazing growth rate and promising future.

While Sanger believes commercial encyclopedias such as Britannica and Microsoft's Encarta will continue to exist side by side with Wikipedia, Wales contends the commercial efforts won't survive for long unless they change and adopt a more open philosophy.

"I think their cost basis is too high compared to what we can do," Wales said, "particularly since we are moving in the direction of peer review."

Britannica execs scoff at the idea Wikipedia could put it out of business, claiming its online revenue has grown 45 percent in the past year, more than offsetting substantial declines in its CD-ROM sales. Cauz, Britannica's president, said nearly 200,000 consumers are paying $60 a year or $10 a month for Britannica's Web service. The encyclopedia reaches an additional 20 million readers through sales to schools and other institutions, he said.

"We will always be appreciated by people who like scholarly work," he added.

That likely is true, but this topic bears watching for anyone interested in the larger questions of whether -- and how -- the Internet's free dissemination of knowledge will eventually decrease the economic value of information.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.

September 8, 2004 at 10:47 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

Eyetrack III - What You Most Need to Know

By Steve Outing and Laura Ruel
Eyetrack III project managers
News websites have been with us for about a decade, and editors and designers still struggle with many unanswered questions: Is homepage layout effective? ... What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? ... When is multimedia appropriate? ... Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools could help answer those questions and more. Eyetracking research like this won't provide THE answer to those questions. But combined with other site metrics already used by news website managers -- usability testing, focus groups, log analysis -- the Eyetrack III findings could provide some direction for improving news websites.

In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we'll provide an overview of what we observed. You can dive into detailed Eyetrack III findings and observations on this website -- use the navigation at the top and left of this page -- at any time. If you don't know what eyetracking is, get oriented by reading the Eyetrack III FAQ.

Let's get to the key results of the study, but first, a quick comment on what this study is and is not: It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of "findings" based on controlled variables, and "observations" where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went "wide," not "deep" -- covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors. We hope that Eyetrack III is not seen as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a wave of eyetracking research that will benefit the news industry. OK, let's begin. ...

September 8, 2004 at 10:38 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Lower costs prompt UK Internet boom

Lower costs prompt UK Internet boom

LONDON (Reuters) - The number of newcomers to the Internet in Britain has surged this year to its highest level since the dotcom heyday of 2001, according to a study.
Falling fees for access to the Net were a factor behind the boom, market research firm NOP World said on Saturday.

In all, 26.8 million Britons -- nearly half the population -- connected to the Internet at home or work during the first half of the year, 40 percent of them via high-speed broadband connections.

In that period, 1.9 million Britons went online for the first time in their lives, the fastest growth spurt in the past three years, the study said.

The rise in Internet usage is having a noticeable impact on Britons' daily lives, researchers noted.

"The online and offline behaviour of broadband users is significantly different from the general population," they said. "We are seeing a knock-on impact through many off-line activities for broadband users, such as a decrease in TV viewing."

Britain has only recently caught up with its European neighbours in rolling out broadband as significant price discounting by Internet service providers takes effect.

The evidence of continued strong demand for Internet access should soothe concerns that the phenomenal Internet growth rates of years past are on the wane. The UK government has been keen to promote the country as "broadband Britain," a business-friendly market for the 21st Century.

September 4, 2004 at 01:36 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

How Americans Use Instant Messaging

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Instant Messaging

2004 Pew Internet & American Life surveys reveal that more than four in ten online Americans instant message (IM). That reflects about 53 million American adults who use instant messaging programs. About 11 million of them IM at work and they are becoming fond of its capacity to encourage productivity and interoffice cooperation.

ome 42% of online Americans use instant messaging, and 24% of instant messagers say they use IM more frequently than email. This translates to 53 million American adults who instant message and over 12 million who IM more than emailing. On a typical day, 29% of instant messengers�or roughly 15 million American adults�use IM.

The new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project also finds that instant messaging is especially popular among younger adults and technology enthusiasts. 62% of Gen Y Americans (those ages 18-27) report using IM.
Within the instant messaging Gen Y age group, 46% report using IM more frequently than email.

�It comes as no surprise that instant messaging is especially popular among younger Americans because many more of their peers subscribe to IM programs,� said Eulynn Shiu, a research associate at the Pew Internet Project who co-authored a report on the new findings. �Once one friend becomes available via instant messenger, usage among peers grows dramatically.�

IM is more than a tool for chatting. It is also a popular tool for self-expression. Instant messengers take advantage of customizable features such as profiles and icons to enhance their online presence. A third of IM users (34%) have posted a profile for their IM screen name that others can see, and nearly half (45%) post away messages when they are not available to chat.

Twenty-one percent of IM-ing Americans instant message at the office; they find it encourages interoffice cooperation and increases work productivity.
When asked who they contact most often during IM sessions at work, 40% of at-work IM users reported instant messaging coworkers, 33% reported friends and family, and 21% interact with both groups equally.

�There is no doubt that IM use will intensify,� said Amanda Lenhart, research specialist at the Pew Internet Project and co-author of the report.
�Younger Americans, in particular, have incorporated IM into their lives in multiple ways, using it to keep track of their friends, coordinate work meetings, and share files. IM use at home and in the workplace will grow as these creative and time-saving uses of the technology percolate through the generations.�

July figures on Americans Internet use by the tracking firm comScore Media Metrix show that:

# AOL Instant Message (the proprietary service to AOL subscribers) was used by 37% of those who traded IMs during the month. On a typical day during the month more than 5.7 million IM-ers were using this application.

# Yahoo! Messenger was used by 33% of those who traded IMs during the month.
This was the single most popular service used at work and the average user of the application spent 423 minutes using the application during the month � the highest total among the applications.

# AOL Instant Messenger (AIM Service) was used by 31% of those who traded IMs during the month. This application had the greatest reach among college students and on any given day there were nearly 6 million people using the application, making it the most popular application on a typical day.

# MSN Messenger Applications were used by 25% of those who traded IMs during the month.

Some other data highlights from the report:

# IM users often send instant messages to people in the same location as they are: 24% of IM users say they have IM-ed a person who was in the same location as they were � such as their home, an office, or a classroom.

