EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva today announced the results of an EU-wide investigation into websites offering mobile phone services such as ring-tones and wallpapers. The inquiry, which was carried out on more than 500 websites across the 27 Member States, Norway and Iceland, found that 80% of the sites checked need to be further investigated for suspected breaches of EU consumer rules.

"This EU wide action is a direct response to hundreds of complaints from consumers that have come into national authorities. Far too many people are falling victim to costly surprises from mysterious charges, fees and ring-tone subscriptions they learn about for the first time when they see their mobile phone bill. There will be Europe wide enforcement action to track down each of these traders. But we need to get a clear message out particularly to teenagers and children – be on your guard! It's all about the small print! There are many reputable traders out there, but to be safe buying these services, check the fine print every time and make sure you are not signing up for more than you bargained for." – said EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva.

Main findings of this investigation:

• 80% of websites checked are being further investigated. The total number of websites checked was 558, the total number of websites that need further investigation is 466. The number of cases potentially requiring cross border co-operation between different national authorities, CPC cases (Consumer Protection Co-operation Network) is 76. See MEMO/08/516 for breakdown per country.

• 50% of websites checked targeted children (279 websites out of 558). These websites used children's cartoon characters, well known TV characters or required parental consent. The same high level of irregularities (80%) also applied to these sites.

• Almost 50% of all the sites checked had some irregularity related to the information about the offer's price (268 websites out of 558). On many websites prices and related charges and fees are not clearly indicated or not referred to at all - until the consumer is invoiced via their phone bill. Prices did not include all taxes, in the case of a subscription, the word subscription is not clearly mentioned or the period of a subscription is not clear.

• Over 70% of all the websites checked lacked some of the information required to contact the trader - the trader name, geographic address or the contact details were incomplete (399 websites out of 558). This is against EU law -the eCommerce Directive 2000/31/EC requires details of the service provider, including an email address, to be displayed.

• Over 60% of websites checked presented the information in a misleading way (344 out of 558). Information on the contract is available on the site but hidden in small print or hard to find. Goods and services advertised as "free", but the customer is misled and later finds that there are charges or that they are tied into a contract.

Companies will be contacted by the national authorities and asked to clarify or correct problems identified. Failure to do so can result in legal action leading to fines or closure of their websites. For cross border cases, national authorities will work with colleagues from other EU authorities. Authorities are asked to report back on their progress in the first half of 2009.

Source: press release of the EU Commission

Glow is the world's first national intranet for education, managed by Learning and Teaching Scotland and delivered by Research Machines (RM). Glow enables innovation in teaching approaches by offering unique learning opportunities. It helps motivate young people to work independently and collaboratively. It supports individualized learning, allowing for personalization and choice. Glow provides children and young people with relevance in their learning.


The intranet provides:

• A trusted and safe environment for pupils, teachers and parents;
• An area to create personalized programs of work and share curricular resources;
• A variety of online tools to enhance learning experiences;
• Virtual learning to share information and take part in a lesson;
• Tools to enable pupils and teachers to communicate and collaborate across the network (email, videoconferencing and virtual whiteboards, chat rooms, video streaming, instant messaging, mailing lists).

Main benefits for learners:
Children in primary and secondary education have access to world-class, personalized learning opportunities, using a range of tools, together in one place, to work on at school or at home. Learners can collaborate and share with others in their school, local area and other parts of Scotland. Glow breaks geographical and social barriers, allowing joined-up working the length and breadth of Scotland.

Main benefits for teachers:
Teachers can deliver and mark pupils' assignments online as well as using the assessment and tracking tools to save you time. Using the personalized workspace in Glow provides the opportunity to collect resources in one easy-to-search area. Glow ensures that working and sharing resources with your colleagues is effortless.

Benefits for parents and carers:
Parents are able to access reliable and up-to-date information, along with the chance to see what their child is doing at school and how they performed in class. Parents are able to collaborate online with other parents and carers, providing a secure communication channel. Parents and carers can rest in the knowledge that the information provided on Glow is targeted and secure - only you are able to see specific information about your child.

There is a great collection of online digital resources and activities which are available for authenticated users of Glow:

• The Big Bus provides engaging, interactive and multi-active learning activities and is designed for use in the classroom and at home.

• LearnNewsdesk@LTS: this online news service (in English and Gaelic) provides a real-life context for curriculum topics and helps to improve literacy by encouraging a daily reading habit.

