ZDNet UK Online business Toolkit

What Google Analytics cannot tell you

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Darren Guarnaccia) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:28:01 +0000

Google's free web analysis tool may have a lot going for it, but it is worth knowing its limits, says Darren Guarnaccia

Goodbye, GeoCities: It's the end of an era

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Bruce Lawson) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:40:02 +0000

Yahoo's decision to close its once-powerful GeoCities hosting service says much about the web, says Bruce Lawson

Microsoft may help News Corp. vanish from Google

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Steven Musil) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:56:02 +0000

Rupert Murdoch's media empire is talking with the tech giant about having its web sites removed from Google search results, according to a Financial Times report

EU ministers agree e-government aims

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Kable) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:15:02 +0000

European ministers set out five-year plan for creating better online public services across the EU

eBay finalises $2.75bn sale of Skype

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Caroline McCarthy) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:48:02 +0000

The auction site has sold off its telephony unit, after plans to take it public and a legal dispute with the company's founders

Mozilla reveals 2008 revenue of $79m

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Stephen Shankland) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:23:02 +0000

The revenue growth rate tapered off to five percent from 12 percent the previous year, while a search deal with Google still supplies the bulk of the Firefox backer's money

YouTube UK launches full-length TV shows

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:44:09 +0000

YouTube, Google's main online video repository, has made full-length episodes of shows such as The IT Crowd and Who's Line Is It Anyway? available to UK viewers. YouTube's Shows section was...

Salesforce to launch social networking for businesses

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Stephen Shankland) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:57:01 +0000

The cloud-computing specialist has announced its Salesforce Chatter service to build social-networking services into its customers' business operations starting in 2010

Firefox 3.6 beta aims to improve stability

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Stephen Shankland) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:54:02 +0000

The third beta imposes a new restriction on how third-party software can interact with it, while a feature called Resource Package could speed up Firefox 3.7

Google, Bing gain search share at Yahoo's expense

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Tom Krazit) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:43:01 +0000

In recent months, fewer and fewer searches have been performed on Yahoo's sites, with market leader Google and upstart Microsoft seeing the benefits

Facebook adopts revised privacy policy

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Steven Musil) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:48:01 +0000

The social-networking site hopes the policy revision will make it more accessible and easier to understand

Microsoft sets January date for Azure

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:34:02 +0000

On day one of PDC 2009, executives Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia filled in details about the launch of its Azure cloud platform

Antitrust concerns linger in Google Books deal

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Elinor Mills) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:04:01 +0000

Opponents of the revised Google Books settlement say the search giant will still have exclusive rights to digitise out-of-print works

Google Books revised settlement adds limitations

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Elinor Mills) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:38:02 +0000

The settlement allows the scanning of out-of-print works from only English-speaking countries, restricts future business for Google and gives copyright holders more rights

FAST Search for SharePoint promises custom search without cu...

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:22:30 +0000

Microsoft is trying to marry SharePoint admin with FASTs search expertise for manageable search. At the SharePoint conference last month we got more details about the new Fast Search for...

Microsoft declares Bing UK ready for action

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (David Meyer) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:50:02 +0000

The company's search engine, which has a UK market share of just below three percent, is now out of beta

Google SPDY protocol could boost web speeds

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Tom Krazit) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:39:02 +0000

Researchers are playing with a new web protocol that could theoretically decrease the time it takes to load a web page by a significant amount

Google plans first-ever share buyback

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Tom Krazit) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:58:01 +0000

If the company's $750m acquisition of AdMob is allowed to go through, Google will offset the impact of issuing $750m in stock by buying back an equal amount

Apple issues security update for Safari

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Seth Rosenblatt) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:00:02 +0000

Available for Windows and Mac, the Safari 4.0.4 update addresses multiple security holes in the browser

Chrome Mac beta due in December

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Stephen Shankland) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:35:02 +0000

Google plans to release the first Mac beta version of its browser in early December, according to a Chrome product manager

Google hints at impending Caffeine launch

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Toby Wolpe) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:37:02 +0000

The search giant says its next search engine, code-named Caffeine, will soon be activated for wider public use

Google introduces 'Go' programming language

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Stephen Shankland) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:29:02 +0000

A Unix co-creator is among those behind a new, open-source programming language project which Google hopes will boost computing power and programmers' abilities

Twitter, LinkedIn announce tie-up

editorial@zdnet.co.uk (Caroline McCarthy) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:20:01 +0000

The new partnership means status messages can be interchangeable between Twitter and LinkedIn

Murdoch versus the Net? Game on.

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:30:37 +0000

Rupert Murdoch has said that he'll probably take his content out of Google, and hinted very strongly he and other newspaper groups are in discussion over paywalls. Leaving aside the question of...

Bye bye browser?

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:32:18 +0000

Whats the future of the web? On one side theres Flash and Silverlight and the rich internet applications world, which is working on ways of taking the web outside the browser and onto the...