# IM users are multi-taskers: 32% of IM users say they do something else on their computer such as browsing the web or playing games virtually every time they are instant messaging and another 29% are doing something else some of the time they are IM-ing. In addition, 20% of IM users say they do something else off their computer such as talk on the phone or watch television virtually every time they are instant messaging and another 30% say they do other things offline at least some of the time they are IM-ing.

# The IM universe of most users is very modest: 66% of IM users say they regularly IM between one and five people. Only 9% of IM users say they regularly IM more than 10 people.

# 15% of IM users say they use a wireless device such as a phone or wireless laptop to send and receive IM messages.

# 17% of IM users use different screen names to contact different groups of friends or colleagues.

# 51% of IM users say they have received an unsolicited IM from someone they didn�t know.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative, fully-funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts to explore the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, health care, schools, the work place, and civic/political life. The Project is non-partisan and does not advocate for any policy outcomes. For more information, please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org.

September 2, 2004 at 08:01 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Intellisync Revenue Soars on Mobile Growth

ComputerWire Staff

While Intellisync Corp has been seeing a surged of new business, its shares took a hammering Friday after it withdrew its forecast of 2005 revenue in the $70m to $82m range and said it was now aiming at $70m, a 65% increase. The company blamed weaker-than-expected demand.

In its fourth quarter to July 31, the net loss was $1.7m, down from $1.8m on revenue 82% higher at $13.3m. But for $2.1m charges for amortization of purchased assets and other intangible assets, the company would have broken into the black after eight quarters of revenue growth.

For the year, the company posted a loss of $9.5m, up from a loss of $7.7m on revenue that increased 70.2% to $42.3m.

With analysts expecting fourth-quarter revenue in the $14m range, the market was unimpressed by the figures. Intellisync (NASDAQ: SYNC - news) believes that its approach has been vindicated by contracts wins with Verizon (NYSE: VZ - news) to offer a platform for non-RIM devices and with PeopleSoft (NASDAQ: PSFT - news) to extend it mobile access products.

August 31, 2004 at 08:29 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

Homegrown Satellite Radio Software Draws XM Fire

Yahoo! News - Homegrown Satellite Radio Software Draws XM Fire

Sat Aug 28, 9:12 AM By Kenneth Li
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Catching Blondie's reunion tour broadcast at 4 a.m. wasn't an option for XM satellite radio subscriber and single father Scott MacLean.

"I was missing concerts that were being broadcasted when I was asleep or out," he said.

So the 35-year-old computer programmer from Ottawa, Ontario, wrote a piece of software that let him record the show directly onto his PC hard drive while he snoozed.

The software, TimeTrax, also neatly arranged the individual songs from the concert, complete with artist name and song title information, into MP3 files.

Then MacLean started selling the software, putting him in the thick of a potential legal battle pitting technically savvy fans against a company protecting its alliance -- and licensing agreements -- with the music industry.

MacLean says he is simply seeking to make XM Radio -- the largest U.S. satellite radio service with over 2.1 million members paying $10 a month for about 120 channels -- a little more user-friendly.

"The larger issue here is they came out with one lock and another creative person goes out to create a key," said Michael McGuire, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner. "It's very hard for policy and copyright law to keep up with the pace of technological change."

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. "We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library," RIAA (news - web sites) spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.

The RIAA and XM are both busy figuring out if any copyright laws and user agreements have been broken.

MacLean's software essentially marries the song information with an analog recording of the broadcasts, then stores this in MP3 files. The user can leave the software running unattended for hours and amass a vast library of songs.

That feature has been a central concern in the music industry as it lobbies regulators to place restrictions on free copying of digital broadcasts before many more radio stations add digital broadcasts. About 300 stations already offer digital broadcasts.

Music labels fear that the convenience of MacLean's software will lead millions more to copy and distribute songs over file-sharing networks such as KaZaA, a music industry source said.

Media companies were dealt a blow last week when a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that online file sharing software companies in the spirit of the original Napster (news - web sites) were not liable for acts of copyright infringement its users committed.

More than 2,400 XM listeners have downloaded the program since he made it publicly available on Aug. 12, MacLean said, and nearly 400 paid for the full version at a cost of $19.95. He raised the price on Tuesday to $29.95. The software can be found at http://www.nerosoft.com/TimeTrax.

These users are using TimeTrax -- in combination with the software that came with XM's receiver, the PCR -- as their main gateway to XM Radio on the PC.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:XMSR - news) said it was concerned about the software, based on a description of its features.

"That's a product that's not authorized by XM," Chance Patterson, vice president of corporate affairs, told Reuters last week.

"That program is something we don't condone ... It's our expectation they will be shut down," he added. "We're also researching any potential legal violations."

Patterson said the device the software relies on, the PCR receiver, represents a small fraction of its sales. The lion's share of its sales come from receivers built into new cars and stand-alone units that connect to home stereos, which can not be hooked up to computers.

The software could conflict with XM's plans to improve its service. XM has said it plans to launch in October a new car and home radio receiver that lets users pause and rewind live broadcasts. XM also has a deal to stream its broadcasts over next-generation TiVo (news - web sites) recorders.

In a letter seen by Reuters, XM's lawyers told MacLean to discontinue his sales and provide the company with a list of purchasers.

He said he had no intention of complying and added that he had no such list.

August 30, 2004 at 07:35 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Digital Transition

Yahoo! News - The Digital Transition

Sun Aug 29,12:01 AM
By Rob Pegoraro
If my car died tomorrow, I'd have a lot less angst picking its successor than I would if my TV conked out. The "digital transition," as it's called, has given the television market some of the same frustrating inscrutability as the computing market, with an extra dose of technological, regulatory and economic uncertainty.

And yet: People are buying these things. Not just the techno-victims who will snap up any unproven gadget with a four-figure price tag, but regular folks who simply want a better set when their old one implodes.

Finding that better set without buying more or less than you actually want is the real trick of the digital-TV market. Here are six riddles to keep in mind:

Digital and high-definition TV aren't the same thing, except when they are. HD is a subset of digital TV, a generic term that covers 18 possible combinations of picture resolution, screen proportions, scan mode and frame rate. Only six of them count as HDTV -- only two of which broadcasters actually use.

