a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Deloitte Consulting admits it helped foster confusing, indecipherable language, but it’s now released Bullfighter software to help business people avoid gobbledygook. [CNET News.com E-Business]
Part viral marketing and PR, but mainly a funny and good idea. If you’ve ever had to read or actually written any of this Krap (the K is for emphasis) you’ll love bullfighter. I am just sorry, though not surprised it is Windows Office only.
The new view combines titles and descriptions—it’s sort of like a web page, actually, except that you can navigate via arrow keys and the space bar and you can expand and collapse descriptions.
And you can get it from the beta page.
Well worth the usual risk associated with beta software… The new combined view makes scanning the headlines much much faster. In general performance seems to be improved as well.
A key Senate committee plans to vote Thursday on a proposal to restrict unsolicited commercial e-mail by requiring a working return address and a way for recipients to decline future messages. [CNET News.com]
Subscribe before June 20, 2003, and get the first year of service for just $10.99. That’s 63% off the regular service fee of $29.99. If you subscribe after June 20th, 2003, you may experience an interruption in service and the price will increase to $29.99.
Just retrieved as it was nicely fitered to the junk folder on hotmail. I guess I can finally let this account go to rest as paying for this is not in the cards for me. The free service side is coming to an end. I just wonder how long other .Net focused initiatives from Redmond will stay free.
Changes to MSN messenger can only be around the corner…
The agency is expected to ask Congress for sweeping new powers that would let it cooperate closely with other governments and prosecute domestic and overseas spammers more readily. [CNET News.com]
Stewart Alsop’s current column in Fortune details his back and forth with broadband access to the home. Although he started as a fan of DSL, he’s moving over to the cable camp.
I have to say I’m not convinced and in fact, think cable creates a bad dynamic for the future development of the Internet. I’m just not a fan of assymetric broadband access. Cable tends to have significantly more downstream (to the home) bandwidth than upstream and performance for most day-to-day applications (i.e., web surfing) certainly is better on cable. But this assymetry creates a dynamic that discourages the development of applications that serve content back to the web — in fact, most cable ISPs prevent their customers from operating web servers on their home networks.
By limiting the back channel, broadband over cable has the potential to push the Internet more and more towards becoming a one way medium. Such a thing happened 80 years ago with radio. While it’s unlikely that history will repeat itself, we need to push for symmetric broadband networks. Only that way can we keep building the Internet into a medium in which every consumer can also be a producer.
Interesting perspective and as always a good column by Stewart Alsop, though I disagree with the in general nature of the perspective here. While I do agree that an asymmetrical connection makes it potentially more difficult to have a two way medium it is far from reality today. Just look at the blog community. Does it get more two-way? Any resourceful consumer can easily (yes easily) set up a server at home for both local and remote use. Almost all home connectivity options are asymmetrical as well… DSL, Cable and Satellite are, though dial-up is not… no perhaps we should all stay with that as our option?? I don’t think so.
I think that the majority of what people do by nature is view and receive information rather than produce it and since we are talking about mass markets (was that not clear) we need to talk about what most people want. Email is two-way, sharing photos is two way…blogging… two-way! all easily done on almost any kind of connection.
For me, Cable is the way to go. It is extremely fast, costs less and is amazingly reliable and very easy to set up. I would love more upstream speed, but even for the limited serving I do (including streaming music to myself remotely) it all works just fine.
The portal giant puts a controversial challenge-response technique to work to stop spammers from using its Web e-mail service to send out junk e-mail. [CNET News.com Entertainment & Media]
Using the Blue Hawaii, beta 9 AOL client I just signed up for an Alert for AOL Journals – as they put it, Blogs are coming to AOL!
Stay tuned… this space could get very interesting if sudddenly ~30 Million people can blog.
Seattle’s online retailing giant launches new business-to-business e-commerce division to help partner sites. [internetnews.com: Top News]
Amazon.com said the group would also provide fulfillment and customer service operations as part of the range of services available for merchants that want to sell on the Amazon.com site.
Major news… Not sure why InternetNews is so negative on this. Seems like a logical extension of ZShops and in my humble opinion is a total package with fulfillment and customer service. Yahoo Stores is simple by comparison and no where near as comprehensive for a small to medium business and their customers.
Microsoft sends a cease-and-desist letter to a shareware firm started by former employees, claiming their home-networking application violates a non-compete agreement. [CNET News.com]
Microsoft claims that Schnazzle–which allows PCs on a home network to share music, photos and other media–is similar to planned Microsoft technology and therefore violates the non-compete clause of the employment agreements Rao and Doise signed when they began working for Microsoft. The company’s standard employment contract prohibits ex-employees from using knowledge they gained at Microsoft to work on competing products for one year after they leave the software giant.
The real test of any music store is its ability to move the chart toppers. While it’s great to sell and offer a deep catalog, the cost to run something like the apple store or Amazon/CDnow would be a losing proposition without major hits.
Checking the Apple store for today’s releases is unfortunatley disappointing in that regard… No Radiohead… No Ruben Studdard… and No Clay Aiken.
There are a few new releases listed for today (Tuesday is when new music is released publically by the way) but nothing from the big three for this week.
UPDATE – I stand corrected… There are now singles available by each of the finalists from American Idol, though no mention on their albums.
Seems logical that everyone is taking a renewed interest in Music Stores thanks to the early success of the Apple efforts…[LaTimes via MacRumors]
Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and AOL Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit are among the companies expected to launch services to compete with Apple’s 6-week-old iTunes store, which charges 99 cents to download a song onto a personal computer. Viacom Inc.’s MTV, another popular Web destination, is also exploring a download venture, according to sources.
