Internet - News and Articles

BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth

November 4, 2006 from Livewire - “A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice. For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies…

180 View – If you haven’t heard of BitTorrent, ask your kids, nieces, nephews… And there are other file sharing programs sucking up bandwidth. One reason this is important can be read in Deloitte & Touche's Technology Predictions for 2007. Their #2 prediction is “Internet Capacity Woes: Reaching the limits of cyberspace - The unrelenting growth in Internet traffic in 2007 may overwhelm the Internet's backbone; the terabit-cable pipes connecting continents will reach capacity and ISPs will not be prepared to pay for extra bandwidth because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs. The threat to available capacity will be driven by the number of Internet users continuing to grow, and the exponential increase in the transmission of video files.”

Hakia: A New Google?

January 3, 2007 from E-Business News – Google entrenched itself deeper in our lives in 2006, but the success of the world's most popular search engine is attracting early-stage competitors in the New Year. One of these competitors is Hakia, whose search engine I tested out recently.

The Hakia premise, summed up in a company blog entry by software developer Chris Gates, is that "We are just now entering the phase of search with engines that understand 'what you mean' not just what or how you say it." Gates is referring to search engines with semantic (context) over and above syntactic (contextless keywords) capabilities.

For example, Gates suggests typing in "what drug treats headache" into another search engine. I ran the search on Google and got the following hits:

Lower Cervical Bupivacaine Injection Treats Headache in the ED
IngentaConnect Dexamethasone/amitriptyline treats drug-induced ...
As you can see, it wasn't a helpful set of results. The tacit question behind my query (what can I take for my headache?) went completely unanswered, as Google relied on the syntactic recurrence of keywords rather than deducing my semantic meaning. As a result, I didn't get a single relevant hit.

I repeated the search on Hakia and, right at the top of the page, Hakia told me: "The following should help: By reducing the amount of prostaglandin available for synthesis, paracetamol helps relieve headache pain by reducing the dilation of the blood vessels that cause the pain." There was a link to a specific page about headache pain, as well as to a Hakia gallery of prescription drugs.

The hits that followed this helpful top-line explanation were much more relevant to the issue of headache pain than Google's hits. Hakia's hits told me more about aspirin, nurofen, barbiturates, and even techniques like "sleep, darkness, or a quiet room…"

180 View – Even though 180 Systems does not show up on top of Hakia for keyword searches such as “ERP comparison”, we can see that it does offer a good alternative to Google if you’re getting nowhere in your Google search.

Skype 3.0 for Windows Beta

November 21, 2006 from PC Magazine – “Skype is popular, no doubt about it: Downloads of the software, available in 27 languages, average 250,000 per day, for a total of 136 million so far. The Internet voice-call provider hosts 7 million people worldwide at any given moment and expects revenue to hit $195 million in 2006, up from a mere $7 million in 2004. You'll find over 150 devices which are specifically built to work with Skype, and 3,500 developers around the globe are toiling away on additional apps. With stats like these, even the naysayers, me included, who were scratching their heads when eBay bought the service have to admit that it appears headed toward world domination. The Skype 3.0 for Windows beta could accelerate the trend by removing roadblocks to acceptance among network administrators in businesses.”

180 View – If you haven’t tried it yet, what are you waiting for? I (Michael Burns) use it all the time whether calling my daughter in Ireland, making long distance conference calls, making calls while out of town at my client’s office or hotel room…

The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization

July 12, 2006 from Market Position - "The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful."

180 View - SEO is critical - if you have a web site and you are not attracting many visitors, read this article. It would also be a good idea to get some professional help. We don't do this kind of work but will be able to recommend companies that do.

Web 2.0 has corporate america spinning

June 5, 2006 from BusinessWeek - "Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords, and there's none more popular today than Web 2.0. Unless you're a diehard techie, though, good luck figuring out what it means. Web 2.0 technologies bear strange names like wikis, blogs, RSS, AJAX, and mashups. And the startups hawking them -- Renkoo, Gahbunga, Ning, Squidoo -- sound like Star Wars characters George Lucas left on the cutting-room floor.

But behind the peculiarities, Web 2.0 portends a real sea change on the Internet. If there's one thing they have in common, it's what they're not. Web 2.0 sites are not online places to visit so much as services to get something done -- usually with other people. From Yahoo!'s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr and the group-edited online reference source Wikipedia to the teen hangout MySpace, and even search giant Google, they all virtually demand active participation and social interaction. If these Web 2.0 folks weren't so geeky, they might call it the Live Web.

And though these Web 2.0 services have succeeded in luring millions of consumers to their shores, they haven't had much to offer the vast world of business. Until now. Slowly but surely they're scaling corporate walls. "All these things that are thought to be consumer services are coming into the enterprise," says Ray Lane, former Oracle president and now a general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

For all its appeal to the young and the wired, Web 2.0 may end up making its greatest impact in business. And that could usher in more changes in corporations, already in the throes of such tech-driven transformations as globalization and outsourcing. Indeed, what some are calling Enterprise 2.0 could flatten a raft of organizational boundaries -- between managers and employees and between the company and its partners and customers. Says Don Tapscott, CEO of the Toronto tech think tank New Paradigm and co-author of The Naked Corporation: "It's the biggest change in the organization of the corporation in a century."

