Welcome

Welcome to another edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. This week we're pleased to announce an interesting new client, SNIF Labs, a company headquartered in Boston which was formed by several graduates from MIT's Media Labs. SNIF has developed the world's first pet accessory that combines wireless sensing and social networking technologies to enhance the lives of dogs and their owners. The SNIF Platform blends real-time activity monitoring for dogs with online social networking for humans to improve insight into the lives of dogs while enriching owners' relationships with other pet enthusiasts.

For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your technology PR, marketing, social media and blogging consultancy, copywriting or surveys, please email me at hbutters@prompt-communications.com. We are always delighted to hear from you.

Best regards,
Hazel Butters
Prompt Communications

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Enterprise Technology News

By Lance Concannon

Microsoft and Sun cosy up, snow forecast in Hades

Techworld reports that long standing Microsoft rival, Sun, will soon be selling the 64-bit version of Windows on its servers. The two firms have also announced that they will work together on Windows for the Sun Fire servers, and to ensure that Sun Solaris Unix is compatible with Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

The deal clearly benefits Sun, since it will be able to sell its servers into organisations which prefer to use Windows. Microsoft will benefit from Sun's virtualisation technology, a booming business in which MS has arguably failed to keep up with rivals.

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Google pushes Asian online privacy model

According to the Register, Google wants the world to start using a set of internet privacy rules that have already been signed up to by several countries in the Asia Pacific region. A spokesman for Google claimed that the majority of countries offer their citizens and businesses virtually no privacy standards and that this situation could be improved. Google plans to outline its vision for a set of standardised international privacy principles today at a meeting of policy makers in France.

Societies across the western world have often very different ideas of how far personal and business privacy should be protected, and any attempt to create a standard which will work effectively across political boundaries is likely to face significant challenges.

US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

US

Katrina Brooker has rejoined Fortune magazine after recently leaving Portfolio. She was a senior writer with Fortune for almost nine years before joining Portfolio.

Todd Pruzan has resigned as senior editor at Details to become assignment editor at Portfolio. He has been with Details since July 2006 and has previously worked for Print Magazine, Blender and Inside.com. Pruzan will start his new position on Sept. 17.

Alexandra Berzon has resigned from Red Herring where she was a reporter. Berzon covered Internet topics such as the launch of social networking sites and changes to media downloading programs.

The Los Angeles Time will be the first US paper to experiment with innovative advertising techniques that aim to engage the reader's senses. This weekend, the paper will run an ad for a new movie called Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium that smells like freshly baked frosted cake when scratched. Rolling Stone has its own adventurous ad planned for the new CBS series Cane that will feature a Peel n' Taste strip that tastes like a non-alcoholic Lucia Duque Rum mojito.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

UK

Emma Jacobs has been promoted from assistant UK news editor at the Financial Times to features editor for the FT's Business Life. Online night news editor David Crouch is the new assistant UK news editor.

There have been further changes at the Daily Telegraph recently. Chris Evans has been promoted from news editor to executive head of news. Former deputy news editor Matthew Bayley replaces Evans as news editor. Bayley will be replaced by Neville Dean who was previously assistant news editor.

Two new editorial staff members have been appointed at Incisive Media's CRN. Garry Hayes has been hired as a reporter and will cover channel news, analysis. Hayes will specialise in the voice and data sector. Recent Hertfordshire university graduate, Kayleigh Bateman, has also been hired as a reporter and will cover channel news and analysis. She will specialise in the data storage arena.

Phil Elliott has replaced Ellie Gibson as editor of Eurogamer Network's GamesIndustry.biz and MobileIndustry.biz. He was previously editor of GameSpot UK. In his new role, Elliot is responsible for ensuring the sites cover up to date business news and information for the videogames industry.

Consumer Technology News

By Dave Wilby and Sean McManus

Ebay and Paypal squabble over address bug

The Register reports that Paypal has been dredging up long-abandoned postal addresses and making them into the default address for some Ebay transactions. Customers complaining that goods have gone astray have been told by Paypal that it's an Ebay problem, and by Ebay that it's Paypal's fault. Ebay acquired Paypal five years ago, but it seems they still operate as separate companies, for technical support at least. Ebay says it's working on a bug fix, but advises buyers to contact sellers before leaving negative feedback if goods don't show up. It's a shame shoppers can't leave feedback for Ebay on a transaction too.