(Why 18 digital-TV formats if so few are used? Much of the consumer-electronics industry remains stuck at a kindergarten-playground level of conflict resolution; when the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) had to pick a standard in the mid-1990s, embracing all 18 formats available was the best it could do.)

One of the two HD formats is called 720p to indicate its 720 progressively scanned lines of resolution; "progressive" means that the entire image on the screen is refreshed 60 times a second, the way a computer monitor works. The other is 1080i, for 1,080 interlaced scan lines; in this case, half of these lines are refreshed every 60th of a second, the way old-fashioned analog TV works. Both 720p and 1080i are wide-screen formats, with a 16:9 aspect ratio close to a movie-theater screen's proportions.

Vendors, however, often try to fudge whether a set is HD-capable in ads. Pay attention to an HD set's resolution -- except when it doesn't matter.

Many digital sets -- including some large, pricey plasma screens -- only support a third, lower-resolution format called 480p (short for 480 progressive scan lines). This format, still a big step up from analog TV (which uses 480 interlaced scan lines), is often marketed as "Enhanced Definition." But on those 42-inch plasmas, the difference between ED and HD won't be hard to spot. When in doubt, look up a set's resolution in pixels; if its vertical resolution (the second number listed in a figure like "640 x 480") is below 720, it's not HD.

Conversely, on smaller sets -- say, under 25 inches across -- it is difficult to see the difference between 480p and 72op or 1080i from normal viewing distances. On those televisions, you can get away with enhanced definition, saving yourself a few bucks.

Like analog TV, digital TV broadcasts can be received in a variety of ways -- over the air, or, for a much larger selection of channels, over cable or via satellite. But digital cable or digital satellite isn't the same thing as digital TV. The services that cable and satellite providers have sold for years are analog at heart; they're only "digital" in the way they transmit that conventional signal. Real, HD-capable digital TV via cable or satellite costs more than "digital" cable or satellite and brings a smaller selection; many cable channels haven't brought out HD versions, although this is quickly improving.

Then there's over-the-air reception, something that seems an anachronism but need not be with improving digital receivers. If you get an acceptable analog signal, you can get a terrific digital signal, as our latest tests have found. But while any analog TV sold today only needs an antenna to tune into what's on, most digital sets are missing any digital tuning hardware.

A set sold as "HD-ready" isn't ready for HD. That phrase, "HD-ready," really means that the set can display an HD picture if it's fed a digital signal by an external box -- a cable, satellite or off-air tuner. A small but growing number of TVs called integrated sets now include an over-the-air tuner, often called an "ATSC" tuner after the Advanced Television Systems Committee that devised the digital system.

A smaller number of sets can tune in to digital and HD cable signals without needing an external cable box. Those with a "QAM" tuner can get unscrambled digital cable, but not premium fare such as HBO; this is the functional equivalent of a "cable-ready" analog set. Those with a "CableCard" slot can get a full set of channels if you pop in a small ID card provided by your cable company, but it won't allow any interactive cable services, such as video-on-demand.

An HD set that included a satellite tuner might be a good idea, but it doesn't exist. Sorry.

Many of the technologies I've mentioned here are new; CableCard sets, for instance, went on the market only at the beginning of last month. So it still pays to hold off on an HDTV purchase if you can -- just not for too long. This is an issue of technology, economics and politics: The technology keeps getting better and the prices keep getting cheaper, but political considerations are forcing manufacturers to put in features that viewers probably won't appreciate.

Last year, the FCC (news - web sites) unwisely voted to require that, as of July 1, 2005, any device capable of receiving a digital signal off the air must support the "broadcast flag." This scheme is supposed to stop full-quality copies of digital programs from circulating online. The idea is to boost the selection of HD shows available over the air and thus speed the digital transition (the government needs stations to switch to the new digital frequencies they've been given for free so it can, in turn, auction off part of the old analog spectrum).

I doubt that the broadcast flag will stop Internet copying of programs -- people will just share lower-quality copies of programs that take less time to download -- but I am pretty confident that the flag will do a fine job of inconveniencing law-abiding viewers. You would be wise to buy an HDTV, or least an off-air tuner, before the FCC's deadline, assuming its manufacturer hasn't implemented broadcast-flag support ahead of time (as if customers are screaming for this feature today).

If you buy too late, or you buy a set that's already flagged, there's still a way out of this copy-restriction mess. Make sure digital-TV hardware has analog connections. Analog component-video inputs and outputs offer almost the same quality as digital connections, but they can't enforce the copying limits of the broadcast flag or its equivalents in cable and satellite transmissions. Make sure that your digital tuner, however it gets its signal, can send the picture along to a TV or a video recorder via a high-resolution analog output.

Digital television has spent most of the past decade as a moving target, and that's not likely to change for the next few years. But I think -- or maybe I just hope -- that if you keep those principles in mind, you can find a digital set that has the useful lifespan of a TV as you've known it, not that of a computer. It's been wonderful to see such rapid progress, but at a certain point, digital TV has to become as boring as analog.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.

August 29, 2004 at 10:05 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

PluggedIn: Multifunction Devices Draw Back-To-School Crowd

Yahoo! News - PluggedIn: Multifunction Devices Draw Back-To-School Crowd

Tue Aug 17,12:57 PMBy Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The consumer electronics gizmo that offers many functions in a small package is what's compelling back-to-school shoppers to open their wallets.

Tablet personal computers on which users can type or handwrite their notes, next-generation handhelds that double as video players and advanced camera phones are among the hottest sellers, analysts say.

One of the highlights is Averatec Inc.'s C3500 convertible notebook, whose display swivels back on itself and can be used to take notes longhand. While such a product isn't new, the Averatec PC is a hit because of its comparatively low price, analysts said. It starts at $1,349.99 before a $50 mail-in rebate, according to the company's Web site.

"I've been told consistently that that has been one of the hottest products," said analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies.

The C3500 is also a full-fledged computer that uses Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Windows XP (news - web sites) Tablet PC operating system software and a low-voltage Athlon processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE:AMD - news). It has high-speed wireless Internet access, a DVD drive and a 12.1-inch screen.

