One of the good people I met in Paris was Tara Hunt, who is working with Ojos on Riya, a face recognition programme. This got some love from The Times on Wednesday. In conversation it was good to see that the company is trying to address privacy concerns, in that I may not want photos with myself in tagged with my identity. It was interesting to hear that many of the concerns that the company had received were from Europe, indicating a different perception of privacy.
Walking round the streets of Paris last night, we came across a designer shop with customised XBox360 faceplates. 6 different sets, of which this one surely had the most bling. Robert Scoble and Maryam were suitably impressed with the Parisian welcome for Microsoft, whilst Marc Cantor got woken up again by the shiny lights. Anina’s posted about this as well.
Last night I went along to Swedish Beers, a networking event for peopel involved in mobile marketing. Sponsorship was ably organised by Helen Keegan , giving more than a few rounds of drinks for the attendees. I think there were around 30 people there, all heavily discussing hte various aspects of mobile marketing.
I got a nice surprise at work this week - I got given an iPod shuffle. I did actually have to do some work for it; I was an advisor on a project in an area I would not normally be working in and the was a thankyou. I’ve not really got on with iPods in the past, with the screens and the touch wheels, but as this one does not have a screen and really just plays it’s proving very easy. First of all I had to download iTunes, but was quickly loading music - as it politely came ready charged I was soon away. Will it replace my Zen PMC - probably not but it’s a good addition. And it can always act as an addtional flash drive!
Maybe it’s the dark nights in the Northern Hemisphere, but the volume of posts coming through the aggregator over the last few weeks feels huge; overnight there can be an extra 500 or so unread to read. So I don’t…or rather I read some and skim others.
P2P network closes. A US university P2P network, set up specifically to facilitate sharing of books and research papers, has closed due to pressure from entertainment industry. The network was also used to share otherkinds of files (music and movies) which has the potential to bring downthbe wrath of the entertainment industry. Maybe they were just trying to avoid crippling their property with Sony rootkits? Which I see that Sonyhavefinally decided to recall the CDs that were deliberately infected with the malformed code.
Dan Kaminsky’s research into the scale of the infection, looking at how many of the net’s nameservers have seen requests to the phone-home part of the code, gives an indication that more than half a million networks have got the root kit on them. He’s mapped the numbers; for a set of CDs that were only released in the US, the spread in other parts of the world (here’s Europe) demonstrates how the sale of ‘legitimate’ music sources also ignores borders.
I thought there was a problem, but my PC desktop has given up the ghost before I got to fix it. It’s decided that it no longer has an MBR and just sits there sulking, asking to find something to give it a kick…time to find someone to fix the thing.
Great to see that the BBC will be trialling HDTV. It will be available in certain satellite and cable areas, plsu terrestrial in London. The intention is to have all free to air digital programmes as HDTV by 2010. This could be my trigger to buy a new set at some time.
Over on Sysinternals, Mark Russinovich has done a superb piece of detective work into a rootkit that he had found on his machine. After a long investigation, he found that it had originated from a Sony music CD; there appeared to be no warning of this installation, nor anyway to remove the software. Using standard removal techniques, it ended up crippling the CD player on the PC.
Within the comments, there are listings of various computer misuse legislation that Sony may have broken by surrepticiously installing such sotware. There is also further detective work, as the software is discovered to make calls to Sony with identification.
Yesterday, Sony provided removal software: “This Service Pack removes the cloaking technology component that has been recently discussed in a number of articles published regarding the XCP Technology used on SONY BMG content protected CDs. This component is not malicious and does not compromise security. However to alleviate any concerns that users may have about the program posing potential security vulnerabilities, this update has been released to enable users to remove this component from their computers.”
At least they were listening and put up a fix…pity they had to installed the equivalent of malware in the first place though.
Update: the Sony software is only decloakimg software so the files are no longer hodden. It does not remove the rootkit.
One of the other things announced yesterday by Microsoft was OfficeLive. This is still in development with it going into beta (to US residents only) in early 2006.
