Dear Reader,

Welcome to another edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. At our London office, we were interested to hear this week that the city will now have access to Europe’s largest wireless network, providing internet and email access to workers in the city’s financial district. The network doesn’t quite stretch to our part of town, but we’re not too worried about that since we’re not quite ready to consider using a public wireless network for our sensitive business data...

For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your technology PR, marketing, 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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Technology Update

By Lance Concannon

MS releases public beta of next Windows Server edition

Microsoft this week released a public beta of Longhorn, the next edition of its Windows Server operating system. Earlier beta versions of the software have previously been made available to developers, but this is the first version available for public testing. You can download a copy from the Microsoft website. Longhorn is due to replace Windows Server 2003 when it’s officially launched later this year, if Microsoft manages to keep to its release schedule. Stop laughing, there’s a first time for everything.

City of London gets blanket WiFi access

The ‘Square Mile’ financial district of London this week became Europe’s biggest wireless hotspot as an advanced wireless network was switched on. Managed by The Cloud, the network will provide wireless internet access for the area’s 350,000 workers at a cost of £11.99 per month or £4.50 an hour. Not everybody’s impressed though, according to The Times, the British Computer Society has warned that you’d have to be ‘crazy’ to use the network for transferring any sensitive personal or business information. Well duh...

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Consumer Technology Update

By Sean McManus and Dave Wilby

Digg.com confirms news story appeal fades in about an hour

Read this story and tell all your friends quickly – in an hour or so you probably won’t care. New Scientist is reporting information from community news site Digg.com which reveals online news articles lose their appeal in around an hour. Statistical physicists Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs studied Digg to try and understand the way online news readers consume stories and discovered just a handful of stories grab most people's attention while most links fade and die within 69 minutes. The team did admit that Digg is an ideal "natural laboratory" for observing collective behaviour of online news consumers, because link choice and popularity is directly down to end users.

Yahoo waxes lyrical with Gracenote

Yahoo Music has struck a deal with Gracenote to post lyrics online. It’s being billed as the first time lyrics have been posted legally, which just shows how the music industry believes everything revolves around its own existence (what about all those artists on MySpace publishing their lyrics?).

That said, this is a groundbreaking deal. So far, all the major lyrics sites are search engine spam, leeching off the songwriting to punt tacky adverts and spyware. At least the artists might see a slice of the money through this deal. Next stop, guitar tabs? Probably not: the lyrics use webdesign trickery to stop you from being able to cut and paste them, find them through a search engine, or even read them if you’re blind. There’s a way to go before the industry is prepared to give people what they want, in a way they want it.

Playstation users donate processor time to medical research

Over a quarter of a million Playstation 3 owners are donating idle time on their machines to medical research. Software was released in March for Folding@home, a distributed computing project that aims to understand protein folding, ‘in many ways a mystery...[that is] critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology’. By joining together the spare time of lots of machines (PC and Mac users have been folding for years), the project builds a supercomputer way beyond what would otherwise be affordable.

The project is inspired in part by Seti@home, a similar programme that scours radio telescope signals for signs for intelligent alien life. By joining forces with Playstation gamers, the Folding@home project has doubled the size of its network.

IBM goes hybrid in effort to embrace virtual worlds

IBM has teamed up with Brazil-based Hoplon Infotainment, a multiplayer online game developer, in a hybrid project to integrate games console processors into its mainframes computers. News.com says the move will allow IBM equipment to host massively multiplayer online games and virtual world infrastructure software more intelligently, thanks to the Cell Broadband Engine. Initial integration will be achieved by networking each mainframe with IBM's Cell blades, but eventually the Cells will be plugged directly into mainframes via PCI adapter cards, IBM said.

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Marketing Update

By Elissa Fry and Sally Forge

Marketers tap social networking sites

It seems that traditional marketing methods are no longer cutting it in terms of promoting brand awareness. In fact, according to Jupiter Research, reports Brand Republic, 50% of marketers will use social networking websites to deliver their marketing message to the public. The popularity for online networking is substantially slowing traditional marketing methods down, with 68% of consumers set to visit sites for further information based on a friend's recommendation alone.

When the message is lost in the marketing

Anya Hindmarch handbags sold out within the first hour of going on sale in Sainsbury’s. The £5 designer jute bags, bearing the logo ‘I am not a plastic bag’, were created to raise awareness of environmental issues and to promote the use of re-usable shopping bags. However, the press release announcing the availability of the bag was apparently sent out in a plastic cover. A lady shopper around Chiswick was also recently spotted carrying a diverse array of purchased items – each in a plastic bag – stuffed into an 'I‘m not a plastic bag’ bag.

Still, with a celebrity campaign, zeitgeisty theme and scarcity appeal, the marketing was a success. The bag sold well and is now available on eBay, with bids at fifteen times its original price.

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US Media Report

By Kay Wilson

One of the top seats in business journalism has been filled with the announcement of Marcus Brauchli’s appointment as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Brauchli is currently deputy managing editor at the prestigious business title and has also held positions such as global news editor. He’s been with Dow Jones, which owns the WSJ, since 1984. In his role as deputy managing editor, Brauchli oversaw the redesign of the WSJ to its existing format, a project nicknamed ‘Journal 3.0’.

Metro, the ubiquitous freebie newspaper, has named Jonathan Auerbach as the editor in chief for Metro in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Auerbach was formerly the executive editor of American Media Inc.'s Star magazine. He has also held positions at the New York Post and CNN.

Darling of the online world, Elizabeth Spiers, has announced her departure from Dead Horse Media, the online media company which she co-founded in 2006. Dead Horse Media produces a number of popular blogs including Wall Street tabloid, DealBreaker.com; fashion-watching Fashionista.com and legal tabloid Above The Law. Spiers was formerly EIC of mediabistro.com, where she launched six new blogs. She has also written and held editorial positions for New York Magazine.

UK Media Report

By Annie Kasmai

As the FT's Mudlark column comes to an end, another City column is set to spring up in its place. This week saw the launch of ‘The Real Deal’, a weekly column on M&A issues. It is set to be published inside the Companies and Markets section every Monday.

A reshuffle is set to take place at Property Week, with Laura Chester - currently deputy news editor - taking over from Dan Thomas, currently assistant editor (news). Thomas will be leaving Property Week on May 14 to join the editorial ranks of the FT's finance team.

The Daily Mail’s ‘Money Mail’ has snapped up Guy Anker from Money Marketing. Anker will cover financial issues.

Jason Nisse, the former business editor of the Independent on Sunday, has joined the Daily Telegraph as a senior consultant after a year spent in Barclays Bank's PR department.

Brian McKenna has left Elsevier’s Infosecurity and joined Computer Weekly as editor. McKenna is replaced by S.A. Mathieson, who was appointed editor of the information security title on April 17. Mathieson will be involved in editing, commissioning, managing and writing articles for the magazine and website.

B2B Marketing, run by Silver Bullet Publishing, has replaced Alice Johnson with Claire Weekes as news and features writer. Weekes was previously a reporter on Noble House Media’s Mobile, and has been drafted in to expand online operations and improve news-generating capabilities.