Bajarin said the price is more than acceptable for college students, since most convertible tablets cost $2,300 to $2,500.

Handheld computers have long been a staple of high-school and college students, but more advanced machines that can double as a video camera are particularly popular with young people heading back to school this year.

One such device is PalmOne Inc.'s (Nasdaq:PLMO - news) Zire 72, which starts at $299 and uses the Palm operating system software from PalmSource Inc. (Nasdaq:PSRC - news)

With a 1.2 megapixel built-in camera, users can take pictures and, if they buy an expansion memory card, can shoot video and listen to MP3 digital music files.

"Now I've got all my class schedules on there, and I can even do video," Bajarin said. "That's much more attractive than the standard camera phones."

That said, the more standard camera phones that are seemingly omnipresent are still a must-have for high school and college students.

"Certainly camera phones are popular, but there's also a lot more interest in video instant messaging now," said analyst Stephen Baker of research firm NPD Group. Students are digging deep into their closets and pulling out Web video cameras, he added.

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and others have rolled out video instant messaging. Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news), with its iChat software, also offers the service.

Also combining a phone, e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging, a digital camera, personal information management functions and games are the "hiptop" devices from Danger Inc., Bajarin said.

They're known as the Sidekick when sold by Deutsche Telekom's U.S. mobile operator T-Mobile USA, which has given them a suggested price of $249.99.

Actresses Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore have whipped out their Sidekicks during television appearances, and actor Ashton Kutcher uses one. The product has also appeared in rap videos.

"It's got the cool factor and part of that is being helped by its use on television shows," Bajarin said.

And, of course, Apple's iPod is still a hot seller, particularly for college students. With more than 3 million of the digital music players sold and better availability of the multicolored iPod mini players, those devices should be strong sellers during the back-to-school season, analysts said.

"That one's somewhat of a given," Bajarin said of the iPod.

The success of the iPod and another strong season for notebook PCs point to the importance of portability and Internet connectivity for today's students, analysts said.

"Any notebook that gets thrown out on the shelves in August is going to sell like crazy," NPD's Baker said. "It looks like this year is going to be just as strong as last year."

August 18, 2004 at 11:27 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Korean Internet use creates a digital divide

Korean Internet use creates a digital divide

By Seung eun Myung, CNETAsia
The Internet is taking off in a big way in Korea - but not if you're a country girl
The Internet is at risk of causing divisions in Korea's population, according to new figures released by the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC), which show young men in the cities are by far the most likely to be Net savvy.

MIC's figures show that of the 68.2 percent of Korea's population accessing the Internet last month, the most frequent users were young males, with use lowest amongst women and in Korea's rural areas.

The MIC figures show a strong correlation between age and Internet use, with 86.4 percent of 30-year-olds logging on regularly, but only 27.6 percent of 50-year-olds doing the same.

More than 45 percent of respondents said they are a member of at least one Internet community, while 37.1 per cent utilise instant-messaging services.

The figures also show that only 46.2 percent of Korean's rural population regularly surf the Internet.

More than 17,300 residents from 7,030 households across Korea were interviewed in the bi-annual survey, conducted by the MIC and the National Internet Development Agency.

However, the research suggests that since the start of commercial services in 1994, Korea's Internet use has steadily increased and its penetration rate is now starting to match that of mobile phones.

Frequent Korean surfers spend an average of 11.5 hours a week on the Web, an hour less than they did six months ago. They primarily use the Web to surf for information, play online games and check their email.

Seung eun Myung is a staff reporter at ZDNet Korea.

August 13, 2004 at 01:14 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Study probes roles Internet is playing in U.S. users' lives

Yahoo! News - Study probes roles Internet is playing in U.S. users' lives

By K. Oanh Ha, Mercury News
Like most Americans, single mom Diane Ybarra uses the Internet to make her life a little easier. She buys event tickets online, plans carpools and parties virtually and routinely e-mails friends to keep in touch.

Yet, the Santa Clara mother of two teenagers prefers to browse birthday cards at a store and try clothes on before she buys them. And that, too, matches the Net habits of most Americans, according to a study released Wednesday by the non-profit Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The survey of nearly 1,400 Internet users found that by far, getting information and communicating with family and friends were the two most popular activities online.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans who go online said the Internet plays a role in their daily routines and 64 percent said their daily activities would be affected if they could no longer use the Internet.

Convenience is a big factor. In fact, the most popular online activity is getting maps and directions, with more than half surveyed saying they don't use paper maps or ask for directions anymore.

Yet, for most things, from paying bills to shopping, the real world nearly always wins out over the virtual one.

"The Internet is making a big mark on how we live our lives but it hasn't taken over our lives," said Deborah Fallows, the report's author and a project senior research fellow.

Ybarra e-mails friends and family because it's fast and easy -- but she abhors the idea of sending electronic greeting cards.

"It's tacky," she said. "I like picking something out, feeling the paper, looking at the colors of the graphics. It makes it more special."

Of the 18 everyday activities the study asked about, a majority of people preferred to do almost all of them offline. The only exception: getting directions.

"You don't have to find the map under the seat somewhere and then try to find a paper and pen," Fallows said.

Popular activities Mapquest, based in Denver, with 35 million unique visitors each month, is reaping the benefits. Mapquest is the most popular map site on the Internet, and its traffic continues to grow 15 to 30 percent each month, said Jim Griner, the firm's director of marketing. Some of the more surprising yet popular destinations people look for: prisons and churches.

Other popular Internet activities included communicating with friends and family, checking weather reports and getting news.

Only a third of Internet users who buy everyday items did so online, while only 44 percent of those who pay bills and conduct banking do so on the Internet. Though the number of people conducting transactions online is relatively low, it's one of the fastest-growing segments of users, Fallows said.

For Bank of America, which bills itself as the top online bank, getting customers to pay bills online is key, since those customers are less likely to switch to other banks, have higher deposits and are more likely to use other banking products, said spokeswoman Betty Riess.

Currently, half of households who have checking accounts with Bank of America use online banking, while an even smaller number pay bills online. The bank has tried to address customers' security concerns and anticipates more customers will convert over time.