Looking at the domains, live.com was first registered in 1994. I wonder how much Microsoft paid for it?
There’s a definite theme to today’s posts. In a far more serious vein, the Blackberry Women and Technology Awards were announced last week. The overall winner, Jackie Edwards, is a lecturer at De Montfort University and her award was focused on her work in opening up technology to other women through a Women’s Access to Information Technology course. In 2005, only 21% of the IT workforce was female (via silicon.com), a reduction since 1997 as “work-life balance, ‘old-boys’ male-dominated environment and industry culture are the core reasons why the IT sector is unattractive to women”. Although in my company, the department I work in would be regarded as technical my many, it is not really, we just work with people who work with technology; that could be the reason why we have a 50/50 ratio.
Via Engadget, a group of guys requested donations in order to buy an iPod and then proceed to smash the gadget instore. The video of the act can be found on their site smashmyipod.com. Pity they’re in Canada instead of the UK; they could have called it a protest against capatalism or DRM or something and entered it into the Turner Prize. Which, by the way, has podcasts for you to download, with the artist and the judges commenting on the works. It also allows you to submit your own ‘casts about the pieces and these may be put up.
Business Week have a story about BitDefender offering a trip to Romania to meet Dracula. Whilst there, the winner would also have to pick up 1000 bottles of beer to help you through the experience for the best beta tester of their new Mail Protector product. Wonder if they will pay the duty as well for all that beer.
Apple announce the video iPod. Another toy I wo’;t buy, having still to dip my toes in the water on the Apple stuff.
Yahoo and Microsoft are linking their Instant Messengers, in an attempt to improve market share over AOL. Hooray - that reduces the number of clients I need to run to talk to al the people I have to work with - although it look like we have to wait 6 months.
Yahoo and Ipsos Insight have released a study on RSS. (In pdf). Looking at RSS usage inthe US, it shows that many people who are using RSS do not know they are going so.
As a tool, it is working best when people do not know (or care) what the tool is, just what it can do for them. Convenience and ease of use are the sellers. Make the nuts and bolts invisible and just let it happen, make it easy and seamless for people to subscribe.
Another study out this week is the Edelman/Technorati study of bloggers. A self-selecting survey, it looks at why people blog, the trust factor that can be engendered thought the use of blogging and the interaction between companies and bloggers. Over 800 bloggers responded, over half from the US, and over 90% from English speakers so the use of results for business blogging can only be for certain markets. Unfortunately, there’s no analysis yet, but that is supposed to be coming.
In answer to why people blog, the biggest reponse was about being an authority in the field, followed closely by a record of thoughts (this blog obviously falls into the 2nd category, there being no ‘field’ here!) But when it comes to company interactions, people appear to want interactions - or at least free product. The contact would be trusted more if direct from the company, reflecting on PR being perceived as spin; the moot trusted contacts would be those employees who blog. Agree - I’d be happier talking to someone who believes in the product (they still work for the comany!) rather than those who are paid to promote it in a second way and also the contact would be better coming from soemone who understands the blogging world and how it is made up of people instead of consumers.
Finally, Google have released their RSS aggregator. Still feels very much in beta, I’m just not getting a feel for it. The lack of organisation in the listing pane, with new articles presented in date/time order as a single stream would not suit the number of feeds I read, I prefer to read sections separately instead of everything in order. I don’t see a way of rearanging the view or arranging the subscriptions. One ot keep an eye on, but no instant winner.
In the second Weblog sale this week, Dave Winer’s weblogs.com has been bought by Verisign. The ping server needs investment to cope with the exponential increase in blogs, plus the investigation and work on how to clean up pings from spam blogs. Verisign have put forward their vision for the continuation of the service:
So a vision of maintinaing an open, community service whislt strengthening the infrastrcutre and scaleability of the service to cope with increasing demands., Sounds good to me. Winer wrote about the day of the announcement, which appeared to be slightly ahead of schedule
Jason Calacanis confirms that his Weblogs Inc has been bought by AOL. A great scoop by PaidContent.