• Crocodilia for Crocodile Chemistry: this suite of learning resources makes use of simulated chemistry laboratory features where you can model experiments and reactions safely and easily.

• Scran is a searchable learning resource with 360,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media. It can be used as a superior form of clip art or for particular learning applications.

• Gigajam: learn the drums, keyboard, bass or guitar. A unique interactive method of learning to play a musical instrument.

• Spark Island offers primary teachers a range of interactive toolkits which make teaching and learning English, maths and science easier and more fun.

• Images for Schools is a website with thousands of free images for teachers and pupils to download.

• Sunflower for Science is an interactive resource covering biology, chemistry and physics. Each program is either a simulation or a collection of interactive animations on a particular topic.

Find out more!

Wordle is a Java driven “toy” for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide: you can type in text; you can enter the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed; or enter a del.icio.us user name to see their tags. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can print the images you create, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.


Hear are a few examples what you can do with your generated word cloud:

• Make all words lower or UPPER case;
• You can choose to remove common words of 20 different languages;
• Choose from 30+ font types;
• You can prefer an alphabetic order;
• Choose between rounder/straighter edges;
• You can adjust your layout horizontally, mostly horizontally, half and half, mostly vertically, and vertically;
• You can change the colors: choose a color preset or make a custom color palette.

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg, working at IBM Research.

This year's Safer Internet Forum will take place in Luxembourg on September 25 and 26. The Forum is open for stakeholders from NGOs, governments, researchers, industry representatives, including Internet Service Providers, mobile network operators, social networking sites, software developers.

The European Commission is organising 4 different experts’ panels on the following topics:

September 25:

Social Networking and Children

• Public Consultation results on Online Social Networking
• Online social networking and safety: Challenges and risks (research and survey results)
• The parental control approach and children's privacy (presentation followed by a panel discussion)
• Measures taken by social network providers to enhance safety of minors
• The role of education and awareness
• Conclusions

Age verification

• Increasing Online Safety: The challenge of age verification
• Electronic identification & authentication
• Age verification solutions, the service providers' experience
• Panel discussion: The efficiency of Age Verification Solutions
• Conclusions

September 26:

What do we know about Children's use of online technologies?

• European Research results
• International research results: South America, USA
• Round table: commenting findings of research results, looking ahead
• Panel discussion: What use can other make of research vs. what research are we interested in?
• Conclusions

Media Rating – towards pan-European cross media rating and classification schemes

• Cross-platform/cross-media rating and classification: films, games, mobile content and Internet
• Cross media initiatives
• Panel discussion: Stakeholders' view on cross media rating
• Conclusions

The Safer Internet Forum will take place in Jean Monnet Building, Rue Alcide de Gasperi, Luxembourg. All those interested in participating are invited to register until the 18th September.

Look at the draft agenda!

Nova Spivack wrote a blog post reflecting to Jason Calacanis’ announcement regarding his retirement from blogging, in which Nova Spivack describes why his blogging evolved and is moving into a better medium which he defines “interest networking”.

Nova Spivack wrote about “interest networking” in a blog post earlier in July: “Interest networks are about leveraging collective intelligence to discover and share great content around your interests -- they are the next evolution of social media (discussion forums, wikis, blogs, social news aggregation, and social bookmarking). Interest networks are for making sense of information and discovering new information that matters to you.”

Nova Spivack, is the CEO and Founder of Radar Networks which introduced Twine – a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people. He explains how he uses Twine:
“I now use Twine as my main place for authoring and sharing content on the Web. (I also use Twine as my main place for keeping up with my many interests. The Twine community does a great job of scouring the Web to find the content that I want to know about. Generally if there is an article that matters to me, it shows up in Twine very quickly. I no longer have to read as many RSS feeds. This is the power of collective intelligence at its best.)”

He believes that “Blogs will continue of course, but for those of us who do a lot of blogging and online bookmarking, social networking, online discussions, and social media sharing -- blogs just aren't productive enough anymore.” He also believes that “an increasing amount of activity is going to move off of today's blogs and into a new kind of social media environment. I call these next generation services, interest networks, and my company is building one of the first: Twine.”

Nova Spivack says, unlike Jason Calacanis, he hasn't left blogging: his blogging evolved and is moving into a better medium which he defines “interest networking”. “Jason wants to go back to old fashioned email mailing lists, but I'm moving forward into something even better than blogs.”