Gender differences Yet even avid Internet users such as Sunnyvale Web designer Robin Fisher are more comfortable paying bills the old-fashioned way. "I prefer a paper trail," Fisher said.

The report also found that men are more likely than women to use the Internet to gather information and for entertainment. Women, however, were more likely to use the Internet to communicate.

The Pew study said over time, people will rely more heavily on the Internet. One-third of Americans who go online -- mostly educated, affluent, longtime Internet users with high-speed connections -- already are more likely to do everyday activities online exclusively.

"The Internet is an evolution," Fallows said. "It's never going to be a black or white issue, online or offline. More likely, it'll be shades of gray."

Contact K. Oanh Ha at kha@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3457.

August 12, 2004 at 08:09 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (37) | Top of page | Blog Home

Britons embrace digital lifestyle

BBC NEWS | Technology | Britons embrace digital lifestyle

Britons are spending more time than ever using digital goods, like mobile phones, DVD players and the net, says a comprehensive Ofcom report.
The communications watchdog found people spend more time on mobiles than they do on landlines, with nine out of 10 households owning at least one.

Broadband is also becoming an essential part of people's lives, with 55,000 new connections made each week.

Ofcom's annual Communications Market report tracks trends in digital media.

It offers a panoramic picture of digital habits, including the net, gadgets, mobiles, digital TV and radio.

What it suggests is that people are finding extra, or new, activities with which to fill their time, like downloading, communicating online, texting, and surfing 24-hour news services.

Doing digital

"The advance of digital technology brings increased consumer choice and greater innovation, through broadband access, digital television, music downloads, digital radio and more," Ed Richards, Ofcom's senior partner of strategy development said.

As people grow more comfortable with technology, there is more willingness to spend hard-earned cash on digital services and gadgets.

DVD players has proved remarkably popular, with more than half of Britons own one.

The amount spent on fixed, mobile and net services rocketed by �1.3bn in 2003. In real terms, Britons dedicated 4% of their household purse for such services.

The report suggests time spent online has exploded since 1999, from two hours a week on slower dial-up connections to an average of 16 hours a week in homes with broadband.

More than half (53%) of Britain's homes are now online, with a third of those enjoying a broadband connection.

The report predicts that high-speed net connections will surpass five million by next month.

Competition between broadband providers, as well as efforts to upgrade telephone exchanges, has meant such a speedy connection is far more affordable and accessible.

With more people on broadband, more services, like music download sites, have come online to give them something to do with their fast net.

- 53% of homes have at least one digital TV
DAB digital radio covers over 85% of the UK
- 89% are able to access broadband services
- 21% of people use mobiles as main device for calls
- 20m people use their mobile at least once a week instead of a landline

Source: Ofcom

August 12, 2004 at 07:46 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

Caught in the Web

ITBusiness.ca

by Shane Schick
8/11/2004 5:00:00 PM - Internet addiction may or may not be real, but that's not worrying the enterprise

According to an international news report, a number of Finnish conscripts have been excused before their full term ended because they couldn't handle the time away from the Web. It should be noted that the compulsory length of time these young men are required to spend in the forces is six months. If less than a year offline puts them into such a state, they must be Internet addicts. Right?

The truth is that no one really knows, despite a growing branch of psychological literature around Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Although there are a number of firms offering to treat this problem, most likely it is merely a branch of a more comprehensive counseling service. The most authoritative (and by that I mean skeptical) resource I've found online is an article by a psychologist named Dr. John M. Grohol, who has been updating his research on the subject since 1999. Grohol points out that most of the information around IAD is based upon a few scant surveys, which are often heavily skewed towards white men and fail to take into account pre-existing medical disorders. IAD, he argues, is simply something the mental health profession has coined in order to give itself something new to talk about.

"For most people with 'Internet addiction,' they are likely newcomers to the Internet," he writes. "They are going through the first stage of acclimating themselves to a new environment -- by fully immersing themselves in it. Since this environment is so much larger than anything we've ever seen before, some people get 'stuck' in the acclimation ( or enchantment) stage for a longer period of time than is typical for acclimating to new technologies."

There's some truth in this. People I know who don't have office jobs often tell me how quickly they've become "addicted" to their home PC and spend more than the usual amount of time in chat rooms. That's because it's not the Internet itself that's addictive, but the behaviour of socializing in what some consider a more safe environment.

In the Finnish military's case, however, Grohol's theory would appear not to apply. Doctors there concluded the conscripts stayed up all night playing games and didn't have any friends. The Internet was a place to escape, not to interact. That also has little to do with the technology and much more to do with the mental health issues of those behind the keyboard.

Theorized disorders like IAD are emerging at a time when IT users are being criticized (and increasingly monitored) by employers who blame their perceived lack of productivity on the amount of time they spend managing e-mail and surfing the Web. These same firms are moving more and more functions onto the Internet, and implementing collaboration and knowledge management software to even the most entry-level employees. The marketing of these sorts of tools frequently makes light use of the word "addiction" in an oddly positive way -- as though it's wonderful to find something so useful we simply can't do without it. You tell me who's losing it.

August 11, 2004 at 07:01 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Internet and Daily Life: Many Americans use the Internet in everyday activities, but traditional offline habits still dominate

Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Internet and Daily Life

The vast majority of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines and that the rhythm of their everyday lives would be affected if they could no longer go online. Yet, despite its great popularity and allure, the Internet still plays second fiddle to old-fashioned habits. Fully 88% of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines. Of those, one-third say it plays a major role, and two-thirds say it plays a minor role. The activities they identified as most significant are communicating with family and friends and finding a wealth of information at their fingertips. And 64% of Internet users say their daily routines and activities would be affected if they could no longer use the Internet.

Download file

Still, while nearly all Internet users go online to conduct some of their ordinary day-to-day activities online, most still default to the traditional offline ways of communicating, transacting affairs, getting information and entertaining themselves. For instance, they are more likely to do these things offline than online: get news, play games, pay bills, send cards, look up phone numbers and addresses, buy tickets, check sports scores, listen to music, schedule appointments, and communicate with friends.

August 11, 2004 at 01:17 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Egg combats Chip and PIN memory fears with online recall

finextra news: Egg combats Chip and PIN memory fears with online recall

24 May 2004 - UK Internet bank Egg has launched the world's first 'PIN browser', so that forgetful customers can securely view their credit card personal information number online.