RT @jacobian The power of no

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:31:23 +0000

Can you retweet a blog post emanating from a tweet? On the day that Radio 4 hails the mighty Twitter onto the world political stage, I think anything is admissible ;) Jacob Kaplan-Moss made a...

Is cloud computing a solution for software licensing woes?

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:08:16 +0100

Had an interesting wide-ranging discussion with a bunch of people at a BT cloud computing seminar the other day, including long-standing contact and analyst Phil Wainewright. But it was...

Berners-Lee regrets the HTTP slashes

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:37:19 +0100

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the HyperText Transfer Protocol, regrets specifying the characters "//" in the protocol. Berners-Lee told The New York Times last week that the characters,...

Elevator pitching VaporWare

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:04:49 +0100

Ok. This is my elevator pitch for two software ideas. 1. AJAX wireframe application A web application that enables information architects to create wireframes and sitemaps with simple...

Twitter, Trafigura, trends and treason

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:03:09 +0100

Information wants to be free, said Stuart Brand, adding in a less well reported codicil that it also wants to be expensive. One of the most expensive bits of free information today has been the...

Building a web site is like cooking a meal

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:58:23 +0100

(This is the wrong sort of blog post to be writing with an empty stomach.) Building a web site is like cooking a meal - it's all in the preparation. I have been using the ever-delightful...

If Royal Mail won't free postcodes, take them off it

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:58:03 +0100

Where does the line between code and data lie? What if there's an algorithm that turns a simple string into a location, where everyone in the country knows the string that applies to them? What...

HTML 5 cometh

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:12:34 +0100

I was perusing Eric Meyer's Free S5 presentation tool the other day, and came across HTML5 And You. This is a blog entry about the HTML5 specifications. The delightful news which leads from...

Pipes, clouds and scarcity

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:11:34 +0100

Why does Microsoft call its cloud computing platform Azure? After all, a blue sky doesn't actually have any clouds in. Is the name a hint that Microsoft thinks the cloud is a fad that will soon get...

Internet advertising surpasses TV

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:42:33 +0100

So, spending on online advertising has finally overtaken spending on TV advertising. The BBC this morning reports on research carried out by the Internet Advertising Bureau and...

Flickr links photos to OpenStreetMap

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:45:38 +0100

Yahoo's photo sharing site, Flickr has announced support for OpenStreetMap data in photo tags. By adding a tag to your photo linking it to the relevant object in OSM, Flickr can retrieve details,...

Intel Developer Forum - Day Zero

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:16:08 +0100

It is September. I find myself in the bar of the Marriott in San Francisco. There is a drunken hack on the lash to my left, a garrulous Intel executive off the leash to my right, and a nervous PR...

Social Security

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:10:25 +0100

In this Social 2.0 World we have created, I'm finding it hard to keep track of all my identities scattergunned across the internet, let alone my multitude of Pa55w0rd5, keywords, PINs and...

Why Turing matters

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:36:12 +0100

I've just written one of my most satisfying stories for years. It wasn't much cop in journalistic terms: rattled off in a few minutes, it was based on a story in another publication and bolstered...

ohloh: interesting but...

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:50:14 +0100

I came across an interesting Free Open Source Software site on my hyper travels the other day: ohloh. It seems to be a social networking site for FOSS developers, where you can track projects...

Mozilla Add-on Collections

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:47:45 +0100

Like many Open Source applications, the Mozilla Firefox web browser has a huge range of extensions (or Add-ons as Mozilla likes to call them) which extend the functionality of the browser in...

It's a Social 2.0 World...

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:57:08 +0100

I recently set up my new Open Source training company. This entails a new domain name and new email. That is enough work in itself. But then there's all the other internet services that I use...

Opera 10.00 Available

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:25:11 +0100

It's been a long time coming, but it is finally here. Opera 10.00 is available for download. At first glance, it appears to me that it was worth the wait. I have installed it on Windows XP...

Skype Apparently Sold - So Much for "Shutdown"

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:47:58 +0100

The news is overflowing with stories about eBay selling a majority of Skype. So, which do you think is the case - did eBay find someone else who is foolish enough to pay for a company without...

Sony to ship Google Chrome browsers on Vaios

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:12:06 +0100

After promising earlier this year that a major OEM would start to ship its Chrome browser, Google has done a deal with Sony that will see all its American Vaio-brand PCs so equipped. There's no...

Google barbecue causes fire at London offices

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:09:46 +0100

The fire services have been called to Google's London offices, where a barbecue on a roof terrace went out of control. The Victoria offices have been evacuated and everyone is safe, a...

Notepad++ - where is my loyalty??

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:01:45 +0100

Whilst working away on a slew of CSS bug fixes at The Agency, Notepad++ wasn't. Or rather, didn't. Occasionally. Two or three times a day, Notepad++ just froze, a blank white screen of...

ALERT: Incorrectly ordered headings

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:14:18 +0100

I was doing some work for the BBC the other day. This is fairly commonplace amongst freelance web developers; at some point in your peripatetic career you get your call-up papers for Auntie. One of...