BBC Radio 6 confirms (presumptively) that Aplle will be unveiling the new video iPod with a press event at the BBC. Ben talks about the leak. But maybe not, according to ThinkSecret.
Don Dodge writes about how Napster came and went, but the record companies lost anyway.
Gnutella was an open source program and we were already seeing new variants of it emerge. We told the record labels that we (Napster) had a loyal audience of over 50M users. We had servers that could control distribution. If they didn’t do a deal with us and put us out of business then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. There would be no company to sue and no server to shut down. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paying subscription or per download model. If we didn’t do a deal chaos would ensue. They didn’t believe us and didn’t really understand what this Gnutella threat was. The record labels lost billions of dollars in lost revenue over the next several years, and may never squash the free file trading movement.
. Via Rick.
Astromoners display their TV preferences with the discovery of a moon orbiting Xena, the 10th ‘planet’. Predictably, the moon has been called Gabrielle.
Yahoo reveal their input into the digitisation of the world, supportting the Open Content Alliance in creating a digital archive. Unlike Google, Yahoo’s offerieng is opt-in, so they may avod beign sued by the Authors Guild who seem to miss the point about having their works searcheable for anyone instead of languishing on shelves.
Digital Music revenues triple, but the industry continue to crack down on piracy. With the number of people downloading increasing, how many of them are hitting the barriers created by DRM meaning that the music is restrained and it cna only be paid on certain devices.
The South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is encouraging his dozen secretaries to blog on an official group blog. It’s currently only availalbe in Korean. Definitely think we should get a blog from Number 10 now.
The Web1.0 do tomorrow night sounds interesting!
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
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Read the comments from the last meetup to get a feel for how interesting this could be…and if we can get the secret list of 1998 wiords that trigger a drink, we should hold one in London.
In the unusual situation of an April Fools joke taking a step towards reality, Iread that Google has teamed up with NASA to co-operate in areas such as IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology. This includes such things as remote sensors - are they going to be doing a survey for the new base on the planned next trip to the moon in 2020 or just looking for the cheese?
Interesting to see that SAP, in my experience a large, process-driven, intricateand at times unwieldy piece of enterprise software, has invested in SocialText. SAP’s current offerings are what I would call the most malleable when it comes to sharing qualitative information across a workforce, so it would be great if they could offer a less rigid solution. You may have guessed that we use SAP extensively in the company I work for, and have some difficulties with it!
Yesterday I received my first order from ocado, the online supermarket. Looking through what I had received, I found that I’m obviously ignorant of what I actually buy when walking round a supermarket and do much of it out of habit. many of the sizes were just wrong, either too small (beans, oil) or too large (pasta, tuna) So I have little idea of actual size of the products that I pick up.
I was in Debenhams yesterday. The shop in Oxford street is going through a refurb and there have been some changes in the fitting rooms. All items are scanned going into the changing room and then the ones you decide to buy are scanned on the way out. I think this is so the individual franchises in the store know what they have to collect from the room, although it probably has a shoplifting deterence as well. If I was ever in town at a weekend I suspect the scanning would slow the entry of customers. In a further change, they have added scanners into each cubicle (as in the picture). The idea is that if you want to change the size or get something to match, you scan the barcode and call for assistance.
Whilst browsing, I came across an frustrating site, which I won’t name, however it is a large FMCG. First of, the job site won’t work in anything but Windows and IE.
Please note you will not be able to access this system if you are using a MAC or any other kind of Internet Browser software apart from Microsoft Internet Explorer (eg. Morzilla or Firefox).(sic)
After switching browsers, I find that I cannot easily navigate and I cannot easily view the jobs. It’s a SAP based website and is using Adobe Acrobat to present the jobs which does not want to display at all on my machine. Overall, not a good experience - a site built for the HR function not potential applicants.
I'm Rachel Clarke and this is my personal blog, about life, stuff and a bit of technology. The marketing stuff can be found at Digital Stuffing
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