At the end of his latest blog post, Nova Spivack invites Calacanis to Twine:
“I agree with Jason -- blogging isn't good enough. The first wave of social media is ending -- for some because they couldn't cope with the overload, for others because they want a better medium. I believe interest networks are what's next and I hope to make Twine into the best place to network around interests on the Web. So don't give up blogging or move to email lists, Jason. Just move to a better platform. See you in Twine!”

Related articles by Zemanta

• Do Blogs/Bloggers Have Expiry Dates?
• The Old Dull Thing Is The New Shiny Thing (or deconstructing the Calacanis email newsletter)
• Jason Calacanis Quits Blogging
• The death of blogging is nowhere near....
• Jason Calacanis' First New Email Post

07/07/2008 – Monday

• TechCrunch: Facebook is continuing its war on Facebook apps that push the limits on acceptable user interaction. Last week it was Slide’s Top Friends App, which it briefly suspended. Later Facebook also suspended another popular app, Social Me.

• ReadWriteWeb: After more than a year in private beta, the new Web 2.0 style MyYahoo is being rolled out today to all MyYahoo users, the company says. MyYahoo is the biggest player of all web start pages and any changes made there will effect millions of mainstream users.

08/07/2008 – Tuesday

• Official Gmail Blog: Google has teamed up with eBay and PayPal to fight phishing scams more effectively. Starting today, Google will authenticate every email that claims to be from 'paypal.com' or 'ebay.com.' If a message fails these checks, Google will reject the message and not, as it often did before, allow it through and display a warning message.

09/07/2008 – Wednesday

• New York Times: On Tuesday Google introduced Lively, an online tool that allows people to embody a cartoonish online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The rooms can be added to any blog or Web site.

• Reuters: Advertising revenue from YouTube is likely to total about $200 million this year and thus fall short of parent company Google Inc's expectations, The Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter. Google also has significantly cut the number of YouTube clips it will sell ads against, so as not to sell them against videos that may violate copyrights, the newspaper said, citing one source.

• TechCrunch: The most recent victim of the Facebook vs. annoying application war is SpeedDate. SpeedDate, an application from the company of the same name, has disappeared from the application list, and the link to the application leads back to the Facebook homepage. SpeedDate is a web-based speed dating service that also offers a Meebo application, and until recently, a Facebook application.

10/07/2008 – Thursday

• ZDNet: n an attempt to boost its search-ad business, Yahoo has begun a project that lets anyone build a customized search engine on top of the internet company's technology. The service, which entered public beta testing on Wednesday night, is called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). With it, someone can build an independent website with a search box, pass users' queries to BOSS, process the results returned by Yahoo's search engines in any manner, and display the results.

• BBC: The mobile web has reached a "critical mass" of users this year, according to a report by analysts Nielsen Mobile. The US is the most tech savvy nation with nearly 40 million Americans - 16% of all US mobile users - using their handset to browse on the move. The UK and then Italy come a close second and third in the 16 countries surveyed by the analyst firm. Indonesia has the lowest take-up with just 1.1% of mobile subscribers using their handsets for surfing the web.

• New York Times: Two of the largest Internet service providers, AT&T and America Online, have reached agreements with the state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, to eliminate access to newsgroups where child pornography is posted and purge their own servers of child pornography Web sites.

• Wired: A Southern California man who already served federal time for hacking into Lexis-Nexis has begun a state prison term for allegedly using his skills to try and extort phone sex from an internet celebrity. Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, 23, pleaded no contest to a single count of computer intrusion in May, and was sentenced to two years in prison. He was transferred to California's Tehachapi state prison on Thursday.

11/07/2008 – Friday

• The Next Web: Blog network PaidContent has been acquired by (former-)traditional media player The Guardian for the sweet sum of 30 million dollars.

13/07/2008 – Sunday

• BusinesWeek: Yahoo has rejected yet another bid to buy its search operations, this time a combined, take-it-or-leave-it offer from Microsoft and activist investor Carl Icahn. According to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock in the statement, the “improved” offer—which I’m told involved $2.3 billion in annual search ad revenue guarantees over five years, an improvement over Microsoft’s previous search deal offer—was made Friday with a 24-hour deadline and no chance to negotiate it.

Slideshare is the world's largest web community for sharing presentations. A real “web 2.0” service where you can upload and share your own slides; download, comment, save and tag, and embed in your blog the slides of other users.