Customers logging on to Egg can now call up their PIN by entering the three-digit security code on the back of their cards. The new service is being launched amid fears that a UK-wide conversion to PIN-based transactions at the point-of-sale could be stymied by consumers suffering from information overload.

Jerry Toher, marketing director at Egg, comments: "With the vast amount of information consumers are required to remember there is a great temptation to write (PINs) down however this is not advisable."

In an Egg-commissioned survey of over 1000 adults conducted in February, ICM found that 41% of people admitted to being more forgetful now then they used to be, with nearly a quarter (22%) attributing this to the increasing number of passwords or codes they need to remember. Nearly a third (31%) admitted to forgetting one of their pass codes every month.

The research found that nearly all Brits (92%) use access codes at least on a weekly basis and a nearly a third (28%) use them several times a day.

Commenting, Professor Evan Heit, Warwick University, says: "Whether a fact will actually be remembered will depend on other psychological factors such as whether it is personally relevant or meaningful, and whether it will be confused with other information. So, for example, a person would not be able to learn a lot of different passwords because these would be meaningless and easily confused."

The latest research tallies with an earlier survey commissioned by Visa which found that two thirds of consumers in the UK have problems remembering multiple PIN codes.

August 11, 2004 at 08:08 AM in Smart Cards, Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Chip and PIN launches memory campaign

finextra news: Chip and PIN launches memory campaign

10 August 2004 - The UK's Chip and PIN programme is to launch a campaign to help people memorise their security numbers, as research reveals that more than one in four UK citizens struggle to remember passwords and access codes.

With chip and PIN, credit and debit card holders will need to remember their four-digit PIN - the same number they would use to withdraw money at a cash machine - to verify purchases at the point-of-sale.

The Chip and PIN programme team has produced an online guide featuring hints, tips and memory tricks for consumers struggling with information overload.

The initiative comes as research conducted among 1,814 people across the country shows that 28.7% find it diffuclt to remember their PINs and code numbers.

The Chip and PIN team has recruited the help of psychologist Donna Dawson in an effort to overcome consumer fears about the new technology.

"On the surface, numbers appear to relate only to the logical parts of our brains," she says. "To make numbers more memorable, they must appeal to the creative side of our brains as well. By using methods of association - like visualising numbers as objects relating to their shapes, by linking them to important dates, or by rhyming them with other words - the vast majority of people will be able to remember four-digit PINs simply and quickly."

Two in five UK cardholders (41 per cent) had been issued with a chip and PIN card by the end of May 2004. Major retailers including Dixons, Wilkinsons, Asda and Tesco are currently making the upgrade in stores across the country.

August 11, 2004 at 08:06 AM in Smart Cards, Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home

Korea has over 30 million Internet users

Korea has over 30 million Internet users

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 10 August 2004, 11:48
OVER 30 MILLION KOREANS are now regularly using the internet, according to a survey by the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Internet Development Agency.
The country has a population of 45 million.

Korea is the fifth country in the world to have topped the 30 million mark, following after the United States, Japan, China and Germany. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Information and Communication announced that there were 30.67 million internet users at the end of June � up from 29.22 million six months ago.

Just under 70% of the population happen to be "internet users" � that is, they are on the internet for an hour or more each month � which marks a 2.7% increase from last December, and 4.1% from the same time last year.

Over 95% of Koreans between 6 and 29 go online regularly, 86.4% for Koreans in their 30s, 58.3% for 40-50 year olds, and 27.6% for those in their 50s.

The survey showed that the average Korean internetter will spend about 11.5 hours a week online � primarily to check for information and e-mail, and to play online games (like GunBound)

August 10, 2004 at 08:21 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

100 mln books published in human history, 200K movies, 50K CD-ROMs

IT Facts.biz - just the facts

About 100 million different books have been published in history, according to the estimates from Carnegie Mellon University. About 28 million sit in the Library of Congress. On average, a book can be condensed to a megabyte in Microsoft Word. Thus, the books in the Library of Congress could fit into a 28-terabyte storage system. Only about 2 million to 3 million audio recordings (mostly music) have ever been published for public consumption. The Internet Archive has begun to store digitized recordings of concerts as well and has about 15,000 shows in its database to date. There are between 100,000 to 200,000 theatrical movies (half of them from India) in existence and about 20 terabytes of TV broadcasts a month. The Web grows by about 20 terabytes of compressed data a month as well. (One terabyte equals 1 trillion bytes.) Since 1984, about 50,000 software titles, including CD-ROMs, have emerged.

August 10, 2004 at 08:18 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Customers walking away from slow POS lineups

ITBusiness.ca

by Neil Sutton
7/27/2004 12:05:44 PM - A study by Leger Marketing shows Canadian retailers may be losing $1.7 billion due to poor point-of-sale management.

A study by Leger Marketing shows Canadian retailers may be losing $1.7 billion due to poor point-of-sale management. The study, conducted for Moneris Solutions Corp., shows that 56 per cent of Canadians have walked away from a purchase because of long waiting times at the checkout. Montreal-based Leger Marketing spoke to 1,510 Canadians in a May telephone poll. About 60 per cent of them said the maximum acceptable waiting time is five minutes.

"It is extremely significant," says Rena Granofsky, a retail analyst with Toronto-based J.C. Williams Group. "You've just turned away business that you never even knew you had, and there's really no way to track it other than surveys like this. What you really want to do is make sure your POS systems are as quick as possible (and) that you have enough of them."

"Merchants could be doing everything right but just because of the nature of their business, they get long lineups. That's where the technology comes into play," says Kevin Tait, senior manager of communications with Moneris.

Toronto-based Moneris the result of a joint investment from Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada. In February, the company announced its intention to move its transaction-processing retail clients away from legacy architecture to an IP-based platform. Many businesses have already moved to an IP architecture for transaction processing, including Moneris clients FutureShop and Staples. There are some hold-outs, particularly among Tier 2 and Tier 3 retailers, which operate smaller storefronts, and still use dial-up technology for their POS transactions. "I'm sure you've stood in line where you can actually hear the terminal dialing up after your card's swiped. The new terminals (on an IP-based platform) are more like high-speed Internet. You swipe the card, you're already connected, the transaction goes through and gets authorized," says Tait.