All that's going to require more than slick technology. Executives, long used to ruling from the top of the corporate hierarchy, will have to learn a new skill: humility. "Companies that are extremely hierarchical have trouble adapting," says Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech book publisher O'Reilly Media, which runs the annual Web 2.0 Conference "They'll be outperformed by companies that don't work that way." Ultimately, taking full advantage of Web 2.0 may require -- get ready -- Management 2.0.

180 View - Sounds like hype to us. The article fails to explain Web 2.0. It seems like it's all about using the internet more effectively than before. Has anything changed or is it just creative people taking advantage of what already exists. We think it's both. As far as what's changed, two technologies come to mind - one is web services, which has been around for years, but has not really taken off yet. The other is Ajax. Web services, amongst other uses, will allow sharing of data (such as purchase orders) across any system. And Ajax is allowing internet applications to have as much functionality as our favourite PC applications.

Fastest Internet Ever Coming Your Way

May 27, 2006 from CIO Today - "Someday, we might conquer the vast distances of space and visit the stars. But right now, on this planet, we are on the verge of eliminating distance itself. And the vehicle for eliminating distance is the next generation of the medium you are now using: the Internet.

The current Net has little to impede you as you search for information. If you want to find the exact height of the Eiffel Tower, for example, and also see a small video or a photo of it, you can, within seconds. But if you want to have a live conversation with someone standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, at night, as if they were on the other side of a clear window -- with the tower shimmering in more realistic detail than you can absorb -- you have two choices. You can either fly there right now, or you can use a PC hooked into the next-generation Internet.

That's right: An Internet that leaves the current Internet in the dust is within reach. Some lucky individuals have already seen the possibilities thanks to the next-gen Net's major research network, a consortium of more than 300 universities, research labs, government agencies, and corporations called Internet2.

In 2005, at a conference in San Diego, a team from the University of Washington showed two high-definition screens. On one screen were small head shots of seven people, stacked in a "Hollywood Squares"-style grid. On the other was a single head shot of a different person, who was talking. All of the people were in different physical locations, meeting together live via uncompressed high-definition video transmitted over Internet2.

"It was a lot different from what we have been calling a 'videoconference,'" says Michael Wellings, engineering director for streaming media and broadcast at UW. "Some of the people held up sheets of paper to the camera, for the others to see on their screen, and the writing on the papers could be read," he remembers. "It was literally like seeing someone else on the other side of a glass window." For the rest of the article, click here.

180 View - And you thought that that web conferencing is neat now.

Microsoft puts money behind Web strategy talk

May 1, 2006 from Yahoo News - "Microsoft is backing up its talk of investing in Web services with cash, months after chairman Bill Gates called the company to arms over an Internet "sea change" in which software and services become delivered over the Web. Next year the company will invest $2 billion more than expected in a variety of technologies, and the clearest goal is to transform its way of doing business on the Web, analysts and investors said...

"We believe Microsoft has been working to implement a strategic vision to leverage some unique advantages and become a player along with Google and Yahoo in the market for online advertising," Sherlund wrote in a note to clients. Microsoft sees paid search as the first test in a larger ongoing competition for Internet ads.

Online advertising continues to win over clients abandoning television, newspapers and other traditional media. Forrester Research projects the online advertising to grow to $26 billion in 2009 from $15 billion now. At the core of Microsoft's software services vision is Windows Live, an advertising funded one-stop shop for Microsoft's web services from e-mail to instant messaging to blogs.

In order to support such a platform, Microsoft is expected to spend heavily for computer servers and data storage. Local media reported earlier this week that Microsoft bought a 75 acre property in central Washington state to build a "server farm" that will hold thousands of data-serving computers.

Merrill Lynch expects Microsoft online unit MSN to get a significant share of an estimated $2.4 billion in additional spending by the company. MSN expenses would increase by $891 million in the upcoming fiscal year, compared with $1.1 billion for Google and $708 million for Yahoo.

Google and Yahoo have become household names, but Microsoft is still larger by far, from a financial perspective. Before the stock fall on Friday Microsoft had a market capitalization of $282 billion and revenue in its latest full fiscal year of $40 billion, while Google had a market cap of $125 billion and revenue of $6.1 billion. Yahoo had a market cap of $47 billion and revenue of $5.3 billion." For the article, click here.

180 View - This article comes from a new service offered by Yahoo on technology news. Click here for Yahoo Technology News. There is some interesting information in this article including the importance of online advertsising (follow the cash...) and the market capitalization of Google, a company that started operations in 1998 with 3 employees.

iPOD Security Threat

February 9, 2006 from The Globe and Mail written by Shane Schick - "It's not that he has anything against Apple's portable media player, exactly, -- he even owns one, and is quick to extol its virtues. But where most of us see an iPod as a repository for hours of musical entertainment, Mr. Usher sees a hiding place for thousands of company files, with which a smart thief can walk out of a building completely undetected.