The all time 20 most favorited slides are:

The Brand Gap – on how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. (2007 favorites / 305590 views / 623 comments / 819 embeds)

| View | Upload your own

Death by PowerPoint – on how to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death. (1572 favorites / 480507 views / 173 comments / 43813 downloads / 1608 embeds)

| View | Upload your own

Shift Happens – a stylization of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalization and America’s future in the 21st century. (1255 favorites / 631191 views / 128 comments / 60161 downloads / 1390 embeds)

| View | Upload your own

Social Media – A Literature Review on Social Media. A compilation of social media thoughts from the experts point of view. (1100 favorites / 107348 views / 188 comments / 298 embeds)

Improving Interface Design – Web Visions 2007 Improving Interface Design Workshop. (655 favorites / 90277 views / 25 comments / 9916 downloads / 124 embeds)

"How to": Visual Effects in PowerPoint 2003 – A brief guide to some visual effects for presentations using PowerPoint 2003. (648 favorites / 172628 views / 76 comments / 15310 downloads / 165 embeds)

Web 2.0 – What you need to become web 2.0 (568 favorites / 83502 views / 30 comments / 7133 downloads / 271 embeds)

The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One – A compilation of 25 basic styles of blogging including tips on how often to use each and potential to create buzz and blog traffic by using each. (534 favorites / 50485 views / 30 comments / 311 embeds)

Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka – Presentation on Visual and Creative Thinking. The presentation explores how professional in all fields can apply creative and visual thinking skills to their work as well as why people ignore the talents that made them naturally creative as children. About the myths that people hold about creativity, why they exist and how you can overcome them. (514 favorites / 77209 views / 44 comments / 16874 downloads / 176 embeds)

What is Design (and why is it important) – Based on Tom Peter's book "Design" (484 favorites / 62155 views / 45 comments / 147 embeds)

Creative Web 2.0 Learning – Explore, discover, learn, dream and believe that Web 2.0 can help transform your learning and teaching to engage students in 21st century learning. (468 favorites / 54234 views / 24 comments / 10029 downloads / 222 embeds)

Meet Charlie - what is Enterprise2.0? – A visual and entertaining example of web2.0 within the corporation. (456 favorites / 125871 views / 41 comments / 2470 downloads / 549 embeds)

Brain Rules for Presenters – A sort of book review: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. (455 favorites / 101827 views / 21 comments / 455 favorites / 9349 downloads / 231 embeds)

Amazing photos – a 39 page slide showing “amazing” photos (429 favorites / 161422 views / 100 comments / 39485 downloads / 316 embeds)

Nokia brand & design priorities – (416 favorites / 50648 views / 47 comments / 93 embeds)

Word Of Mouth Marketing Techniques WOMM – How to use word of mouth marketing techniques to create a buzz & viral campaign. Why? What? How? (410 favorites / 48791 views / 40 comments / 10180 downloads / 148 embeds)

Conversation by Design – Creating an effective and unique blog experience. (409 favorites / 38022 views / 9 comments / 6100 downloads / 153 embeds)

I Am The Media – thoughts about new media. (402 favorites / 46904 views / 19 comments / 7496 downloads / 116 embeds)

Meet Henry – An aspiring young professional with fine suits and fast cars, it’s fair to say that Henry has a slightly inflated ego. Recently, Henry was given a make-or-break career opportunity – to deliver a stunning presentation. So what did Mr. MBA do? Within 24 hours he assembled a knockout PowerPoint, complete with a fancy company template and exquisite bullet points. Henry pulled out all the stops. He even made handouts of his slides. It was a recipe for success. So he thinks… Meet Henry. He doesn’t know any better. Today we live in a business culture that abuses the art and science of public speaking. It’s a culture where PowerPoint is the norm, reading from you slides is accepted, and wasting everyone’s time is a given. When you think about it, it’s really quite disturbing. Now… meet Erica. Erica is changing the world. (400 favorites / 131644 views / 57 comments / 329 embeds)

What's Next In Marketing & Advertising – a slide on what's going on in marketing and where things are moving (392 favorites / 59914 views / 27 comments / 5615 downloads / 437 embeds)

I found an interesting article at IntranetBlog.com written by Toby Ward (The power of Intranet 2.0) which compares “intranet 1.0” and “intranet 2.0” tools:


Toby Ward describes Intranet 2.0 which “represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.”

He points at the importance of web 2.0 tools in corporate intranets: “whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.”