The move to IP for retailers is practically inevitable, according to NCR Canada president Brian Sullivan. There are still some large chains that use their own networks for transaction processing, but most retailers have by now built IP networks into their POS strategies. "An IP-based terminal offers a little more functionality but it also becomes part of a bigger picture � how am I going to deal with information in my enterprise? � of which payment is a small subset of many things that go on," says Sullivan.

August 10, 2004 at 07:41 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Barbarian Inventions

Stephen's Web ~ Knowledge ~ Learning ~ Community

July 29, 2004
I think there's a theme. There may be a theme. But don't spend time looking for one; it's not written that way.
One
Please let me be clear about my objection to registration.

One

Please let me be clear about my objection to registration.

For access to services where a unique ID is by definition required - participation in a mailing list, for example, posting a personal blog or discussion board comment, accessing personalized content - then I have no problem with registration. I have many such user IDs and even have a registration form on my own site for the same purpose.

But when links are posted on the open internet, as though they are accessible with a single click, and the user is presented with a registration form instead the content they were expecting when they clicked on the link, then that's where it becomes not just annoying but damaging.

Such links are nothing more than spam. A type of link spam. Trying to lull readers in with a false promise in order to sell them something for a price.

Sure, the price is low low low. Sure, the product or service can't be beat. And, of course, the company couldn't survice without your business. I know the message from the newspapers. And I'd be more sympathetic if I didn't see exactly that same message from the links pretending to be email messages polluting my in-box.

We've heard on this list from people with years of newsroom experience attesting in favour of registration. Well I come in to this debate with years of internet experience. I remember when the Green Card Lottery swept across usenet. I remember when commercialization of the internet was still a living issue. So I can say this with some authority: I've seen this play before.

We will be hearing from various studies and surveys that most people don't mind registration, that most people provide accurate information, that most people see it as the cost of supporting content on the internet. These people are responding at a time when registration sites are relatively few in number. But as they begin to report success, the bandwagon effect takes hold.

Ask the same people what they think in an age before every second link takes them to an advertisement, not the content it promised. People will have much shorter tempers by then. You can't depend on the surveys to guide you here. You have to ask yourself - is what we're doing fundamentally honest? Because while a little dishonesty today may be tolerated, a lot of it in the future won't be, and people will react with a much stronger than expected anger, because they will feel that their tolerance and good nature has been abused.

The message is: stop the false advertising. What I see, though, is the false advertising accelerating. I saw an item today about Wall Street Journal RSS feeds. Now what use is an RSS link from the WSJ? Unless you are one of the few who subscribe, it's nothing but spam. I hit a link today from the Kansas City Star - it let me in to read the story, but the second time (when I went back to verify a quote) it demanded a registration. It was basically trying to trick me, an occasional visitor, into providing a link to its onsite advertising.

Now the beauty of Bugmenot is that it really only works against those false advertising sites. If your site isn't putting out misleading links all over the internet, people aren't going to be getting annoyed at you and using Bugmenot to gain access. And even if someone has created some Bugmenot accounts, there won't be people using those accounts because you're not duping people into staring at a registration screen. So there's no reason to worry - or to get upset - unless you're polluting the web with misleading links.

And from where I sit, if your major means of interacting with the web and welcoming new readers is with a lie, then you should not be surprised if people respond in an angry manner.

Newspapers themselves can be honest with links. Put "(Registration Required)" in your page titles so that aggregators and Google display appropriate notice in link listings. Don't ask for registrations for content you intend to widely publicize. If you run a registration site, keep the deep web deep - don't pollute out browsers with misleading advertising. Or best of all, participate in the exchange that defines the web by putting your content out there for free (the way the rest of us do) and save registration for where it's needed.

So think of Bugmenot as an honesty meter. If its creating unwanted (and unregistered) traffic, then your means of promoting yourself online is in some way dishonest, and you are paying the price for that. And don't expect anyone to be sorry about the fact that you're paying that price.

You reap, you know, what you sow.

Two

Re: Dreyfus. Community in the Digital Age: philosophy and practice. 2004.

In Kirkegaard's book Present Age: "More basically still, that the Public Sphere lies outside of political power meant, for Kierkegaard, that one could hold an opinion on anything without having to act on it. he notes with disapproval that the public's 'ability, virtuosity and good sense consist in trying to reach a judgment and a decision without ever going so far as action.' This opens up the possibility of endless reflection. If there is no need for decision and action, one can look at all things from all sides and always find some new perspective......All that a reflective age like ours produces is more and more knowledge....i" by comparison with a passionate age, an age without passion gaines in scope what it loses in intensity".....Life consist of fighting off boredom by being a spectator of everything interesting in the universe and of communicating with everyone else so inclined. .....

Such a life produces what we would now call a postmodern self---a self that has no defining content or continuity and os is open to all possibilities and to constantly taking on new roles.....the anonymous spectator takes no risks....When Kirkegaard is speaking from the point of view of the next higher sphere of existence, Khe tells us that the self requires not 'variableness and brilliancy but 'firmness, balance and steadiness (Either /Or)...Without some way of telling the significant from the insignificant and the relevant from the irrelevant, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring, and one finds oneself back in the indifference of the present age.

It is, of course, illusion that there could be a life free of choice, even for the most dispassionate and idle spectator. The fact of being human forces choice on us every minute of every day.Willthe ground support me if I take a step forward? Will this food nourish me or poison me? Should I wear clothing today? It is true that these choices are in a certain sense mundane and everyday. But at the same time, they are foundational, the most important choices a person can make - a committment to at least a minimal ontology, a decision to continue living and the means toward that end, an understanding and acceptance of social mores. It is true that most people make such choices without reflection - showing that there must be something to meaningfulness over and above choices - but it is also true that people who seriously reflect on such choices, who consider both alternatives to be genuine possibilities, nonetheless in the main come to the same resolution as those who make such choices automatically. In matters that are genuinely important, choice is itself an illusion. And in cases where choice is not an illusion, it is also the case that the decision is not so fundamental. The two outcomes are of relatively similar value, at least in comparison to fundamental questions of existence, life and living.