Security consultants like Mr. Usher use the term "PodSlurping" to describe the way in which devices such as MP3 players, USB Flash drives or Sony Memory Sticks pose a risk to businesses and government agencies. Data theft tends to conjure up images of rogue programmers hacking into databases through the Internet, but PodSlurping suggests it can be much simpler and scarier than that.

With little technical expertise, almost anyone can plug one of these portable storage systems into a PC in an office, find what they're looking for on the network and download it while nobody's looking. PodSlurping is the modus operandi for the inside job.

"Over the past 10 years, the majority of the people working in information security have had backgrounds in networking. As everyone got plugged into the Internet, when people thought of security, they thought of firewalls and access controls," says Mr. Usher, who is based in Arlington, Va. "Not all of these threats to companies exist outside of the corporate network."

Smaller businesses, which may not devote as many resources to IT security as their larger counterparts, could be particularly vulnerable to PodSlurping. It's not easy to keep track of who walks into an office building with an MP3 player, and most USB Flash drives are pretty small (they don't call them "thumb drives" or "keychain drives" for nothing).

Last year, Mr. Usher created a proof-of-concept software application called Slurp.exe that shows how easy it is to put PC files on an iPod. He recently followed it up with Slurp Audit, a tool that runs on portable storage devices and shows, once it has been plugged into a desktop, what kind of files could have been downloaded had a theft occurred.

Part of the problem, according to Mr. Usher, is that these devices plug into computers in a standard way. This makes them highly useful for connecting with each other (most laptops and PCs, for example, have a USB port), but it also raises the risk of PodSlurping that much higher." There are dishonest people in the world -- many of them work at many companies -- and these USB devices make it rather trivial to steal huge amounts of data," Mr. Usher says.

The threat of PodSlurping has opened up a new market for vendors around what's called "endpoint security." The products are usually software that makes sure users adhere to their company IT security policies. One such product, DeviceWall from Centennial Software of Portland, Ore., is designed to prevent the connection of unauthorized removable media devices to corporate PCs and laptops. It can block read/write access, for example, for anyone who does not have predefined authorization to download data. Securewave, of Luxembourg, offers a similar product called Sanctuary Device Control, designed to manage portable device access to desktops, tablets and laptops.

Although it's taking some time for awareness of the problem to spread to corporate decision makers, Centennial's vice-president of marketing, Brian McCarthy, says businesses are starting to earmark money for endpoint security in their annual budget cycles. "They're realizing they've pretty much covered the perimeter," he says. "I think 2005 was an educational year. It was the year they realized this is an issue."

In some cases, the IT security policy can be quite specific. Companies refer to "role-based" access, because the president of a small business, for instance, should be given more freedom to use these devices than a temporary worker. In others, employees simply need to be protected for their own good.

"A lot of guys are doing this non-maliciously -- they just want to be more effective," says Dennis Szerszen, Securewave's vice-president of marketing and corporate strategy. "They think, 'I'll just take this big spreadsheet home.' Then they lose the Memory Stick." A few organizations have already decided that portable storage isn't worth the risk at all. Mr. Usher says he has clients that prohibit the use of iPods, USB Flash drives and similar devices in the workplace altogether. Such Draconian measures, however, could create a trade-off in convenience that has an impact on productivity, he warns.

"If you have a blanket statement that says no one is allowed to use a USB thumb drive, that sounds good, that sounds secure, but you may have system administrators that need thumb drives," he says. "You can't go to one extreme or the other. You need to find the right balancing point in your own organization." Mr. McCarthy agrees, pointing out that the move towards mobile computing means an ever-growing number of devices." How do you block against the use of a PDA in most business environments?" he said. "A ban can be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce."

Few businesses are really active about IT security, possibly because there haven't been a lot of high-profile PodSlurping horror stories yet to scare people into action. An exception is the U.S. Department of Energy, which was ordered to stop all classified work on computers two years ago until security for removable storage devices was tightened. According to a report from research firm Gartner Inc., the order followed the loss of two computer disks containing nuclear weapons information at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The incident emphasized the risks that portable storage devices pose to high-security computer operations.

It's possible, of course, that PodSlurping is happening within companies all the time, and they simply choose not to disclose it for fear of retribution from their customers and shareholders. It is precisely such a lack of information sharing that makes it hard to develop best practices around IT security. If businesses were more transparent, there are a lot of secrets to protecting data they could pass onto each other -- perhaps more than even an iPod could contain." For the article, click here

180 View - We were at a meeting the day before this article was published and the CEO was expressing concern about the ability of a new ERP system to easily provide the employees with valuable information that could potentially be sold to competitors. With one click, valuable information could be exported to Excel, which then could easily be given to the wrong people.

e-Business Portal from the Government of Canada

"ebiz.enable is an easy-to-use Web site designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). It is a comprehensive online resource that allows you to explore e-business problems and solutions relevant to your company and its success in the global online environment" There's a lot of information on this site including:

• Where To Start - New to e-business...
• What e-Business Can Do - From online research to marketing, from strategy to human resources ... and more.
• What Others are Doing - Benefit from the experience of others.
• Assessing Your Business - Try out one of the e-business diagnostic tools.
• Implementing e-Business - So, how do you do it? Topics such as technology, security, suppliers ....
• Where To Learn More - Educational programs, statistics, selected industry info ..."

Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce

December 14, 2005 from eWeek - "Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian will spend almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com, Experian announced Wednesday. Following on the heels of June's purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experian's move seems to continue a trend. Price comparison sites make their money by charging retailers a fee when customers are sent their way." For the article, click here. And for PriceGrabber, click here.

Online holiday spending in the U.S. up 30% from ‘04

December 30, 2005 from ComputerWorld - "Excluding travel, U.S. shoppers spent a total of $30.1 billion online this holiday season, according to the fifth annual eSpending Report from Goldman Sachs & Co., Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive Inc.
Online shoppers spent the most money on apparel and clothing, computer hardware and peripherals, and consumer electronics, according to the report. “Consumers continue to shop later in the online holiday season as their trust in on-time delivery grows,” said Anthony Noto, Internet and entertainment analyst at Goldman Sachs." For the article, click here.

EDI over the Internet

December 9, 2005 from E-Business News - "Since the Internet began encroaching on the territory of the electronic data interchange (EDI) value-added networks (VANs), a series of connection options have been developed to support e-Commerce over the Internet. The most obvious and ubiquitous transport was to simply attach an EDI document to an email message. Obvious and ubiquitous, but hardly secure, and security is one of the prime assets of the VAN's proprietary network." For the rest of the article, click here.

Wikipedia: It's Online But Is It True?

December 7, 2005 from NewsFactor Network - "When Jimmy Wales started the online collaborative encyclopedia called Wikipedia four years ago, he had the high-minded goal of creating a sort of digital brain that one day would contain the sum of all human knowledge. In many ways, Wikipedia, which lets anonymous users add encyclopedia entries and update entries by others, continues to reach that ambitious goal. It was rated the top reference site by Hitwise, and has versions in 82 languages and more than 850,000 articles in English. In October, 16.3 million people visited the site, says Internet measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings.

But a high-profile incident last week is making some people rethink their faith in the type of anonymous collaborative information gathering that Wikipedia relies on -- and is reminding them that just because something looks authoritative, doesn't mean it necessarily is." For the article, click here.

Web based user interfaces

October 17, 2005 from InfoWorld - There is a debate about whether a pure web based product can compete in functionality and performance with the traditional client/server systems. Things are changing. "It's easy to see why AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has captured the imaginations of so many Web developers. For the first time, browser-based UIs are rich and full-featured enough to do away with so-called thick-client desktop applications." For the rest of the article, click here.

Google Offers Web Analytics For Free

November 13, 2005 from InformationWeek - "In March, Google acquired San Diego-based Urchin Software Corp. and promptly lowered the monthly cost of the company's hosted Web-analytics service, Urchin On Demand, from $495 to $199. Today, the search company is re-branding Urchin under the name Google Analytics and making it available to everyone for nothing...

Web analytics is the analysis of the data generated by visitors to Web sites -- the pages they visit, the ads they click on, and various related metrics -- for the purpose of marketing and content optimization." For the rest of the article, click here. Why give it away you ask. It's one great way of gathering business intelligence.

eBay Acquiring Skype

September 12, 2005 from eWeek - "eBay will acquire Internet telephony provider Skype Technologies for $2.6 billion in cash and stock, and as much as an additional $1.5 billion in future performance-based payments, both companies announced Monday. Skype's VOIP (voice-over-IP) telephony software will help eBay drive existing and new e-commerce on the popular online auction site, said eBay Inc. officials. Skype SA, which has about 53 million registered users, provides software to let users talk for free over the Internet or pay to send and receive calls from landline or cellular phones. For the article. click here.

September 13, 2005 from eWeek - "eBay's acquisition of Skype could be worth up to $4.1 billion to investors in the Internet telephony start-up, but it is getting mixed reviews from Skype's fervent supporters. It was the hard-core Skype fans whose word-of-mouth advertising helped it become the world's largest voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) provider without spending a penny on marketing. It has some 54 million registered users and usually has more than 3.5 million people online.

But the sale to eBay could signal the end of the evangelical zeal from users that drove Skype's rapid growth. Its software—which offers free computer-to-computer calls between Skype users—has spread in classic viral fashion, as each new user convinces friends and family to sign up. In a poll on the forums, 69 percent of users said the acquisition is not a good thing, compared with 23 percent in favor of the deal. "In my opinion, the takeover by eBay means to me possibly and probably the end of free Skype services. I anticipate a very bad future for us here but I sincerely hope I am wrong," the Skype user Alan2 wrote on Monday." For the article. click here.

Google builds an empire to rival Microsoft

September 21, 2005 from ZDNet News - "Google already has plenty of influence. It handles nearly half of the world's Web searches...But what's next? Author Stephen Arnold has closely analyzed Google patents, engineering documents and technology and has concluded that Google has a grand ambition--to push the information age off the desktop and onto the Internet. Google, he argues, is aiming to be the network computer platform for delivering so-called "virtual" applications, or software that allows a user to perform a task on any device with an Internet connection.

