Welcome

Welcome to the latest edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. There's a lot of discussion about the impact of social media and Web 2.0 on the PR and marketing industries at the moment. Lots of discussion, that is, but perhaps not quite as much action as you might like to see. Here at Prompt we're already working for several clients in the area of social media, and we've even created a new business division to focus specifically on this fast growing new market. Our director of social media, Fiona Blamey, writes at length on the subject in her Web 2.0 Watch blog.

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 and Dave Wilby

Game over for SCO?

Having recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, software vendor SCO this week announced that it has very little chance of surviving as a viable business. This development comes just a month after a judge ruled against SCO in several legal proceedings the company had brought against a number of Linux users and suppliers.

SCO had argued that several chunks of code which found their way into the open source operating system originally came from its own Unix variant, and consequently decided to sue the entire world for billions of dollars. In retaliation some big Linux vendors like Red Hat, Novell and IBM formed a posse and went all lawyer-crazy in SCO's face. Things didn't go well for SCO, and combined with a downturn in its Unix business and its recent delisting from the Nasdaq, the disastrous legal binge looks very likely to result in the company going out of business.

Dell supercomputer mulls on mysteries of the universe

In his often prescient sci-fi trilogy 'The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy', author Douglas Adams introduced Deep Thought, a supercomputer brought into being by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race to answer the ultimate question of 'Life, the Universe and Everything'. Now nearly 30 years later, Dell, a company better known for building affordable desktop PCs, has unveiled a huge supercomputer in London that will busy itself searching for cures for cancer and the origins of the universe. According to The Times Dell's Legion supercomputer, built for University College London (UCL), will be one of the most powerful in Europe weighing 21 tonnes and boasting the power of 3,000 desktop PCs. Legion is funded by a £3.9 million government grant, and is the first stage in a long-term cooperation between Dell and UCL.

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US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

US

The New York Times stopped charging for access to some of its website content. The change took place exactly two years after The Times launched the TimesSelect subscription service. Visitors to www.nytimes.com will now also be able to access the newspaper's archives from 1987 to the present free of charge.

There have been several recent changes at Baseline, a monthly magazine for senior IT and corporate management business leaders. Executive editor Anna Maria Virzi recently left the publication. She has previously worked as managing editor at Forbes.com and news and executive editor at Internet World magazine. As of September 17th, Amy Lipton is the interim managing editor of Baseline to replace John McCormick. McCormick has moved to a contributing editor role. Lipton previously served as the director of editorial operations for Network Computing, which merged with InformationWeek magazine earlier this year.

Kristen Salvatore has been promoted from editor to editor in chief at PC Gamer and PCGamer.com. She has previously served as managing editor at Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. Salvatore began her new role on Sept. 17.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

UK

The Evening Standard is launching an Oyster-style card next week that will allow customers to purchase their papers by tapping the pre-loaded card on a yellow reader at selected vendor stands. The Eros card will initially be launched on Monday, September 24th at Waterloo station. During a one week trial at Waterloo station, commuters traveling through the station will be given preloaded Eros cards. The Eros card is expected to be launched throughout London on Octobers 1st.

Janine Milne has replaced Matthew Aslett as deputy editor of Datamonitor's Computer Business Review (CBR). She was previously editor of Internet World. Milne started her new role on September 3rd.

Incisive Media's IT Week has appointed Rosalie Marshall as reporter. She previously worked as a channel editor for GBTV. Marshall will cover all sections of IT Week with a particular focus on the Management Week section.

Chris Evans has been promoted from news editor to executive head of news at The Daily Telegraph. Former deputy news editor Matthew Bayley will replace Evans. Neville Dean has been promoted from assistant news editor to deputy news editor to replace Bayley.