And here is a new 54 page slide also from Toby Ward which was presented at the Intranet 2.0 webinar for Prescient Digital Media with great case study examples from IBM, BT, Cisco, and many others:

| View | Upload your own

According to the press release of the IBM, the company previewed a unique Social Accessibility collaboration software, developed by IBM Research, which allows Internet users to improve Web accessibility, particularly for those who are visually impaired. View video:




How It Works

For example, a visually impaired individual wants to find out what image is showing. The image shows a photo of Mount Fuji taken during sunset. Existing screen reading software may not obtain the same information as shown in the image, or a description of the photo is simply missing. Whenever visually impaired users face such difficulties, they can report that incident by using the collaboration tool developed by IBM Research and ask for adding an improved alternative text to describe the image.

The request then is automatically sent to a server hosting the Social Accessibility Project Website where visually impaired users and any Internet users who wish to take part in help improving Web accessibility will register themselves to use the collaboration tool. Internet users who are registered to the Social Accessibility Project can see this request on the project Website, and may decide to respond to this request by using the collaboration tool by clicking "start fixing it" button, and type a short description, such as "Photo caption: Mount Fuji during a gorgeous sunset." The short description will automatically be transformed to an external metadata. The next time any visually impaired person tries to revisit the Web page showing the photo image, screen reading software will read the alternative text from the metadata to give better explanation of what the photo shows.

Metadata consists of useful information such as description of the content and the physical location of the particular content. By having external metadata to reside at the Web server, Web content will remain unchanged while making the Web more accessible.

To further enhance the usability of Web content, the Social Accessibility Project Website offers an incentive mechanism where screen reading software users can rate the quality of external metadata provided by Internet users along with a comment to show their appreciation. Also, active users are listed at the project's top page to recognize their active participation on the project.

In addition, screen reading software users can place a landmark whenever they find an important position on a Web page, and other users can benefit from those landmarks to help reach important information easier and faster.


In order to encourage participation in the project, the Social Accessibility Project Website and collaboration tool are available free of charge on IBM alphaWorks Services website.


Read the entire press release!

Related articles by Zemanta

• IBM makes web accessibility for blind users a social effort
• Web standards for the blind

Today morning I switched on my laptop and a Microsoft security update wanted to start… I let is run (When your computer is on and connected to the Internet, the most current security updates are automatically downloaded and installed.) Among the downloaded updates one was especially important: MS08-037 which addresses a vulnerability in the Domain Name System (DNS) – as I learned from different articles in my recent RSS “box”.

According to the BBC, computer experts have released software to tackle a major security glitch in the internet addressing system. The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake webpages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said that the case was unprecedented, but added: "People should be concerned but they should not be panicking." He discovered the error in the Domain Name System (DNS) about six months ago. Dan Kaminsky is the Director of Penetration Testing for IOActive. Previously of Cisco and Avaya, Dan has been operating professionally in the security space since 1999.



According to a CERT* document, deficiencies in the DNS protocol and common DNS implementations facilitate DNS cache poisoning attacks. The Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for translating host name to IP addresses (and vice versa) and is critical for the normal operation of Internet-connected systems. DNS cache poisoning (sometimes referred to as cache pollution) is an attack technique that allows an attacker to introduce forged DNS information into the cache of a caching nameserver. DNS cache poisoning is not a new concept; in fact, there are published articles that describe a number of inherent deficiencies in the DNS protocol and defects in common DNS implementations that facilitate DNS cache poisoning.

An attacker with the ability to conduct a successful cache poisoning attack can cause a nameserver's clients to contact the incorrect, and possibly malicious, hosts for particular services. Consequently, web traffic, email, and other important network data can be redirected to systems under the attacker's control.

* The CERT® Program is part of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a federally funded research and development center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The CERT Program develops and promotes the use of appropriate technology and systems management practices to resist attacks on networked systems, to limit damage, and to ensure continuity of critical services.


If you are interested in this issue you can download the 22 page CERT Advisory document at Securosis.com.


Read the entire BBC article!

Related articles by Zemanta

• DNS hole prompts synchronized patching effort by IT vendors
• Major DNS issue causes multivendor patch day
• Dan Kaminsky has posted a DNS checker on his website.
• Microsoft patches security bugs in Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows
• Web companies organize massive effort to patch fundamental Internet flaw
• Researcher offers insight into DNS flaw
• Cisco releases its DNS patches
• Massive, coordinated DNS patch released
• Patches coming today for DNS vulnerability

Lou Ordorica (Community Manager) and Linda Skrocki (Sr. Program Manager) at Sun Microsystems made a slide titled “How to use the power of the network to gain opportunities and build relationships”.