For all of its wild success, about 99 percent of Google's revenue still comes from advertising, mostly from Internet keyword searches. Certainly, it has built on the core business, adding everything from the Gmail free Web-based e-mail service to Google Earth, a satellite mapping service. And it has plenty of cash to spend on new technology--nearly $7 billion in cash, $4 billion alone from a secondary stock offering on Sept. 14." For more, click here.

Never Heard of MySpace?

August 28,2005 from The New York Times - "Although many people over 30 have never heard of MySpace, it has about 27 million members, a nearly 400 percent growth since the start of the year. It passed Google in April in hits, the number of pages viewed monthly, according to comScore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic. (MySpace members often cycle through dozens of pages each time they log on, checking up on friends' pages.) According to Nielsen/NetRatings, users spend an average of an hour and 43 minutes on the site each month, compared with 34 minutes for facebook.com and 25 minutes for Friendster.

"They've just come out of nowhere, and they're huge," David Card, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, said of MySpace. "They've done a number of things that were really smart. One was blogging. People have been doing personal home pages for as long as the Internet's been around, but they were one of the first social networks to jump on that. They've also jumped on music, and there's a lot of traffic surrounding that." For the article, click here.

XBRL - International Financial Reporting Standard

August 29, 2005 from AccountingWEB.com - "Labeling XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) as “the universal business information translator,” Harding compared XBRL to the UPC code now replacing cashiers, which was certainly unforeseen in the UPC’s infancy. He also likened it to the railroad industry and the necessary standardization that resulted, enabling business and civilization to develop and progress faster than previously known.

XBRL will, indeed, impact us in ways we cannot possibly foresee in 2005. If the CPA industry can help drive this change to XBRL … wow! Just think of how dynamic and proactive our industry can be! XBRL will lead to cost savings, superior benchmarking and comparative analysis. As Harding put it, “as information becomes easier to use it will be used more.” For the article, click here.

Customer self-service is finally catching on with consumers — and saving businesses a bundle in the process

July 1, 2005 from CFO Magazine - "Customer self-service is quietly and steadily gaining acceptance with consumers. Some of that acceptance stems from a change in demographics, with younger customers preferring to do for themselves. Mostly, though, the sea change in C-service stems from a dramatic improvement in the self-service technologies themselves. Voice-response systems, the onetime bane of banking customers, have improved so dramatically that many patrons now prefer them to live customer service representatives. And intelligent instant messaging (IM) "'bots" — computer programs that "chat" with users — can provide real-time responses to even complicated questions.

The result? Self-service is beginning to fulfill its initial promise of providing easy and personalized customer interaction while substantially cutting support costs. Says Laura Preslan, vice president for CRM at AMR Research, a technology research company located in Boston: "Self-service is one of the highest-reward, lowest-risk investments across the entire customer management spectrum." Click here for the article.

During the past 10 years, E-commerce has changed dramatically.

June 22, 2005 from CFO IT - "Executives who think that the dot-com collapse, channel conflict, and consumer fears of identity theft have combined to make E-commerce strategy a low priority should think again. Ten years after Amazon.com and eBay made "E-tail" a household word, companies in many industries are taking a second look at E-commerce, and finding ways to overcome old problems and tap new opportunities.

Last year, E-commerce sales hit $69.2 billion, and while that equates to less than 2 percent of all retail sales, it is a startling 23.5 percent jump from the previous year. Analysts believe the online channel may account for 7 percent of all retail sales by 2010. That's a potential increase of nearly $200 billion, which means companies that were turned off or got burned the first time around have plenty of incentive to try again." Click here for the article.

FTTP (Fiber-To-The-Premises) Changes Everything

June 2005 from PC Magazine- "It may be difficult to comprehend my enthusiasm, so I want to be clear about something: When we consider FTTP as another broadband option alongside DSL and cable, we're not comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges. We're comparing the tortoise to the hare. Fiber has the potential to be not just a little faster than cable but hundreds of times faster. FTTP promises to transform online content delivery into the home. Let's look at the raw numbers:

Cable: 1 to 5 megabits per second (Mbps) for uploads and downloads
DSL: 1.5 Mbps for downloads and slower upload speeds (performance can even depend on distance from the telephone companies' central switch)
FTTP: Between 5 and 100 Mbps for downloads and 2 Mbps for uploads

With FTTP, downloads speeds are effectively limited only by what you're willing to pay. Verizon is offering me 5-Mbps downloads for $34.95 a month. For another $10, I can get 15-Mbps downloads. FTTP can go much higher, but Verizon isn't offering those options yet." Click here for the article.

We did some internet research and it seems that FTTP has a long way to go before it becomes available let alone mainstream.