Consumer Technology News

By Dave Wilby and Sean McManus

Move operators and spend £1000 to get your iPhone

Is your desire for Apple's iPhone strong enough to make you switch mobile provider and spend a grand for the privilege? The BBC reports that operator O2 has won the exclusive contract to sell Apple's much-hyped handset in the UK, retailing at £269 in O2, Carphone Warehouse and Apple stores from 9th November. If that isn't inconvenient enough for you, committed gadget lovers will also have to sign up for an 18-month contract on a minimum unlimited data tariff of £35, £45 or £55 a month. As Times Online points out, this raises the true cost of Apple's latest dollop of bling from £269 to between £899 and £1,259 over 18 months, dependent on tariff. Apple has already cut the price of the eight gigabyte version of its iPhone in the US from $599 (£300) to $399 (£200).

Government may back fibre rollout to homes

The UK government is ready to promote fibre connectivity to homes across the country in order to keep pace with internet access speeds available in other countries, ZDNetUK reported this week. Stephen Timms, the UK's minister of state for competitiveness and formerly e-commerce minister, made a speech to the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) on Tuesday in which he warned of the danger of falling behind in broadband speeds. "As minister for competitiveness, I see it as one of my highest personal priorities that we have a high-performance telecommunications infrastructure in every part of the country, enabling us to compete successfully on a global basis," said Timms. Currently 'last mile' broadband connections between homes and telephone exchanges in the UK are almost entirely copper-based.

Facebook to invest in third-party plug-ins

Social networking site Facebook is to pay developers to create applications for its site. The BBC reports that Facebook will invest up to $250,000 without expecting an equity stake in any programs created. Instead, Facebook wants first refusal on shares in any company that emerges as a result of the investment. The total up for grabs is $10 million.

Users can already enhance their profile with applications such as quizzes, fortune cookies, personality tests and aquariums. Most of these applications are unsophisticated and only make limited use of the connected network of users, by allowing members to send each other virtual fish or ask each other questions, for example. Facebook is perhaps hoping that developers will be encouraged to think harder about how the connected web of people and all the data held about them can be exploited more creatively.

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Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

Sisters are doing it for themselves

One of the great things about blogging is that it can be used to counteract misrepresentation in the mainstream media.

When Cate Sevilla, curator of the Cupcate blog, was asked to be in an Observer feature about modern feminism, she felt delighted and honoured to have been selected to represent the new generation of feminists in a national newspaper.

Delight turned to dismay, however, when the resulting feature came out in the Observer Woman supplement a couple of Sundays ago. Cate discovered that her 30-minute interview had been reduced to tiny soundbites, some of them not even things she actually said, and placed on the kind of grid that's usually used for comparing the relative merits of different sorts of makeup.

Cate's frustration - shared by some of her fellow interviewees and Observer readers, if the comments on the Observer Woman Makes Me Spit blog are anything to go by - was compounded by the fact that elsewhere in the same supplement, a whole 3,000 words had been dedicated to exploring the mindset of a supposed new wave of misogynist male bloggers in the US.

In pre-Web 2.0 days, Observer readers would have had no way of telling that Cate had been misquoted and misrepresented, unless she'd written a letter to the editor that had then been selected for publication; a process largely beyond her control.

But fortunately for Cate, she has a much more effective way of setting the record straight - her blog. She relates the whole episode in a blog post, explaining how the interview was conducted and exposing the inaccuracies in the resulting 'article'.

In the ongoing bloggers vs. mainstream media debate, journalists often argue that the professional media are legally obliged to check facts, while bloggers can pretty much write what they like. But factual accuracy is only one aspect of truth - impressions are equally important.

Without delving too deeply into philosophical notions of 'truth' and 'reality', if a newspaper creates an impression of an interviewee that the interviewee knows to be untrue, the newspaper has arguably falsified its article. Now that we have blogs allowing interviewees to set the record straight, the current debate over truth in media is going to get a lot more interesting.

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Website of the Week

By Sean McManus

Grow Island

This Flash game takes the idea of the Grow puzzles and extends it to an island. As in the earlier puzzles, you have to work out the right order in which to introduce different elements to the world - in this case, different sciences. The sciences interact with each other, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. You have to experiment to work out the correct sequence that will enable everything to evolve to its maximum potential. It's knuckle-gnashingly frustrating, but addictive so you'll keep at it until you crack it.

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