They used the following definition for “social media”:
People connecting using technology to get the things they need from each other, bypassing traditional institutions like corporations. – Groundswell, Li and Bernoff

Most interesting for me was the listing of different corporate fields where experts of Sun Microsystems say that social media may have a major impact.

In relation with one of the most important and complex tasks of human resources, the hiring process, with the use of social media the company can identify qualified candidates faster, the references come to you, you can work the network to recruit, and you can displace slow and cumbersome HR systems.

Customer service can also be made more effective with the use of social media e.g.: the customers can connect with engineers, problem solving gets more rapid, customer testimonials can be used, real-time feedback loops can be achieved.

Social media can enhance product development by shortening development cycles; attracting new customers, collaborators; improving communication; improving quality — accuracy, timeliness, relevance.

I recommend this slide for those who are working in the PR/marketing communication field.

| View | Upload your own

30/06/2008 – Monday

• TechCrunch: Google signed a five-year deal with Tele Atlas to keep getting the map data that helps power Google Maps. The deal extends to Google Earth and mobile apps, and covers 200 countries. Google also gets map data from Navteq, which is being bought by Nokia for $8 billion. Tele Atlas is owned by Dutch GPS-maker TomTom.

• The Official Google Blog: Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

• TechCrunch: Google launched an affiliate ad network. Or, rather, it rebranded Performics, the affiliate ad network that came along with its purchase of DoubleClick, as the “Google Affiliate Network.” As with other affiliate networks such as Amazon’s, participating Website publishers get paid a fee for each referral that results in a sale. Existing advertisers include Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Citi, Target, and Verizon.

01/07/2008 – Tuesday

• Ars Technica: Microsoft announced that it has acquired Powerset, a semantic web based search service and plans to integrate the company's search and natural language features into Live Search. The San Francisco-based company's employees will remain in place, but will become part of Microsoft's Search Relevance team.

02/07/2008 – Wednesday

• Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department has opened a formal antitrust investigation into a deal between Google and Yahoo to share some advertising revenue, The Washington Post reported.

• Reuters: News Corp's MySpace has entered into a partnership agreement with Russia's largest carrier, MTS (MBT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), to launch a social platform for mobile internet users, an MTS official told Reuters.

03/07/2008 – Thursday

• BBC: Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled. The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".
  

• Reuters: Ask.com, the Web search unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp has closed an all-cash deal to acquire Lexico Publishing Group LLC, the owner of popular reference sites Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com.
  

04/07/2008 – Friday

• Read Write Web: Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London. England's Privacy International doesn't trust in Google's ability to automatically blur faces.

The “E-Communications Household Survey” issued by the European Commission addresses the following topics:

• General overview of penetration rates
• Fixed and mobile telephony
• Directories and enquiry services
• Computers and Internet
• Television
• Bundled offers
  

The interviews were conducted among 26 730 EU citizens in the 27 Member States of the European Union. The penetration rates of electronic communication services in the EU are showing remarkable development in the 2007-2008 period:

• While mobile telephone access increased from 81% to 83%, fixed telephone access decreased from 70 to 72%.

• Personal computer penetration increased from 54 to 57%. Computers are much more widespread in the old Member States (EU15: 60%) than in the 12 new Member Statest (45%). A country-by-country analysis shows that they are most prevalent in the Netherlands (90%), Denmark (85%) and Sweden (82%). The strongest increases in the proportions of households equipped with a computer since the last survey one year ago were recorded in Cyprus, Luxembourg and Slovenia (+10 percentage points in all three countries). Computer penetration rates in Latvia and Ireland also increased strongly, by 9 and 8 points respectively. Home Internet access increased by 7% in just one year from 42 to 49%.

• The increase of broadband Internet access in one year is even more significant: from 25% to 36%! The broadband penetration rate has improved by 8 percentage points within the EU27, with the largest increases being in Luxembourg (+20), Sweden (+18) and Cyprus (+16).

• ADSL access increased from 22% to 29%. The highest proportions of households accessing Internet through ADSL can be found in France (85%), Finland (80%) and Luxembourg (77%). In Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal and Hungary, the cable TV network is the most widespread tool used for accessing the Internet, with more than four in ten households using this technology. The number of households using cable TV to access the Internet has increased in Slovakia (+10 percentage points), Bulgaria (+9) and the Czech Republic (+8). Those figures point to the fact that this technology is more widespread in the NMS12 (among a third of households) than in the EU15 (11%).