It seems that only Microsoft could compete on the same level as Apple, bundling the store, the browser and the DRM scheme across devices. The magic of the store is how EASY it is to use and how EASY it is to use YOUR music. Because a purchased track is instantly available within a music library you can burn it, copy it to your iPod or stream it to another Mac. Microsoft is the only player that seems to be able to do most of that from within the Media Player. Real could get there, I supopse with their jukebox software, but they have not taken the download idea to seriously instead choosing to go for the streaming approach.
New STBs from Pioneer, Scientific-Atlanta, Motorola and LG Electronics focus on high-definition TV, digital video recording and interactive services such as video on demand. [allNetDevices Wireless News]
If this replaced my cable box I would be all set:
Pioneer Electronics has unveiled its Voyager 4000 HD-DVR, which features a dual HD tuner configuration (860 MHz) that allows for both high-definition and standard television signals to be encoded onto the hard drive simultaneously, so viewers can watch and archive two programs at once.
The Voyager also includes configurable controls, Pioneer said, which allow it to output screen resolutions optimized for any display type in a variety of formats. Incoming video resolutions are detected and up-converted or down-converted automatically based on the configured output.
Pioneer said its newly released interactive navigation suite, Passport Echo, is fully optimized to run on Voyager 4000, enabling cable customers to cache, catalog and store programming for later retrieval.
The iTunes Music Store won’t take money to promote acts, according to an independent record distributor’s report of comments made by Apple’s CEO at a private briefing. [CNET News.com]
Software giant makes another run at providing interactive software for digital set-top boxes. [internetnews.com]
Microsoft said its software would allow cable operators to generate new revenues by offering services, such as on-screen TV guides, movies-on-demand and a new generation of interactive advertisements, coupons and other sales and marketing incentive programs. It said the software allows cable operators to offer a variety of video-on-demand services, including films and episodes stored in computer video vaults, and functions that allow users to pause, fast-forward or rewind programming from their remote control.
I am quite sure this is legit and something you can do quite easily to
protect your personal privacy. It takes about 5 minutes…
Your credit info goes public July 1, 2003
Your Credit: Personal Information goes public Starting July 1st,
2003, the four major credit bureaus in the US (Equifax, etc.) will be
allowed to release credit info, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc., to
ANYONE who requests it.If you do not want to be included in this release of your personal
information, you can call 1-888-567-8688.Once the message starts you will want option #2 (even though option#1
refers to this email, push #2) and then option #2. Be sure to listen
closely, the first option is only for a two-year period. Make sure you wait
until they prompt for the second option, which opts you out FOREVER.
You should receive their paperwork in the mail confirming the
“opting out” in less than one week after making the call.
UPDATE – Here’s some more detail on this and a correction on what is going on…
As more high-speed households wake up to intrusion vulnerabilities on their PCs, AOL takes up arms with a pitch for new built-in security. [internetnews.com: Top News]
The security tools in AOL 9.0 include:
Customized Firewall: In partnership with Network Associates’ (Quote, Company Info) McAfee unit, AOL Broadband subscribers will get a free customized firewall. The Personal Firewall Express promises protection against hackers and unauthorized intruders. Firewall options would allow users to block access to sensitive files, financial records and personal data and create records of intrusion attempts. Automatic Anti-virus Scanning: AOL 9.0 will automatically scans all e-mail attachments to detect viruses and fix or block infected attachments before they reach a subscriber’s inbox. While the automatic scanning is free, AOL is also marketing a premium integrated service with McAfee Security to block infection from P2P file sharing, Web site downloads, infected CD-ROMs and disks and other multi-media files. Anti-spam protections: On top of its proprietary server-side anti-spam filters, the company is adding adaptive spam filtering — that learns and adapts to the type of e-mail that each individual member considers spam. AOL Mail will come with a new spam folder to automatically route and separate unsolicited mail and a new feature for word-specific and URL filters.
There will be an additional fee of $2.95 per month for these features…
While I am unfortunatley accustomed to certain sites not working in certain browsers, I found myself completely blocked today trying to set-up an account on UPS. I tried Safari, Mozilla Firebird and finally Internet Explorer and all ended up getting stuck at the same point. What’s up with that? I was only clicking on a submit button and nothing happened — in any browser!
When it comes to the realisation of the digital home, no-one is pushing harder to achieve it than Microsoft. But what role for the Windows-based PC in the home of the future? Microsoft would have us believe that the PC is the natural all-singing, all-dancing hub of the home. And at first sight it has a strong case: with top-end processing power, huge storage potential, cutting-edge graphics, wireless and wired networking and easy access to high-bandwidth internet, there?s no doubt that in… [AlwaysOn Network]
The hitch? Don?t believe the hype. When it comes it to the delivery of no compromise video (the bottom line for discerning couch potatoes everywhere), neither the Windows platform or Wi-Fi are up to the job. Windows XP may be stable enough for desktop computing, but is far from it once you move into the realms of instant-on, never-fail TV. Similarly, Wi-Fi is forging new ground for seamless connectivity in the home and beyond, but it doesn’t yet have the bandwidth to deliver multi-channel video at a quality and consistency to make it a commercially viable proposition.
The chipmaker is examining whether it should create a separate consumer brand for chips used in handhelds and smart phones. [CNET News.com Personal Technology]