Welcome

Welcome to another edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. This week's big story is, of course, the Google/Microsoft/Facebook three-way tug of love, but we've also got all sorts of interesting stuff about policing virtual worlds, piracy sites being closed down, and a report from the geekiest concert in history.

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Technology News

Facebook accepts Microsoft’s friend request
By Sean McManus

Social networking site Facebook has been valued at $15bn (£7.3bn) after Microsoft bought a tiny slither (1.6%) for a bank-busting $240m (£117m). That works out at $300 per member, although Microsoft’s buying in to the potential for growth more than the current database.

Although best known for selling software, Microsoft has a significant advertising business, and offers ad space in its games and online Office applications. Microsoft already sells ads on the US Facebook site, and will now sell ads abroad too.

Far more valuable than the ad space is Facebook’s infrastructure and personal data. Microsoft has been experimenting with demographic ads for some time, which target the individual rather than the activity they’re engaged in (see our blog post from June 2006). If Microsoft can identify Facebook members while they’re on other websites, it would enable Microsoft to punt relevant ads to them based on their interests, wherever they go online.

The infrastructure is valuable because each member has a trusted network of people with whom they want to share content. At the moment, that’s mainly trivial jokes and personal messages. But integrating hosted office applications could make Facebook a valuable work environment. Provided, of course, that you’re not easily distracted by your friends throwing a sheep at you.

All that is a long way off – this is a minor (albeit expensive) investment; a goodwill gesture more than anything. And if they can’t work together, Facebook could always look up its old mate Google. There are still plenty of shares to go around.

US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

US

Deputy national news editor at The Washington Post, Dan LeDuc, is leaving his position to become a reporter on the paper’s metro desk. LeDuc has worked on the national newsdesk since 2002 and in his new role will report on the construction of the new D.C. stadium and local government accountability.

National Geographic has promoted Tim Kelly, a veteran of 25 years, to the new position of President of Global Media, which places him in charge of the organisation's print, TV and digital output as well as other channels. He will be responsible for improving coordination between the organisation's editorial teams.

Time Inc. has restructured itself under the newly created organisation, Time Inc. Entertainment Group with Paul Caine as its president. The move was planned in order to help the company better leverage its brands with advertisers.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

UK

James Brown, the founder of men’s magazine Loaded, has been hired as the creative and editorial director of Sumo.tv. He will be responsible for raising the profile of the service, which publishes user generated video content on the web, mobile and digital TV platforms.

Left-leaning newspaper, the Guardian, has launched Guardian America, a news site targeting liberal Americans who want to get a different perspective on world news. The site will be edited by Michael Tomasky, a former journalist at American Prospect.

The Financial Times announced several new senior appointments this week. In the FT’s New York office, former Wall Street Journal writer Henny Sender has joined the publication as international finance correspondent. Tunku Varadarajan, also formerly of the WSJ, has joined as a contributing editor for the FT’s weekend edition. Justin Baer has also joined the New York office as a US business reporter. In London, Sylvia Pfeifer has moved from the Sunday Telegraph to cover the defence and aerospace industries.

A quarter of Americans happy to ‘date’ the Internet
By Dave Wilby

The CNET News Blog is debating a new online survey which suggests that a quarter of Americans are happy to settle down with the Internet as a temporary life partner. While the poll jointly released by Zogby International and 463 Communications on Wednesday might seem shocking at first, we must agree with CNET readers who suggest that the same response might have been gained if the poll had been asking about pets or television or a good book.

Still, some of the detail is actually quite bizarre. At 31% the percentage was higher among singles; understandable. There was no difference in percentage between men and women; quite interesting. About 11% of respondents were willing to have a device implanted in their brain for ready access to the Internet; what? Nearly 20% said they would be willing to have a chip implanted in a child 13 years or younger to help keep track of them; hang on a minute! While 10% said the Internet made them closer to God, 6% said it made them more distant; right that’s quite enough now.

Police raid OiNK, bring home the bacon
By Duncan Heaney

It’s been a busy week for the British police. The internet is abuzz with the news that anti-piracy operations in the UK appear to have stepped up a notch. OiNK.cd, a BitTorrent music sharing operation, has been shut down by the police. The Register reports that a 24 year old IT worker from Middlesbrough has been arrested and accused of running a piracy ring. Cameras were brought along to document the arrest of the man, whose identity cannot be revealed for legal reasons. A large multinational chemical giant was also raided. The operation was coordinated by Interpol and, as part of the same operation, Dutch police in Amsterdam seized the OiNK servers.

OiNK.cd was an invite-only file sharing operation. The International Federation of the Phonographic Institute (IFPI) claim that OiNK was responsible for the illegal distribution of over 60 major albums released in 2007. OiNK was funded by donations from its users, and the police claims that “hundreds of thousands of pounds” were accumulated by the site. The arrested IT worker has now been released on bail pending further inquiry.

It’s not just file sharers who have been targeted. DailyTech.com reports that TV Links, a website that provided links to online TV shows and films, has also been shut down. The site hosted no content itself, merely directing users to videos hosted on YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh, etc. The 26-year webmaster and some moderation staff have been arrested in a joint venture by local police and FACT. For more information on this story visit the Prompt blog.

Google talks your language
By Lance Concannon

This week Google’s online language translation service started using the company’s internally developed technology, replacing the widely used Systran software which is still used by services such as Babelfish. Systran, and similar products, use a set of rules defined by the developer in order to translate one language to another, and the results tend to be clumsy at best.

