Welcome

Welcome to another edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. This week's big tech story is that while exploring the Antarctic recently, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos stumbled across the perfectly preserved remains of a failed technology idea from the mid-nineties, which archaeologists have ow nicknamed 'Kindle'.

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Technology News

Can it hold a Kindle to a real book?
By Duncan Heaney

Electronic book reading devices have been around for a while now, but so far they have not really taken off in a big way. Amazon is hoping to change all that with the release of the Kindle.

Three years in the making, the Kindle is selling on Amazon.com for $399 (£195). The BBC reports that the device is capable of storing up to 200 books, and capacity can be boosted with SD cards. Kindle has a low power digital ink screen and can go 30 hours between recharges. Just enough time to get through War and Peace then. The device also has buttons that link it to the Oxford American Dictionary and Wikipedia.

Kindle users can subscribe to various papers / blogs etc for a small fee, and can read PDFs and Microsoft Word files on the gadget. Rather than store content on computer, and transfer it from there to the device, books are wireless downloaded onto the device itself via the EVDO network. This is bad news for Europeans, as the technology isn’t widely adopted outside the US.

It’s an interesting gadget, but is it likely to persuade people to pick it up instead of a physical book? Many are sceptical but, as the cliché goes, time will tell.

For more Kindle-ing, visit at the Prompt Blog.

BT becomes data centre myth-buster
By Dave Wilby

BT is dramatically overhauling its data centre infrastructure to shave around £400m off its annual electricity bill and cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent.

Steve O’Donnell, BT’s head of data centres and customer experience, told ITWeek the process had forced the company to reassess data centre rules previously thought unbreakable, including: running equipment hot and/or humid at up to 50C to save 85 per cent on cooling costs; piping fresh air to provide cooling despite traditional worries about contamination and condensation; using DC rather than AC power to save money and improve reliability; and simply migrating data to cheap-as-chips low-energy servers.

Counter arguments are being made by analysts, including Ovum, Bloor and Gartner, but if even a proportion of this new thinking improves bottom line efficiency of costly data centres, BT’s ideas could prove radical.

US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

US

Justin Webb has replaced Matt Frei as editor of BBC North America. Webb, who has been North America correspondent based in Washington since 2001, will take on the role in December in time for the 2008 American presidential election. Frei has moved on to present the new World News America bulletin.

Former White House deputy chief of staff and political counsellor to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, has joined Newsweek and Newsweek.com as a contributing editor. Rove will write editorials on the 2008 presidential election for the publication’s online and print operations.

The New York Times has completed the move to an integrated digital and print news room. The Times began the move into its new building on Eighth Avenue in April. Prior to the move, the newspaper's headquarters were on West 43rd Street, while the digital news operations were about 7 blocks away.

TechTarget.com, Inc. has launched SearchVMware.com, an online publication for IT professionals who work with virtualization technologies in VMware environments. The site will cover industry news on topics such as server virtualisation, production-level virtualisation planning, infrastructure, and architecture and management issues. It will also include features and expert advice from industry professionals.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

UK

Rosamund Urwin has been appointed business reporter at the Evening Standard. In her new role, Urwin will edit the paper’s twice-daily email bulletin and produce the daily podcast.

Maria Fredriksson is no longer the London technology reporter for Bloomberg. Instead, Fredriksson will now cover Scandinavian technology from the newswire’s Stockholm office.

Matthew Warren has joined Campaign, an advertising news magazine, as a reporter. Warren was previously a producer for BBC Paris. Prior to becoming a journalist, Warren worked in advertising for ten years at a variety of agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather, Bartle Bogle and Hegarty, and Wieden + Kennedy.

ShortList , Mike Soutar’s recently launched free weekly men's magazine, has struck a deal with Eurostar to expand its circulation. Eurostar will now stock copies in lounges at the new St Pancras Eurostar station. ShortList has also recently signed distribution deals with airlines including British Airways, Virgin and Lufthansa. In the case of British Airways, ShortList distributes 9,000 copies a week as a domestic gate service between Monday and Saturday.

It’s a model and it’s looking good
By Dave Wilby

Bleeding edge technology researchers believe closer understanding of complex living systems can be gained by modelling them as if they were computer programs. Jasmin Fisher of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK and Thomas Henzinger of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland told New Scientist this week that biologists amassing huge data sets, such as the entire human genome, might never actually comprehend exactly how the components work together.

Their suggestion is to employ models structured like computer programs where many subroutines run in parallel and produce interdependent outputs. By representing proteins as subroutines, they say, it might just be possible to work out how the overall system works without knowing all the details. Sounds great, but will it get us any closer to some of New Scientist’s other current mysteries, including monster sea scorpions, species-leaping toads or nail-clipper dinosaurs?

