byteblog

The start of a new year is always an exciting time, but it is also greeted with a touch of apprehension. You never know what is around the corner, and with the doom and gloom from the media in the past 6 months, you would be forgiven for thinking that every business under the sun is having problems.

Happily, we have found that the adage that you should spend on marketing yourself during difficult times has held true. We’ve had more enquiries from existing and new clients in the first few weeks of 2009 than in any previous year since we started in 1999. Ranging from brochures, to new websites, to starting to sell online – people are asking about all sorts of things, and recognise that we need to remember that if we aren’t out there telling people we’re ready for business, then someone else will be.

We wish you every success for 2009!

It’s late. You’ve had a few drinks. Instead of waiting until the morning to send that email, you’ve sat hunched over the keyboard and spat out a bilious missive to a client or a friend/ex, or (worse), declared undying love.

Go on, you can admit it. You’ve done it.

Now, in recognition of all those emails sent in haste, never to be recalled (wouldn’t THAT be a great invention – a “retract” button), Google has come up with a solution that although won’t stop you altogether, will at least make you think twice before pushing “send”. It’s called Mail Goggles, works with their GMail service, and the idea is that it presents you with a series of simple maths questions that you must answer correctly before being able to send the message.

It works during those key night-time hours when alcohol or just sheer exhaustion can play a big part in thinking whether something is a good idea or not. I think it’s just a shame they don’t do one for the phone too.

There’s a challenge for you, Google bods.

http://tinyurl.com/4gljkl

Google has launched its first foray into the web browser market. It’s no surprise that they’ve extended their reach into this area, given that their business is based around the web and web marketing. Perhaps it is surprising that they’ve waited this long, but it comes at a time when both Mozilla and Microsoft have both launched the new versions of their popular browsers Firefox and Internet Explorer respectively.

At first look it is a very neat browser, with nice touches such as highlighted web addresses with the main domain of the site you are visiting in black, so you can easily see where you are – difficult on some sites with vast URLs.

No crashes yet, but we’re only a few hours in, so will keep you posted!

The latest furore surrounding the loss of a memory stick with the data of all the prisoners in the UK is surprising in a number of ways.

However, the media have chosen to focus on the loss of the key itself, but I don’t think that is the surprising thing; I mean, we all lose things from time to time, especially something barely bigger than an AA battery.

The really surprising thing to me is why I can ensure that we can have all our company disks and portable media encrypted in less than a few hours for the sake of a £150 outlay, but a government contractor with contracts worth north of £50 million over the past few years hasn’t put a similar system in place.

What have they spent all that money on I wonder?

If you deal with any commercially or personally sensitive information, and if you’re in business, then that means you, then do yourselves a favour and invest a small sum in getting things secured.

www.pgp.com

Spell-checkers can be pretty handy. When you are staring at the same document for sometimes hours on end as it is being compiled, sometimes you can miss the simplest of typos, so it is useful to run it through a spell-checker or at least past another pair of eyes before you send it to the client.

However, we didn’t realise that spell-checkers can also pass comment on the policy of our friends and neighbours in the US.

After recently checking the spelling in a document we are putting together for a client, the US-centric spell-checker flagged up “healthcare”.

It said “word not found”…

The search giant Yahoo, amongst others, is experimenting with a new version of the internet called the “Semantic Web”. In other words, the aim is to try and get the internet to behave more like person, rather than just a collection of dumb terminals.

At the moment, when you do a web search for, say, “office equipment”, the search engines use the specific words in that search request, and try and match pages that they have previously indexed. This can sometimes throw up all sorts of anomalies and weird pages. Basically this is because people are still much better than computers at associating between words and phrases, and as people’s associations differ wildly between age groups, countries, races and so on, it is very difficult for a search engine to get it right every time, for everyone.

The solution, say the techies, is to have the web think for itself, and instead of just dumbly returning a list of pages, it should actively search for relevant content by understanding its meaning. Of course “understanding” is a relative term – we think it is doubtful whether a computer will ever pass the Turing test in our lifetime, as the meaning we as humans attach to information is vastly complex and, ultimately, any computer will have to be programmed by us, and we do not fully understand this relationship ourselves.

We all saw what happened in Terminator 2 when SkyNet started to think for itself (it fought back, apparently, when someone tried to unplug it), so maybe going as far as a fully self-aware internet wouldn’t be such a good idea. However, anything that makes our daily trawl through the internet a little easier and quicker is a good idea in our book.

Check out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7296056.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

No, not the strange processed meat that comes in tins and seems to be enjoying a revival, but its namesake, the ubiquitous emails that swamp our inboxes on a daily basis.

According to an experiment by McAfee the software security and backup company, the average email user would get around 70 spam messages a day if it went unchecked. One user apparently received 5,414 spam message in a one month period.

I have that beat. Looking at my spam box, in the past month I have received 6,254 junk emails, ranging from very generous offers of cash from previously unknown dead relatives, to offers of a very generous male appendage, all the way to genuine Rollex (sic) timepieces for only £2.50.

Don’t get me wrong, the internet and email are great tools, but as long as they are around and are free at the point of use, some people will take advantage of that and send out billions of these things every day.

A simple solution? Charge to send emails. I would quite happily pay a few pence to send a genuine email, in much the same way as I’m happy to buy a stamp to post a letter.

Although saying that, looking at the post this morning has revealed that even charging for sending something doesn’t necessarily stop spam coming through my letterbox. Oh well, it was just a thought….

Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7482991.stm