What is being said about you on the internet

March 21, 2005 from Globe and Mail - "Cambridge startup is offering a service it says gives a measure of control over the personal data the Internet disgorges, giving new meaning to a practice commonly termed "ego surfing" or "Googling yourself." The practice of typing your name into an Internet search engine and seeing what pops up is now common, but the results can be unpredictable. The Internet holds surprising amounts of personal information between its ever-expanding corners, and some of it may be outdated, inaccurate or embarrassing. ZoomInfo's computers have compiled individual Web profiles of 25 million people, summarizing what the Web publicly says about each person. The service, launched Monday, allows Web surfers to search for their profile, then change it for free..." Click here for the article - but you will need to pay for the article unless you're already registered. Click here for ZoomInfo.

The New Internet

January 12, 2005 from PC Magazine - "Mozilla released Firefox, the first serious challenger to IE in years. A start-up called blinkx offered a new approach to searching the Web, letting you find information without using keywords. Vonage freed the Internet phone from the confines of the desktop PC, reinventing the telecom industry. And apps like Grouper and Qnext turned the Kazaa craze on its head, letting us share not with the world at large, but with people we know and trust—friends, family, and colleagues...

The Internet phone, also known as Voice over IP (VoIP), is nothing new. An Israeli startup called Net2Phone launched the first consumer VoIP service in 1996. Without paying a penny, friends and family could call each other from their desktop computers, talking into PC microphones and listening on PC speakers. It was an impressive technology, but was a bit ahead of its time. Net2Phone couldn't catch on with the general public because VoIP services just weren't suited to the dial-up connections that most people were using in the nineties. And there was the inconvenience of having to boot your computer to make a call.

Then Vonage introduced a service that let you use regular phones with VoIP technology. It cut costs—and cut them drastically—by routing calls over your broadband connection, but you no longer had to boot your PC to make a VoIP call, you could receive incoming calls, and you could use a conventional phone number (rather than having to arrange times to connect online).

The service debuted in 2002, but 2004 was the year it really took off. The company was so successful that dozens of imitators soon hit the market, including telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Cablevision, and Verizon. According to Jon Arnold, an analyst with the research firm Frost & Sullivan, more than 300,000 people now have paid subscriptions to broadband VoIP services, and the number is growing rapidly.

At the same time, desktop VoIP hit the big time with the debut of Skype, which provides free phone calls over a worldwide peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It is run by two of Kazaa's founders and, though it lacks the sound quality and conveniences of Vonage-like VoIP, it's now used, in Arnold's estimation, by over 4 million people. Click here for the article.

The Best Internet Innovation In Years

February 7, 2005 from Forbes.com - "Let me just come right out and say it. Answers.com is the most useful, smartest, coolest, easiest-to-use Web innovation to come around in years. Answers.com is a new approach to Internet search, but make no mistake: It is not search. With one click Answers.com delivers instant information, not Web links, laid out cleanly on one page." For the article, click here. For Answers.com, click here.

Exploring XBRL

December 1, 2004 from PricewaterhouseCoopers - "XBRL (short for Extensible Business Reporting Language) has for some time been touted as the penultimate tool for assembling and distributing corporate information, from a variety of sources, so that it can be used across different systems—inside and outside a company. Its proponents claim that it marks the end of the old labour-intensive, tedious process of producing, reporting, and analyzing company information. And why was the old process so inefficient? Because most companies still depend upon disparate systems to store and deploy much of the needed data—and those systems simply can't "talk" to each other. They speak different languages. XBRL, on the other hand, will work on any operating system, or any computer. In fact, XBRL is so flexible that an e-mail of a financial report created in, say, accounting software, can be sent to someone using an entirely different format, and XBRL will allow the recipient to easily import the data right into their own software format. This means that business information—regardless of its format—can now be identified, extracted, and re-presented in whatever way the user requires." Click here for the article.

Firefox Keeps Slicing Into IE's Share

December 13, 2004 from InformationWeek - "Firefox's share of the US browser market grew by more than a third in the last month, a Web metrics firm said Monday... Firefox -- the Mozilla Foundation's upstart stand-alone browser -- saw its usage share jump from 3.03 percent in early November to 4.06 by early December... Firefox still badly trails Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which in early December had 91.8 percent of the US browser business... Firefox 1.0, available free of charge in versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, has been downloaded more than 10 million times, a number nearly double that of just three weeks ago. IE has been plagued by several security vulnerabilities since mid-summer, 2004, that have sent some users scrambling for an alternative." Click here for the article.

Skype: Free phone calls over the internet

Thanks to my cousin Sol Matthews for suggesting that I give Skype a try. I did and thought it was great. Then, I did some research to see what others are saying.

October 12, 2004 from OS News - "I love Skype. The concept is nothing new, it is an Internet Telephony application: years have passed with people talking to each other for free over the Internet, and it has always been considered cool. However traditional telephones are on everyone's desk today as they were three decades ago, despite that most of these desks now feature PCs connected with fat pipes to the Web.

The problem: Internet Telephony has a hard life in today's Web. Most connected PCs are cowardly hidden behind firewalls, their ports blocked, and almost every company uses NAT, because IP addresses are a precious good. In short, because of this situation existing Internet Telephony systems do not "Just Work". Instead, Skype got almost everything right: I instructed my uncle how to install and use Skype the day after teaching him how to move that curious arrow with the “mouse”; I did not have to implore my megacorp’s Network Administrator to evoke his black magic with the company’s firewalls “just to chat with mummy”; and I did not feel left behind on my Linux box, since Skype runs natively on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows..." Click here for the article. Click here for Skype.

