Technology Newsletter
8 February 2008

Welcome

Welcome once again to the Prompt Newsletter!

Inspired by the website of the week, I will attempt to start this newsletter with the worst opening (alright, third line) in newsletter history. I apologise in advance:

I’m sure it is with great excitement – perhaps not as great as seeing singing sensation Barry Manilow in concert in a Las Vegas casino, but greater than sitting through a school concert, which, even if your own children are involved, can often prove absolutely terrible, though to their credit, the kids try their best – that we present the latest edition of the Prompt newsletter, which is (as usual) full of good stuff.

Phew! This week: holographic displays, eBay banning negative feedback and updates on the Microsoft Yahoo! bid and the undersea cable fiasco. Plus much, much more!

If you enjoy reading this newsletter (not counting that terrible line in this introduction), then why not visit our blog?

Hazel Butters, CEO - Prompt Communications

Technology News

Microsoft bid ‘troubles’ Google.

By Duncan Heaney

Microsoft’s $44 billion (£22.5bn) bid for Yahoo! understandably has Google a little concerned. According to the BBC, Google revealed in a blog that it finds the potential deal ‘troubling’ and is urging regulators to scrutinise the proposal.

David Drummond, Google's senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer, explains his company's fears that that Microsoft may attempt to exert an ‘inappropriate influence’ over the internet. Drummond states that Microsoft has a history of establishing proprietary monopolies and that the ‘ideals of the internet: openness and innovation’ need to be preserved. In other words: Microsoft bad.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer insists that the deal will set them up as a strong ‘number two’ competitor to Google, and that the merging of the two companies will mean increased competition. In other words: Microsoft good.

Google will no doubt do everything it can to block the deal from going through, so these words are likely to be just the opening salvo in its campaign. The proposal is being examined by the US Congress Judiciary Committee on Friday 8^th February (today if you are reading this on the day of publication).

Damaged undersea cables knock out Middle East internet

By Lance Concannon

Rumour and speculation were rife this week after several undersea cables in the Middle East suffered damage, causing widespread internet outages throughout the region. Claims that one of the cables was cut by a ship’s anchor were later denied by Egypt’s Ministry of Communication. The exact number of cables cut has also been tricky to pin down, with reports wavering between three and five. This, obviously, all seems a bit sinister, given that several governments in the region have been struggling to censor the internet as effectively as they have censored conventional media for decades. The conspiracy theorists have been having a field day, but in fairness to them, nobody has so far come up with any reasonable kind of explanation.

US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

Vishesh Kumar has joined The Wall Street Journal as a reporter. Kumar was previously a senior writer covering the Internet for TheStreet.com. He has also previously worked for Red Herring and as a staff writer at The Industry. In his new role, Kumar will cover the media industry and technology for the WSJ.

In further changes at the WSJ, Liz Rappaport has joined the newspaper as a reporter covering bonds and credit markets. Previously, Rappaport was a markets columnist for TheStreet.com. She has also served as a reporter with Dow Jones Newswires.

Robert Strohmeyer will recently joined PC World as a senior editor. Prior to joining PC World, he was the editor in chief of Windows Vista: The Official Magazine. Strohmeyer has served as editor in chief of several other computer and technology publications.

Tami Luhby has been appointed senior writer covering Wall Street and financial services at CNNMoney.com. Prior to joining CNNMoney.com, Luhby was a staff writer for Newsday, where she had worked since 1999. Luhby has also worked at Crain's New York Business and American Banker. She begins her new role at CNNMoney.com on February 11^th.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

There have been two recent changes at the Times. Former news editor John Wellman has been promoted to deputy head of news. In his new role, Wellman is now second-in-command of news at the Times. Wellman has previously served as deputy news editor and night news editor at the paper. Grainne Gilmore has been appointed economics correspondent. Gilmore was previously the paper's deputy finance editor.

The Wall Street Journal has appointed Alistair MacDonald as its UK politics, economics and European financial regulation correspondent. MacDonald has been promoted from his previous role as markets, hedge fund, exchanges and regulation correspondent at the WSJ. MacDonald has also worked for Dow Jones Newswire and Reuters before joining the WSJ.