If by failing to make a choice in this or that matter, if by remaining dispassionate and accumulating, as it were, more knowlege, if by doing this one may remain insulated from any consequences, it seems evident that the choice one would have you make in such a case falls in the opposite extreme, a choice not about that which is fundamental, but about what is trivial. Though it may be true that we may suffer some consequence by acting one way or another, if a failure to act affects us not in the least then there is no motivation for action, and the choice we believe we face is illusory, and therefore the meaning we would derive from making such a choice illusory also. The choices that engender meaning in our lives are not those we can duck in order to live in a post-modern idyll, but those we cannot avoid, similar in nature to those of a fundamental nature, but less wide in scope.

To make a choice simply to attain the distinction of having chosen is to trivialize the nature and import of making a choice. If one chooses a religion only in order to claim membership in the ranks of the converted, such a choice mocks the devotion that resaults from the presentation of religious phenomena or experience. If one chooses a political affiliation only in order to have voted, then this decision renders meaningless the resolution of affairs of state implicating individuals and nations in matters of economy and war. It is, indeed, the making of such decisions purely for the sake of making a decision, by a person who has no stake in the outcome, that causes the greatest amount of hardship and suffering. The firmness, balance and steadiness of a person who has made a choice for sake of making life less boring is to be feared the most, because such a person has made a choice that did not need to be made, and would have no motivation to alter or sway their course of action in a direction more compassionate or rational. "She has a very deep conviction to some very shallow ideals," it was once said of a politician friend of mine, and the result was action without knowledge, and in the end, nothing more than an illusion of relevance.

Many people criticize me for the moral and political relativism I advocate in numerous spheres; this does not mean that I have made no choices, but rather, that I have made choices - about value, about right, about religion, about society - only when such choices were required by circumstances, and only applicable to a scope in which such a choice were relevant. Kierkegaard is right, though the process of choosing, one can come to believe, and to thereby make the facade originally accepted a reality in fact. But the sort of choice he advocates, there is no need to make. Like Julian of Norwich, presented with religious phenomena or experience that make a previous life incomprehensible, a choice of religion may be the most rational or sane alternative. But God, as they say, does not speak to everyone, and those to whom God has not spoken need not formulate a`reply.

When life presents itself as a fighting off of boredom, of finding nothing or more or less important, the usual cause is not that a person has not committed him or herself to a certain set or beliefs or a certain course of action, but rather, because the person has not accumulated enough knowledge to understand the choices that need to be made. The post-modern stance of observing, countenancing, and experiencing a wide variety of moral, social, political and religious beliefs (among others) is the rational and reasonable approach; when one does not have enough data to make a decision, and a decision is not forced, the rational course is to gather more data, not to prematurely make an ill-informed decision. This to me would seem evident! Why, then, laud the merit of meaningless choicesin order to give life meaning? The meaning of life will present itself soon enough; in the meantime, the only thing a person ought to do is live it.

Threeo

Re: Unshaken Hands on the Digital Street, by Michael Bugeja.

The author assumes that interaction with the physically present must take priority over the physically distant (and electronically connected). Remove the assumption in this article, and require that it be supported through argumentation, and the impact of the dialogue is lost.

In fact, it seems to me, the order of precedence of interaction ought not not be resolved by proximity, which is typically merely accidental, but by two more salient factors: priority (that is, all other things being equal, the interaction that is most important to the actor takes priority) and precedence (all other things being equal, the interaction that began first takes priority). Most interaction is a case of these two stipulii conciding in two people: for each, the interaction with the other is the most important of those available at the moment, and will continue until concluded. 'Interruption' is the process of one person suggesting that the importance of an interaction is greater than one already in progress, and it is (of course) the right of the interrupted to make the determination as to whether this is so.

In the pre-digital age, priority and precedence coincided with proximity. That is, all the choices of interactive possibilities were of people located in physical proximity, and physical proximity being a limited quantity, predence assumed a much greater importance. But it would be a mistake to equate proximity withy priority and precedence; with electronic communications, it is now possible to have a situation in which a communication by telephone is of greater priority than a presently existing in-person interaction. When a telephone rings, this is an interruption, and the receiver typically makes an assessment (often by looking at the caller ID) as to whether the telephone call is likely to be more important than the present interruption.

What is also true, in an increasingly crowded and mobile world, is that the value of physical proximity is diminished. In less mobile, less crowded times, one could assign a high degree of probability that a person wishing communication while in close proximity was also a person with whom communication would be a priority - it would be a spouse or child, a business associate, or a customer. But today's physical interactions are increasingly with strangers with whom one has no prior attachment, and so the probabilities have now tipped the other way: it is more likely that a telephone call, from one of the few people in the world to know your number, is of greater importance than a conversation with a stranger on the street or in the office.

When a person in physical proximity interrupts a person using a mobile telephone or similar electronic device, the probability is that their priority to the person being interrupted is less than the priority of the person being talked to. Where once people apologized for being on the telephone when a stranger wished to speak, it became apparent that no person need apologize for talking with his spouse, child or friend, and that it is the stranger imposing the interruption and making the request. Breaking off a telephone call (or even shutting off an MP3 player) to help a lost tourist is a mark of altruism, and as the stranger had no prior claim on the person's time, such behaviour ought to be thanked rather than criticized when written about in an article.

The mistake being made in the article below is in the assumption that the virtual interaction is somehow less real, somehow inherently less important, than the proximal physical interaction. "By the time they attend college, they will come to view technology as companionship." But this is a fallacy, a confusion between the message, which is a product of the media (a "phone" call), and the content, which is a product of the interaction (a call "from John"). More straightforwardly, the vast majority of online and electronic interactions are with real people, and there is no a priori reason to assign a real person lesser importance on the basis that they are distance (and, given such a person's prior attachment with the caller in question, very good reason to assume the opposite, that the distant person is of greater importance than the proximal). Electronic communications may be caricatured as communications with the non-real, but to draw any conclusion of important from this characterization is to ignore an obvious and self-evident truth: real people communicate electronically.

The characterization of the product of electronic communications as "d