The Dot-Com Era's Last Gasp: Commerce One

September 27, 2004 from NewsFactor - "If there were one company emblematic of the dot-com era it would be hard to argue against placing Commerce One in that spot. The company once enjoyed a stock price of US$1,655, but its shares are now worth about 18 cents...Commerce One -- once with a market cap of $20 billion at the height of the dot-com boom -- with $300,000 to its name...But many enterprises that tried online exchanges discovered they were not that efficient. "Once that realization set in, the market wasn't forced to adopt supply-chain software," he said. Unfortunately for Commerce One, Ariba , and other B2B companies, the realization coincided with an economic downturn..." For the article, click here.

Google Web Mail (Gmail) is next

June 14, 2004 from Forbes Magazine - Expect to see Gmail coming your way soon. "The first thing Google's Gmail marketers will be promoting is its free one-gigabyte or 1,000 MB of storage space per account. That's 250 times what Yahoo mail offered up until this week, and 500 times what Hotmail offers. It's also many times larger than most corporate e-mail accounts...But ultimately storage space probably won't be the main reason why users switch over to Google's new e-mail... Storage is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. You can now buy storage at about $1 per gigabyte, down from $10 three years ago...One of the issues that storing several year's worth of e-mails creates is sorting through it when you need a piece of information. What was Aunt Sally's phone number? She definitely e-mailed it a few years ago sometime before Mother's Day. And what was the name of that dermatologist your friend recommended way back when? With Gmail, you've got Google's fast search engine to track down every word and number in your in-box. Searches in Hotmail and Yahoo Mail only look at subject lines and sender names. And they're slow." For more about Gmail, click here.

Shoppers Flock to the Web

May 28, 2004 from PC World - "U.S. online retail sales increased a strong 51 percent in 2003, as vendors on average improved their bottom line, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Shop.org, the Internet sales division of the National Retail Federation. It was also the first year in which U.S. online retail sales exceeded $100 billion, reaching $114 billion. That represents 5.4 percent of all retail sales...Helped by strong sales in areas such as health and beauty, apparel, and flowers, cards, and gifts, U.S. online retail sales are expected to grow 27 percent this year to $144 billion, or 6.6 percent of total retail sales. " Click here for more.

Electronic Payment Article Published in the May 2004 Edition of CAmagazine

Shame on you if you’re not paying your personal bills electronically. But what about sending cash electronically or making a payment to the thousands of Canadian businesses not registered on your bank’s online list? And what about settling your business bills electronically? The technology is now available. One company that has it is Canadian-based TelPay Inc. TelPay creates technology for Canadian businesses and consumers to transfer money and make e-payments to anyone in Canada (and soon in the US). It processes 14 million e-payment transactions for a total of $5.3 billion annually. For the article, click here.

PayPal

March 9, 2004 from Associated Press - Would you believe that "PayPal opened 17 million more accounts last year, giving the service about 40 million customers as of Dec. 31. PayPal handled transactions totalling $12.2-billion last year, processing an average of 629,000 payments each day, according to eBay." In case you don't know - "PayPal lets buyers and sellers exchange money through e-mail. Buyers make payments on-line through credit cards and bank accounts, and PayPal relays the funds to sellers' accounts. Basic usage is free, but sellers who use added features must pay fees based on the amount transferred. About 60 per cent of PayPal's business comes from eBay users." The article is really about PayPal paying "$150,000 (U.S.) in penalties after misrepresenting to consumers its policy on repayment when merchandise doesn't arrive". For the article, click here.

Voice over Internet Protocol - Finally, 21st Century Phone Service

January 6, 2003, BusinessWeek "This could be the decade that phones finally make their move. Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, sometimes pronounced "voyp," could be the transformative technology that will redefine the phone and the way people use it. With VoIP, calls are transferred in digital packets over data networks instead of over circuit-switched copper wires. This means any corporation with a network or any individual with a $30-a-month broadband connection can make calls without paying the phone company." For this article, click here.

The cheque is in the e-mail

August 21, 2003, from Profit Magazine - "According to a survey released by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., it's only a matter of time before we receive all our bills online. The survey found that while only 9% of Canadian consumers are currently receiving statements online, 46% say they are likely to switch to e-statements, and 60% indicate they'd make the change if given an incentive, such as a one-time $25 discount." For the article, click here.

E-Payment Evolution

July 7, 2003, from E-Business News - "NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association responsible for the ACH (Automated Clearing House) network, has predicted that there will be one billion e-check payments from consumers to businesses in 2003. That number represents twice the e-check volume of 2002." For the article, click here.