'Tap and go' is capital idea

MasterCard has begun rolling out its PayPass contactless micro-payment technology to several retailers in locations across London, reports News.com. The MasterCard PayPass and Maestro PayPass contactless cards allow consumers to pay for items costing under a tenner ($20) by waving their debit or credit card in front of readers. Transactions are then processed through the MasterCard network for clearing and settlement. The basic concept will already be familiar to users of Oyster cards on the London Underground. 'Tap and go' can be added to any MasterCard credit, debit or prepaid card, or Maestro debit card. HSBC and RBS have also signed up to the idea. Retailers currently participating include Books Etc, Coffee Republic, Eat, McDonald's and the Science Museum.

Citizendium plans accountable rival to Wikipedia

A rival online encyclopaedia project has been launched with the aim of usurping Wikipedia as the web's leading reference work, Times Online reports. Citizendium will accept public contributions but takes a step back from the trend to open content up to anonymous collaborative editing. Instead entries will be directed by expert editors, while contributors will be made accountable by providing real names. Citizendium was designed by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, who left that website to become one of its most vocal critics, in a response to the inaccuracies and tomfoolery that have crept into Wikipedia. It is seen by some observers as a natural backlash to the explosion of substandard user-generated online content. Sanger now says: "Wikipedia has accomplished great things, but the world can do even better. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable." The pilot Citizendium project is invitation-only.

Branson turns to Google Earth to find Fossett

British billionaire Richard Branson said on Wednesday he would try to find missing friend and adventurer Steve Fossett using satellite mapping services offered by Google. Branson said: "I'm talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space."

Web 2.0 Watch

Citizen journalism: 'interesting' is not the same as 'important'

The Financial Times noted this week that news stories that are popular with Web users have little commonality with the stories deemed important by professional news organisations.

The FT was reporting the results of a week-long study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which compared top headlines from the mainstream media with the highest rated stories voted by users on three leading 'citizen journalism' sites: Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. These sites have no editors; instead, Web users submit stories they found interesting and other people vote on them.

The PEJ study found that the major mainstream news topic in the week of 24-29 June was the immigration debate taking place in the US Congress. By contrast, the most popular topic on the user-driven sites was the launch of the Apple iPhone.

Such a study inevitably has major flaws. People who use Digg, for example, tend to be the kind of technology geeks for whom the launch of the iPhone was indeed a major world event. Indeed it's interesting to note that the iPhone launch rated significantly less highly on Reddit and on del.icio.us, suggesting that the user bases for these two sites are less technology-focused than Digg's.

The study, and the FT's coverage of it, also fails to make the crucial distinction between 'interesting' and 'important'. People use Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us to share stories they find interesting. But because the sites have no editors, there's no onus on anyone to decide how important any of the stories are. Britney's sparkly pants are interesting, in their own special way, but outside the realms of pop culture academia, you'd be hard pressed to make a convincing case for their importance.

The 'wisdom of crowds' is useful for the mainstream media, but only up to a point. Thanks to the web, news media organisations now know which of their stories are the most read and the most talked about. News sites, including the BBC, now display that information on each page, no doubt creating a positive feedback loop whereby the popular stories become even more popular.

But media organisations shouldn't dwell too much on this kind of data. Their role is to distinguish the important from the merely interesting, and to make sure that we, the news readers, recognise that distinction too. News media must be careful not to make the interesting seem important, as is the case with the user-generated sites, but to make the important interesting enough to make people want to read it.

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Website of the Week

By Sean McManus

Literally, a web log

We're picky about language, so we enjoyed this extended rant about abuse of the word 'literally'. Among other crimes documented on the site, there's Abraham Lincoln literally giving birth to troop regiments and the marriage advisor who will show you how to literally make quantum leaps in your relationship. "I guess catapulting yourself into another dimension is one way to deal with relationship problems," says the blogger. "Seems kind of escapist to me, though." I laughed my head off reading this site. No, not literally.

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