Terry Grote has announced his plan to retire early after running the Independent titles for nine years. Grote has spent 30 years in the newspaper industry. He started out as a sports reporter in regional newspapers before partnering with Sir Ray Tindle to launch Capital Newspapers, a London regional newspaper group which was later acquired by Independent News & Media. Grote plans to pursue a number of private interests after leaving the Independent titles in May this year.

Tech Totals

By Zachariah N. Hofer-Shall

750,000
Number of page-views that John Edwards’ campaign channel on YouTube has received

1,000,000
Hilary Clinton’s YouTube channel views

11,000,000
Barack Obama’s YouTube channel views

“Help me Nasser Peyghambarian, you’re my only hope”

By Dave Wilby

If you’re any kind of techy worth a light, you will have craved a holographic screen ever since you first saw Luke Skywalker play 3D light chess and heard the immortal line “Let the Wookie win” Well, things are looking up, with US researchers (who else?) revealing in this week’s New Scientist that a new material that can create writable holograms could finally make 3D displays in the home a reality.

The first images are understandably on the prototype side of bodged, but it’s definitely promising. Apparently the new material can record a holographic image, erase it, and replace it with another in a few minutes. Optical engineer Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona and his team are confident they can advance the technology to refresh pictures at video frame rates of around 30 times a second. "Our 3D display can be recorded in three minutes and can be viewed for up to three hours without fading," Peyghambarian has said. Awesome! We like this man. Wonder if he has any plans to knock up a makeshift land speeder?

eBay to protect buyers from negative feedback

By Sean McManus

eBay has announced plans to stop sellers from leaving negative or neutral feedback on their buyers, according to the BBC. Under the new system, the only way sellers will be able to warn other sellers about dodgy buyers will be to leave feedback tagged as positive but containing negative comments.

eBay owes its success in part to the feedback mechanism where both parties in a transaction can leave public comments about each other when it concludes. Feedback can be scored as positive, neutral or negative. All eBay members have a feedback rating calculated by totalling the number of positives and subtracting the negatives and that score is used as an indicator of standing in the eBay community. You wouldn’t buy a Wii from someone with a feedback rating of zero, for example.

The problem is that sellers use the threat of negative feedback to coerce buyers into leaving favourable feedback for them, even if the buyer paid on time and got a load of rubbish in return. It’s interesting to note that on Amazon marketplace (where buyers have no feedback rating at stake), sellers tend to have lower feedback ratings than on eBay.

Banning sellers from leaving negative feedback would shift the balance of power in the community towards buyers, and would undermine the spirit of equality that pervades transactions. It would also make it harder for newcomers to gain the trust of the community. Under the present system, members can shop on eBay to build up their rating before attempting to sell something. That won’t carry much weight if the only option was positive feedback and the number of transactions without feedback isn’t reported.

Duke Nukem Forever/Never

By Lance Concannon

Back in 1996, when I was a bright eyed and bushy tailed young nerd, there was a legendary first-person-shooter action game called Duke Nukem 3D. It wasn’t the most technically advanced game in the world, but what it lacked in snazzy graphics and realistic physics, it more than made up for in style, humour and rock solid playability.

When the sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, was announced in 1997, at a time when a new high profile FPS launch was still something to get excited about, gamers the world over wet their pants with joy. Duke Nukem was the undisputed daddy of video game violence and everybody was hungry for another slice. Over a decade later and Duke Nukem Forever has become a gaming industry joke – what was once hyped as one of the greatest games ever to be released has been subject to endless delays, speculation and derision. Despite all this, the developers have continued to claim that the game is still in production and will be released, although will not be drawn on a launch date.

Opinion on the game is divided into two camps – It’s Never Going to Happen and Anything That’s Taken This Long Must Be Awesome. One thing’s for sure though, even today the game still has the power to capture imaginations, even though many of today’s gamers are too young to have played the original title. A report from the Dallas Business Journal, which claimed there was a strong possibility that the game would be released later this year, spread across the web like wildfire this week. Even if the story is as inaccurate as some claim, it’s impressive to see just how many people would love to see the Duke in another outing.

IPv6 is go!

By Dave Wilby

Just how long have we been reading and writing about the impending migration from IPv4 to IPv6? It certainly spans the millennia, which always sounds rather impressive. Anyway, it seems the wait could be over, following an announcement this week that global Internet naming coordinator ICANN had added the first IPv6 addresses to its root servers. Excited? Relieved? We’re not surprised. With shed loads of new devices connecting to the Internet every day, it was literally just a matter of time before we used up the four billion or so addresses possible under old IPv4 limitations.

