Archive for May, 2008

Ofcom has begun an investigation into the charge BT Openreach can levy against communication providers using its telecoms services.

The regulator hopes to promote competition in the market so as to benefit UK consumers.

The review is the first chance Ofcom has had to review the charges it said Openreach could weigh against users of its main services.

Openreach is a key player in broadband provision as it offers Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) and Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) to other firms.

LLU has increasingly been taken up by telecoms firms, resulting a large selection of providers on the market.

Ofcom acknowledged the unbundled lines had created "increased choice and led to an improvement in services for consumers".

The consultation will be in two stages. The first sets out the considerations that Ofcom will take into account and the second will detail proposed new charges.

UK has the highest uptake of broadband in Europe, the European Commissioner’s ICT progress report has found.

Google has outlined plans for its search function, which will see it explore portable media and include expanded results, InfoWorld has reported

Vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, told the company’s conference it will expand its service to cars and phones and become increasingly personalised.

She explained users will receive a more holistic answer, which will feature "things like videos, images, graphs" stitched together.

Its latest developments include Goog-411, a speech-to-text service for mobile phones that uses voice recognition software.

Ms Mayer explained the complexities of search make it impossible for the company to always return 100 per cent accurate results.

"We’ll never have the perfect solution," InfoWorld reported she said.

Google has become synonymous with web search. The company, however, could face further serious challenges from internet and software giant, Microsoft.

Its attempt at a deal with Yahoo! is proof Microsoft is looking to move into search marketing.

"We’re very, very confident that this is the right path for Microsoft and Yahoo!," Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, said at the start of the failed negotiations.

Jerry Yang, chief executive officer of Yahoo!, said it was Microsoft who walked away from a deal between the two, it has been reported.

He told delegates at the All Things Digital conference, there was not a single defining reason the firms failed to agree.

"I understand the situation people are feeling, but at the same time we did not walk away from that proposal, Microsoft did," he said.

The deal faltered after Bill Gates’ firm failed to achieve a price of $33 (£16) a share, while Mr Yang had said the company would accept $37 (£18) per share.

A merger between the two would have created a competitor to search company, Google. Microsoft is keen to increase its search advertising revenue and is currently pushing its live.com service.

Yahoo! president, Sue Becker, told delegates the company had made mistakes: "We were really close in those early years to the users, over time we started organising around the products."

The company is still in crisis talks, however, Yang remains confident he is the right man for the firm’s top job. "I do think I am the best person to lead Yahoo!," he said.

Social networking site, Facebook, has announced it will release an open source project for its developer platform.

Internet tech blog, TechCrunch, reported the scheme will allow compatibility with any social network.

"We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications," Facebook said.

The move is considered a counter to the Google supported Open Social Foundation, which joins Google, MySpace and Yahoo.

Social site, Bebo, already licences the Facebook platform, however if the new arrangement goes ahead, Mark Zuckerberg’s site will release the elements of its platform and make it open source.

Google has taken a separate approach and released Friends Connect, which allows users to add social networking features to their sites.

After it failed to ‘pair’ with Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg said: "We want to talk to Google about this and see if there’s a way we can make it work."

Search company, Google, has been recognised as the UK’s best place to work.

The Great Place to Work Institute research group, made the award after polling 4,000 organisations worldwide and 30,000 workers in the UK.

"Google exemplifies what it means to be a great place to work," said business development manager, Williams Johnson Mota.

"The company balances a dynamic culture with a commitment to business excellence."

Research by the institute revealed the internet giant gave each of its employees a bicycle and encouraged team building sessions of table football.

"Employees have the space to develop a unique working environment and culture," Mr Johnson Mota noted, adding "its retention rates remain amongst the highest in the sector".

The search company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It has evolved to provide email, calendars and free online software solutions to rival Microsoft’s Office suite.

The European Union’s Internet Security Agency (ENISA) has called for the introduction of laws to police social networking sites.

Andreas Pirotti, executive director, hopes by introducing legislation they can better protect people who use the sites.

"Internet security is extremely important, considering how much business takes place online now. We don’t want infrastructures to be disrupted, we don’t want a digital 9/11 to happen," he said.

He said there is a "crucial" need to make people more aware how social networking sites work.

Mr Pirotti observed that many people did not know how the sites operated and were unaware how difficult it is to erase information once it has been published.

"Europe must take security threats more seriously and invest more resources in network and information security," he commented

He went on to remind web users ENISA has estimated there are six million hijacked computers worldwide, which criminals hope to access to support illegal behaviour.

Taking short web breaks at work can help business productivity, a study has claimed.

By replacing fag and tea breaks with ‘e-breaks’, firms can help workers de-stress and work better, research by computer games firm, PopCap Games, assisted by London Goldsmiths University has found.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an academic who helped with the study, said: "By factoring in a dedicated slot for an e-break bosses are fostering a more trusting working environment, boosting productivity and ultimately increasing their profit which surely makes good business sense."

He identified five separate types of e-break and assessed the effects on workers’ productivity.

Puzzles and casual gaming had the greatest positive impact, online shopping quickly reduced stress and social networking increased employees’ motivation and overall satisfaction.

Convincing employers of its benefits may be difficult - information security consultants, Global Secure Systems and Infosecurity Europe 2008 have claimed workers’ social networking use is costing business close to £6.5 billion annually.

US online retail spending slowed in April, new research has shown.

According to the latest data from analyst, comScore, its overall increase of 15 per cent was lower than 12 months ago.

"One hopes that April will emerge as the beginning of a turnaround in the consumer economy," said chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

Online retail spending reached $32.8 billion (£16 billion) during the first quarter of this year. Mr Fulgoni said it was "encouraging that April’s growth rate represented an increase from what was obviously a soft March for online consumer spending".

ComScore revealed growth in March was only nine per cent, the lowest monthly increase during the last 12 months.

Despite a slowdown in internet spending, advertising budgets to attract online shoppers have increased.

Ofcom reported that UK marketers spend more per person on internet advertising than in any other European country.

A senior Google executive has admitted the company keeps its search algorithm secret.

Udi Manber, vice-president of engineering within the firm’s Search Quality department, said many people know "surprisingly little" about how it ranks its content.

Mr Manber explained the firm is preparing to handle future, more complex search requests, while dealing with unethical attempts to control its results.

"One of the key things about search is that users’ expectations grow rapidly. Tomorrow’s queries will be much harder than today’s queries," he added.

He suggested the firm’s reluctance to reveal its methods protected users from competitors who could abuse the system to achieve high rankings.

Analyst comScore’s European search ranking revealed Google is still dominating the sector.

"With nearly 80 per cent of all searches conducted in March, Google is far and away the leading search property in Europe," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president.

New image recognition software has been developed, which can identify online pictures.

An international team has revealed an image can be identified by 256 to 1,024 bits of data.

Led by Antonio Torralba, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the researchers hope the breakthrough "could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do".

They managed to store about 13 million images from the internet in a database of only 600 MB and claimed to be able to retrieve one in less than a second.

Their results will be published as an academic paper, Small Codes and Large Image Databases for Recognition.

Mr Torralba and colleagues hope their findings will develop efficient image search and "scene matching techniques that are not only fast, but also require very little memory, enabling their use on standard hardware or even on handheld devices".

According to Analysts, Nielsen Online, video social networking is the fastest online social trend – top site YouTube.com attracted more than ten million viewers last year.