Google’s system is based on more advanced artificial intelligence, which enabled it to automatically build a translation model by comparing thousands of pieces of text that had already been carefully translated by skilled humans – notably, transcripts of United Nations speeches. Google initially used its own system on the more ‘difficult’ languages, such as Russian and Chinese, but has now applied it to all of the service’s 25 language pairs.

Having tried the system out with some French and German language news stories from AFP, and compared the same results from Babelfish, it seems clear that the Google system offers far more natural results. It’s still some way off being as good as a skilled human, but this is a considerable improvement in the technology, making it far more useful for translating documents in a hurry when a professional translator isn’t available.

Graphics cards not just for games any more
By Lance Concannon

New Scientist reports that Russian security software company Elcomsoft has filed a patent in the US for a password cracking technique that uses a PC's graphics processor to significantly reduce the time it takes to recover a password. The company’s software uses the ‘brute force’ approach to recovering lost passwords for MS Windows logons as well as numerous business applications, such as protected PDF documents. The brute force technique simply involves trying every single possible combination of characters until the correct password is found, this is very resource intensive and requires lots of computing horsepower – trying to brute force a password with any reasonable level of encryption can take a normal PC months.

Elcomsoft has realised that the powerful 3D graphics chips fitted to many modern PCs are ideal for performing the kind of processing work required for this job. If Elcomsoft’s claims are to be believed, the months it would take to crack a Windows Vista password can be reduced to just a few days with a cheap mid-range graphics card. Applications which use less secure encryption for their passwords could be cracked in minutes rather than hours or days.

The company has added the technology to the newly released second version of its Distributed Password Recovery product, so it looks very much like the power to crack even your most secure passwords is no longer the sole preserve of shadowy security agencies. We still think the best use for a 3D graphics card is playing the kind of gory computer games where London gets over-run by thousands of angry demons from hell and you have to save the day by hitting them all over the head with a big stick, but each to their own.

Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

European governments move to control Web 2.0

For a long time, the blogs, virtual worlds and social media sites of the Web 2.0 world have been legislative no-man’s-lands: too new, strange and complicated for governments and regulatory authorities to understand.

I’m talking about Western governments, of course – governments in less tolerant places like China, Egypt and Burma have had no qualms about shutting down dissenting blogs, throwing political bloggers into prison or even pulling the plug on the entire internet when things go wobbly.

Here in the West, though, we cleave to quaint notions of liberty, democracy and freedom of speech, which is why our governments are having a hard time figuring out what to do about the fact that when millions of people are let loose to express themselves online, unpleasantness inevitably results.

Following then-Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell’s appeal in May for British bloggers to behave in a more civilised fashion, the Times reports this week that the UK government is sharpening its interest in illegal goings-on inside virtual worlds, including identity theft, sex offences and – somewhat ominously – ‘anti-social behaviour’. Lord Triesman of the Ministry for Innovation, Universities and Skills said at this week’s Virtual Worlds Forum that there was “a certain inevitability” about the prospect of increased government control of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, although he didn’t say whether any specific legislation was planned.

In Italy, meanwhile, bloggers have been up in arms about a proposed new law that appears to require anyone with a blog to register with the country’s communications regulator as a media site. The act of registration would involve the purchase of official stamps, which is being interpreted as a tax on bloggers. Many Italians see the draft law as a personal vendetta on the part of the government against Beppe Grillo, an influential political blogger known for exposing government corruption. It remains to be seen whether the law will be enacted, and if so, whether it will indeed render any unregistered blog illegal, but it does suggest that the Italian government has been looking at blogs and not liking what it sees.

The main sticking point in both cases is whether a blog or virtual world that is hosted outside the country can be subject to that country’s laws. If a blog is hosted on Google’s US-based Blogspot servers, for example, can the Italian government exercise any jurisdiction over it? The same goes for Brits behaving badly in Second Life – and that’s without even considering the difficulty of correctly identifying and apprehending a real-life perpetrator who is masquerading under another name in a world that has no physical substance. For a lot of police officers and government officials, I suspect that real life’s already complicated enough.

Read more about the Virtual Worlds Forum on our blog.

Event Review

By Duncan Heaney

Video Games Live, Royal Festival Hall, 22nd October 2007

On Monday 22nd October thousands of games fans arrived at the Royal Festival Hall in London to see a concert completely devoted to games music – Video Games Live. I was one of them. I went expecting to see the London Philharmonia Orchestra and the London Chorus play a concert. What I got was a show.

The event was extremely funny. The tone was set with a tongue-in-cheek live action video of Ms Pacman (involving actors running around dressed in foam suits and sheets) and continued throughout the show. Other humorous interludes included a competitive game of Frogger (during which the orchestra played along with the action in real time), and a level of space invaders in which the participant controlled the action by the movement of his body.

As for the music, it was largely excellent, though it did hit a few bum notes. A few tracks in the first half were a little shaky, particularly Civilisation IV, but this was made up for by enthusiastically performed renditions of the music from Halo, Legend of Zelda, and, unexpectedly, the video game music from Harry Potter.

Overall, the show was a warm and welcome celebration of gaming, and all that nerdiness that surrounds it. The crowd loved it, and so did I.

Website of the Week

By Sean McManus

Typorganism

This site says it is a Flash showcase for the philosophy that type is an organism. It includes an interactive set of scales for measuring the relative weights of fonts and a demonstration of a chat room in which the letters that make up a message flock to the screen and then scatter away. The ASCII art maker looks great with the demos, but didn’t work with the image we uploaded. But it’s all worth taking a look at. There are plenty of Flash demo sites around, but the focus on typography makes this one stand out.

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.