• Narrow band Internet access decreased from 12% to 10%.

• Wifi router access increased significantly from 14% to 22%. Roughly half (46%) of EU27 households with Internet access at home have a wifi modem/router. Compared with the winter 2007 study, there has been a strong increase in households using wifi (+12 percentage points).

• 22% of Europeans who have an Internet connection at home say that someone in their household uses the internet to make phone calls, i.e. an increase of 5 percentage points since winter 2007. Most respondents make calls to other users who are subscribers to the same Internet phone service (16%). Only 18% within the EU15 use the possibility to make calls over the internet compared with 43% of respondents in the new Member States. Accordingly, Lithuania has the highest proportion of households using Internet phone calls, with around six in ten households with Internet access (61%) using this service. In Latvia, the Czech Republic and Poland around half of households with an Internet connection use this service. On the other hand, the utilization levels in Spain and Portugal are considerably below the average.

In spite of these good tendencies, 22% of European households have difficulty contacting their Internet service provider about connection problems. A similar number said the cost of the support they get is not affordable.

Read the entire survey!

The federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google's objections) “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website”. According to the viewpoint of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the court’s order grants Viacom's request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users.

The Logging database on YouTube contains: “for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video.”

According to EFF, Google correctly argued that “the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns,” citing the VPPA, 18 U.S.C. § 2710. However, the Court dismissed this argument with no analysis, stating “defendants cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative.”

EFF’s opinion is that the Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a donor-funded nonprofit, was founded in 1990 and from then, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Read the entire article of EFF!

I stumbled upon an interesting recommendation service on gHacks.net: Emmy the Taste Kid, a Romanian recommendation service which suggests similar or related music (mainly bands), movies (titles mostly, some directors and actors) and books, recommendations you might be interested in. Just give an input what you like (e.g., Mozart, Apocalypse Now, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Emmy will provide her recommendations for you.


The database of this new service currently has about 22,370 bands, some 13,100 movies and around 9,440 books. The database is developing with every input the users make and the service "learns" from these inputs.

Another interesting feature of this service is that almost every recommended item has a question mark and if you click on these question marks, you get a short description of the clicked recommended item. The description is based on Wikipedia and sometimes YouTube data.

Try it, its fun!

Undoubtedly, mobile internet will be one of the main pillars of future web development. According to a press release of OMTP, a forum funded by companies from across the mobile phone value chain, a leading group of mobile operators unveiled a new initiative to create a blueprint and roadmap for opening up mobile functionality to encourage the development of exciting mobile applications without compromising customer security. The new initiative which will hopefully boost mobile web 2.0 will be known as BONDI.

Supported by the OMTP members including 3 Group, AT&T, T-Mobile, Telenor, Telefónica, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, BONDI will provide a consistent and secure web services interface that can be used by all web developers across multiple device platforms. This will provide the opportunity for web developers to address a mass market of consumers and to drive the use of data services on mobile.

BONDI will contribute towards ongoing standardisation work to help create a new rich web experience for mobile while also ensuring an appropriate degree of protection that will maintain the current high level of trust by mobile phone users.

BONDI will expose key handset features to web developers to help them develop more function-rich, user friendly and relevant applications. The new handset software will be engineered in such a way as to prevent fraudulent and malicious activity through unauthorised access to functions or sensitive personal information.

Read the complete press release!

eMarketer reported that despite 82% of teens said they preferred shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, while only 18% said they liked shopping online better, nearly 6 out of 10 US teens surveyed have made a purchase online, according to a June 2008 study conducted by OTX and The Intelligence Group. Responding teens spent an average of $46 every month, and more than one-quarter spent $50 or more.


"Teens are proving to be very savvy online shoppers who compare and contrast and click endlessly in search of the item they want at a price they're willing to pay—or that they think mom will go along with," Ms. Putnam, vice president at TNS Retail Forward, said.

Although teens are actively buying online, the amount they spend may be taking a hit from the economic slowdown, according to Piper Jaffray's most recent "Teen Spending Survey," released in April 2008. Piper and its research partner, student marketing association DECA, found that total year-over-year spending was down 15% among young men and 11% for young women.

Read the entire article at eMarketer!