Photoshop-esque

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:18:15 +0100

I’m not exactly ‘first to market’ with the low-down on Sumo Paint, the online image editing web application that has more than a passing resemblance to Photoshop (particularly...

Opera 10 hits third beta

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:27:40 +0100

Opera has released the third beta of version 10.0 of its desktop browser. The beta is available to Windows, Mac and Linux users. New features include a crash logger, but Opera Unite which...

Site-build checklist

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:38:19 +0100

Of late, I have been indulging in some Community Payback. No, not the bedevilled government scheme to mete out justice to ne’er do wells. Rather, I’ve been teaching, in a pro bono...

Local Googlement

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:25:50 +0100

Google has launched an interesting marketing exercise aimed directly at local government in the UK. While there are no new products involved, it's an interesting way of keeping your revenue up in...

WAVE toolbar and PixelPerfect

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:59:38 +0100

Two new cannons added to my Firefox web browser armoury. First up is the WAVE toolbar, quick, easy to use and very welcome. Secondly, PixelPerfect, a Firefox add-on that enables you to add...

Happy birthday, Stack Overflow!

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:25:11 +0100

If you're not a developer, you may not have come across Stack Overflow. It's an online community devoted to programming self-help, and a couple of days it celebrated its first birthday. I...

Google Apps gets more contact sync features

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:31:30 +0100

Google has announced further enhancements to its Google Apps Directory Sync tool. The updated functionality, which follows on from recent enhancements such as the ability to find colleagues...

What will Google Wave kill first?

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:24:06 +0100

Google's new Wave service is billed as revolutionising e-mail. But it might not be existing e-mail and messaging vendors that feel the pinch first. You've probably heard about Google Wave....

Linux Chrome may not be so far away

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:58:51 +0100

I downloaded the 'pre-alpha' version of Chromium for Linux some time ago, more out of morbid curiosity than any particular desire for yet another browser. Google has been silent on when the...

Logitech Vid - SightSpeed Rebranded and Dumbed Down

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:24:25 +0100

A few weeks ago we saw the announcement of Logitech's new video chat software, based on their acquisition of SightSpeed last year. I have now downloaded and installed it, and tried to test it. My...

Twitter, kids and analysts: a cautionary tale

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:42:53 +0100

Matthew Robson ("Aged 15 yrs & 7 months") has managed to cause quite a stir in the tech community and beyond with his analysis for Morgan Stanley on teen trends, particularly with his denial of...

Google Apps users to get OpenID authentication

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:24:41 +0100

Google is about to announce OpenID log-in functionality for enterprise users of its Apps productivity suite. The search giant has already adopted the authentication standard - whereby a...

Tweetdeck demonstrates User Disrespect 2.0

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:33:21 +0100

I use Tweetdeck as my desktop Twitter client. It's a pretty smart example of what can be done with the Twitter APIs, and I generally find it very usable and useful. However, something happened an...

Could "Fremium" social media evolve into a pay once unlimite...

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:38:05 +0100

I read with interest an article on TechCrunch revealing that the free Google Apps that everyone was so excited about a couple of years back have now been hidden to new users, who are now channeled...

Gratification, instant and otherwise

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:17:20 +0100

My brother lectures in music performance and technology at SERC in Bangor, Northern Ireland. We had a discussion the other day about the joy of simple programs that get beginners going, and...

Skype founders' spat with eBay threatens IPO

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:01:35 +0100

EBay's intended spin-off of Skype as a new public company could be threatened by a dispute between Skype's founders and the internet telephony firm's parent. The online auction giant intends to...

ZDNet UK upgrades - more speeds, more tweets

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:42:09 +0100

It may be summer, but we havent been lazing around on the beach. (It is an English summer, after all) Instead, weve been working away behind the scenes on the site part of a project thatll...

How giving Twitter away can make it money

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:42:37 +0100

You may have noticed that we've started to get much more involved with Twitter. That's partially my fault - I'm a certified addict - and partially recognition by everyone involved that Twitter has...

Clonezilla, here to stay, not fade away!*

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:22:43 +0100

Now that I've downloaded it and started testing it, I'm really impressed with Clonezilla. Running as a Linux live CD iso image just over 100 megabytes large, one method touted is to operate it on...

Idiot-Savant Programming

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:45:01 +0100

I spent some time reading the news on Yahoo tonight and a story that caught my attention concerned a Arizona state prisoner who died in the OUTDOOR "cell" (really a cage) made out of chain link...

UK Bing use falls after initial few days

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:25:30 +0100

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, saw a brief spurt of popularity in the UK before its usage levels fell, according to the web monitoring service Hitwise. Hitwise research director Robin Goad...

Update OpenStreetMap - on paper

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:43:37 +0100

This is an interesting idea: Print out a map from OpenStreetMap of an area you know well, or visit often, annotate the paper copy, then upload the scan so the OSM data can be updated, using the...

A call for an internet age speaker

editorial@zdnet.co.uk — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:48:03 +0100

If you think that the recent scandal in Westminster over MPs' expenses has little to do with technology, barring the odd flat screen TV, you'd probably be right. However, some open source software...