Fortunately the longer address strings inherent in IPv6 will be save us form interweb meltdown by delivering more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion possible unique addresses. That should be enough to be getting on with. Now we just need some high-volume websites and web service developers to make the switch and give the migrations some much needed impetus.

New rules of N-Gage meant return to Nokia gaming

By Dave Wilby

It wouldn’t let it lie. Nokia has shrugged off the lack lustre impact of its first generation mobile entertainment handheld N-Gage and returned to the gaming arena to launch a brand new N-Gage platform.

However, according to the BBC this second assault will provide N-Gage gaming on a wider range of existing and new Nokia mobiles rather than for a single dedicated device – not a bad idea bearing in mind strong hardware competition from Sony and Nintendo. Games developers EA, Gameloft and Vivendi are already on board, the software gateway is already available for download and there’s every reason to believe brand new N-Gage titles will hit the market before the summer.

Microsoft and Google, unlikely lunch-mates in Boston

By Zachariah N. Hofer-Shall

The Kendal Square branch of Rebecca’s Café, located at 290 Main St. in Cambridge Massachusetts is preparing for enormous sales growth in 2008, following Microsoft’s recent announcement of planned expansion into the area. Rebecca’s Café, best known for its soup/half-sandwich combo, has over a dozen locations through the metropolitan Boston area, but is expecting to make the Cambridge branch a flagship in light of the expanding tech hub at Kendall Square.

Microsoft’s new offices in Cambridge will become the home of East Coast Research and development. Microsoft employees will be working within blocks of their top rivals now that Google’s new offices were opened around the corner in the fall of 2007. Employees of both tech giants will be forced to share Rebecca’s Café, a fact that has R&D heads nervous of security issues and probable spying from the competition during lunch. The potential problems continue as the Prompt US office resides just minutes from Microsoft’s new facility, unnerving Rebecca’s kitchen staff due to foreseeable soup shortages.

An unnamed sandwich maker at Rebecca’s said “Oh yeah, of course these dudes should open up shop here; us locals ah wicked smaht”. Cambridge, home to both MIT and Harvard, is seen as an ideal location for technology companies, with vast local resources and more compelling university recruiting.

Book review: Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition

By Duncan Heaney

The ‘Gamer’s Bible’, screams the blurb on the back of the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition. As (one of) Prompt’s resident gaming geeks, I felt it was my responsibility to purchase the book and find out if it was worthy of this claim. An old book token and an in-store promotion also had a lot to do with the decision.

As you’d expect, this isn’t the deepest book. Like other Guinness World Record books, the text is spread out over the pages in little bite size nuggets, making it easy to dip in and out of. The design is very good, with the text clearly visible from the vibrant pictures and screen captures that appear throughout. I’m not sure about the cover, which is shiny, bright green, and embossed with images that at certain angles make it look like the book has been sneezed on.

The biggest flaw with the book is that there are not really enough world records to fill it. There are some, such as the highest one day gross (Halo 3) or biggest selling game of all time (Super Mario Bros.), but the majority of the book is filled with facts about the biggest games in each genre that many gamers will already know.

At the end of the book there is a table with an A-Z of high scores and speed runs (completion time from start to finish) for hundreds of games. This section is great fun, and quite inspiring – I’ll beat the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 speed run if it kills me!

The book isn’t bad, but nor is it the ‘gamer’s bible’. Your kids will certainly enjoy it, it’s fun to dip into, and the table at the back is great, but the £15 asking price is a bit steep. The book is available now in the UK and in the US in March.

Website of the Week

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

By Duncan Heaney

‘Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.’

You’ve got to give credit where it’s due. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction award challenges all and sundry to create the worst opening line to a novel that they can, and 2007 winner Jim Gleeson really pulled out all the stops with the gem above.

The annual contest is named in honour of author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who penned the notorious opener ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’ This site contains information on the competition and lists some of the downright hilarious entries it has received over the years. It’s well worth a look and who knows, you might be inspired to enter it yourself.

We hope you find the Prompt Communications newsletter an interesting read. For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your technology PR, marketing, social media/blogging initiatives, copywriting or surveys, please contact us using the details below. We are always delighted to hear from you.