Everything’s coming to a grinding halt
By Dave Wilby

A new study from US analyst firm Nemertes Research claims the whole internet could run out of capacity and grind to a halt by 2010 if consumer demand for bandwidth continues growing at its current rate. The report estimates that around $137bn (£66bn) must be spent upgrading broadband infrastructure globally to avoid catastrophic gridlock.

We can’t help thinking an industry reliant on roomy pipes to reap profit from its collective legacy endeavours and future innovations will find someway to keep infrastructure one step ahead of meltdown, but the report makes interesting reading anyway. "We must take necessary steps to build out network capacity or potentially face internet gridlock that could wreak havoc on internet services," said Larry Irving, co-chairman of Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), a campaign body for universal broadband in the US and a major fund behind the Nementes survey.

Classic Colossus loses code cracking contest
By Duncan Heaney

As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, a team of dedicated technicians have recently rebuilt a colossus machine, a device used in the Second World War to decipher encrypted enemy radio transmissions. The classic machine was entered into a contest to see whether the single purpose machine could beat today’s fancy technology in a code-cracking race.

The results are in, and the Colossus… didn’t win. MSN reports that Bonn-based software engineer Joachim Schuth created his own program for the challenge, and successfully decoded a transmission before Colossus could.

The Colossus technicians faced a number of problems that disrupted their code-breaking efforts. The War era receiving equipment they were using had problems picking up the transmissions, and a valve on the machine blew. Once the equipment started behaving, the message could be deciphered. Colossus ultimately took three hours and thirty five minutes to decipher the message, an impressive time.

The Colossus team was understandably delighted that the machine successfully cracked the code, a staggering achievement when you consider the limited information they had access to when they rebuilt the machine. The technicians extended their congratulations to Mr. Schuth, and are planning to send him an award.

Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

Getting coverage on blogs

Last week I attended a Social Media Club debate about the best way for PRs and marketers to get coverage on blogs.

The main obstacle is that bloggers don’t much like being treated like the mainstream media. Most blogs are essentially personal journals, written for love rather than money. Many bloggers view approaches from PR people as an unacceptable intrusion into their personal lives. Some get very angry about it indeed.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get your brand talked about on blogs. Here are a few potential approaches that we discussed in the session:

Become a blogger. You’re much more likely to earn the trust, respect and attention of other bloggers if you have a decent blog too. You’ll soon understand what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll meet some really interesting people into the bargain.

Get to know bloggers. The more that bloggers know you, trust you and understand what you’re doing, the more they’ll be inclined to write about you. And if you think “they’re not supposed to be writing about me; they’re supposed to be writing about my company”, you need to think again. In blogosphere, you *are* the company. PR people are used to being an invisible link between the brand and the media, but that doesn’t work in the blogosphere, so get out there, comment on blogs, meet bloggers at events, have interesting discussions, write those discussions up on your own blog, build relationships.

Get some media coverage. This may seem counter-intuitive, but a lot of what bloggers write is driven by what they see in the mainstream media. A cute story in a key online publication (it must be online, so that bloggers can link to it) can net you no end of secondary coverage and commentary on blogs.

Create the content yourself. If you write an interesting enough blog post, put an interesting enough photo on Flickr, or an interesting enough video on YouTube, people will find it, write about it and link to it. You don’t have to spend millions on a viral campaign – just create something that the right people will find interesting.

Make the most of social networks. If you post your interesting blog post, video or photo to your Facebook account, it’ll automatically be seen by all your friends, who might want to share it with their friends, who might want to share it, etc. etc. There are bound to be bloggers somewhere in your network, and this is a great way of bringing content to their attention without trying to ‘persuade’ anyone to write about anything. (If it doesn’t get picked up, it wasn’t interesting enough – try again!)

Finally, if you’re still tempted to take the direct approach, the Pro Blogger blog has some great tips for pitching to bloggers.

Website of the Week

By Sean McManus

Penkiln Burn

You might remember Bill Drummond from the KLF, famous for their dance anthems, liberal use of samples and burning a million quid. Penkiln Burn is Drummond’s art site, which consists of a series of pamphlets. One of them urges you to get your hair cut monthly, and really enjoy each haircut in the knowledge that there are only so many left in your life.

Wednesday just gone was ‘No Music Day’, according to Drummond, a day which gives you time to work out what you want from the music in your life. The warning on the artwork ‘Daffodils’ reads ‘This Job contains language, ideas and propositions that some may find offensive, futile and stupid’ and – to be fair – that applies across the site. As with Drummond’s music and writing (check out his book of autobiographical essays ‘45’), the site is packed with ideas and has a quirky personality of its own.

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.