"Almost one-quarter of American employees use Instant Messaging (IM) at work"

March 11, 2003 - From the New York Times "Instant messaging, long associated with teenagers staying up late to chat online with friends, is moving into the workplace with an impact that has started to rival e-mail and the cellphone...Already, almost one-quarter of American employees use instant messaging at work, for the most part informally, according to a recent survey by Osterman Research, compared with just 8 percent two years ago." One way to look at IMing is that it is a distraction and should be banned from the work place. On the other hand, it does provide more responsiveness to customers and business partners. For more, click here.

New kid on the e-mail block

Feb 17, 2003 - According to Forbes, BlueTie might become a competitive threat to Microsoft in the small-business market. "BlueTie, provides applications such as e-mail, scheduling, instant messaging and contact management to small businesses. Firms with, say, ten employees can get all these tools delivered over the Web for $10 to $20 US per user per month...Microsoft dismisses the idea that Web-delivered software will eat into its server business (and said) that the idea of outsourcing your infrastructure is something that small businesses aren't interested in." I personally think that businesses of any size are interested in outsourcing of infrastructure. For more, click here.

Web Services is now the most hyped technology on the planet

Web Services is now the most hyped technology on the planet. It has the potential to let different systems communicate with each other easily. Integration problems would be no more. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) would be replaced by Web Services. Business to Business (B2B) eCommerce would become a reality. New applications could be assembled using programs available on Web Services. Despite the hype, there is a lot of confusion about what is actually meant by Web Services.

Web Services refers to application logic accessible to programs via standard web protocols in a platform-independent way. So, if you hear that companies already have web services in place, this is a stretch. They may be using XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is a key component in Web Services and they may be communicating over the internet, but they are not using standards in a platform independent way. Before they can use standards, there needs to be agreement on the standards. And that’s the big problem. Just as Paul Simon sings about the 50 ways to lose your lover, there are 50 ways to define a purchase order.

There are also different levels to Web Services that need to be standardized including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). Technology companies need an acronym for everything they do, and Web Services has more acronyms associated with it than you would care to know about it.

Although the obstacles to Web Services are large, there is huge momentum and commitment by all the major technology companies to sort out the standards. Only this year, the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) was created to act as a quality assurance group over web services. The group includes IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and will soon include Sun Microsystems. Although Web Services is a tangled web of acronyms, technologies and companies, its net or as Microsoft refers to it, its .NET will catch us all. Only this time getting caught in the net/.NET is a good thing.

Click here for more technical details written by 180 Systems about web services. For a more comprehensive analysis of Web Services, click here for reports from the McKinseyQuarterly.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, says that Web Services is "big, big, big, big, big, the biggest thing that's going to happen in the industry"

Web Services are self contained business functions that operate over the internet enabling any application to share information with another application. Web Services should solve the problem of integration between systems and enable eCommerce to become a reality. However, don't expect integration utopia for at least a few years. In order for Web Services to work, there must first be agreement on standards. So we have competitors such as Microsoft and IBM joining The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to set the standards. Just a few weeks ago, WS-I opened up some room at the table for Sun Microsystems, which is Microsoft's main rival for web services standard setting. For articles on WS-I from InfoWorld, click here and here. For an article on the battle between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems from Destination CRM, click here.

The reincarnation of dot.com

The dot.coms are coming back. One example is WebShots.com, which was purchased in 1999 for $82.5 Million US and was sold back recently to the original owners for $2.4 Million US. With a clean balance sheet, control over spending, improved technology and lessons learned, WebShots is registering 150,000 new users each week. For more from CNN.com, click here.

High speed internet ratings

Broadband Reports provides information on residential and small business Broadband connections including all types of xDSL information, cable, wireless, end-user reviews and ratings, and discussions. Click here for BroadbandReports.

ASPs (Application Service Providers) are making a comeback

With ASP's, you don’t buy the software, you rent it; and the program and data are maintained on the ASP’s equipment. The primary advantage of an ASP is less investment in computers and the resources to maintain it. There were a number of high profile ASP casualties last year, and ASPs fell out of favour. But there seems to no denying the ASP's compelling business case. According to ITConsultant, "Oracle Corporation is crowing about its e-business suite outsourcing biz — it grew by a whopping 50 percent with the influx of 100 new customers in Q4 2002." For ITConsultant's article, click here.

Cringely also writes about ASPs in an August 15 article, in which he talks about StoreReport, an ASP for owners and operators of convenience stores. Cringely says "I like the ASP concept because it isn't hype and it can really save both time and money when the circumstances are right. Maybe it isn't politically correct, but I say do what works." Click here for Cringely's article on ASPs entitled "High ASPirations". By the way, StoreReport has not made its way to Canada yet, but it should not be long before it does. For StoreReport's web site, click here.

Who buys on-line?

You would think that it would be the younger crowd. Guess again. I have attached an article that was downloaded from TechRepublic, which is a decent source of IT information. Click here for a link to TechRepublic and click here for an article on who buys on-line.

Have you attended a webinar?

A webinar is a great technology that allows you to be trained or attend a conference at your office. Using the internet and your phone, you will see the PowerPoint presentation or the latest version of a software product, and you will hear the speaker on your phone. You can even ask questions via the internet. I have used PlaceWare a few times and it sure beats getting on an airplane… Click here for a link to Placeware’s web site.