Micropayments: Would you pay 20p to read an article?By Dave LeeTechnology reporter, BBC NewsA plethora of titles – but for how long? Without devising a fresh way to make money, newspapers will continue to suffer from falling salesHow much is an online article worth to you?After reading the first few lines, would you pay a bit of money to read the rest of it?Continue reading the main storySpecial Report: The Technology of BusinessHow to use customers to get aheadHow drones are helping the wine industryDubais cafe creativesIndias digital switchover beginsConnecting MogadishuTop toys get techy for ChristmasTVs zombie apocalypseWorkplaces that build Africas futureConsider this as a future: paying small amounts to read, watch and listen to content online. 20 pence 32 US cents for a feature here, 10p for a news story there.Its a system called micropayments, and some believe it is the future for supporting journalism, and other creative content, on the internet.The likes of Google and Paypal have begun to roll out and promote their technologies, and there are a number of smaller players hoping to break-through.

via BBC News – Micropayments: Would you pay 20p to read an article?.

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Twitter resets hacked passwords after being compromisedTwitter has given no details of the scale of the problemContinue reading the main storyRelated StoriesArrest in Thai PM Twitter hackingMLA sorry after Twitter hackingFrenchman hacked Obama TwitterThousands of Twitter users have received emails warning their account has been compromised by a third party.Some accounts had been compromised, but other users had received the emails after Twitter had unintentionally reset unaffected passwords, the company said.The mass email coincided with incidents involving several high-profile accounts, including at least one account belonging to the BBC.Other media organisations, such as the TechCrunch blog, reported being warned.Twitter gave no indication of the cause or source of the compromise, and would not share details of the size of the issue.In a statement, it said: “When we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users.”In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised.”We apologise for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.”Deletions and spamSome users who received the email noticed that some of their tweets had been deleted, while others said spam links had been posted without their knowledge – a typical characteristic of a compromised account.The Twitter account belonging to BBC Radio 4s Today programme earlier told followers it was “trying to get to the bottom” of problems relating to their feed.Other BBC accounts have received the warning email – but it is not yet clear if any more were compromised.Comedian David Mitchell tweeted that he had received the email, and that a tweet he had written publicising his column in the Observer newspaper had been removed.Some users criticised Twitters email, suggesting it looked like a “phishing scam” – a message that impersonates an official email in an attempt to trick users into giving up personal details.

via BBC News – Twitter resets hacked passwords after being compromised.

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Apple loses Facetime patent lawsuit to VirnetX

VirnetX had said that Apple’s Facetime technology involved the unlicensed use of its technologies

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A US court has ruled that Apple should pay damages to a Connecticut-based company because its Facetime video chat tool infringed the firm’s patents.

VirnetX was awarded $368.2m (£231m).

The sum is about half the amount VirnetX had originally demanded and will only cause a small dent in the iPhone-maker’s strong balance sheet.

But the ruling could have more serious consequences if VirnetX carries out a threat to block the further use of its innovations in Apple’s products.

Apple said it had no comment to make on the case. It still has the right to appeal against the judgement.

Sales ban

VirnetX had alleged that four of its patents – registered between 2002 and 2011 – had been infringed by Apple’s desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone computers, all of which run Facetime and its instant messenger service iMessage. It said Apple would have needed to have paid a licence fee to have legally made use of the technologies.

These included a method of establishing a secure communication link between different types of computers using a protocol referred to as TARP (Tunneled Agile Routing Protocol).

VirnetX had previously secured a $200m settlement from Microsoft over similar claims and has made related allegations against Cisco, Siemens and others.

“Apple says they don’t infringe, but Apple developers testified that they didn’t pay any attention to anyone’s patents when developing their system,” a lawyer for VirnetX was quoted as saying by the Bloomberg news agency.

Apple had denied infringement saying that VirnetX’s patented techniques had only played a small role in its systems.

But the verdict will boost a related claim filed by VirnetX with the US’s International Trade Commission which could theoretically lead to a sales ban on Apple products that infringe its technology.

More lawsuits

The ruling marks Apple’s second patent loss in a week, after a judge dismissed a case it brought against Google’s Motorola unit on Monday.

A defeat last month in the UK has seen it ordered to run a notice on its homepage acknowledging that Samsung’s tablets had not infringed its European iPad design rights.

In September a German court also rejected Apple’s claims that competitors had infringed its multi-touch inventions.

In a sign of further problems to come, Ars Techica has reported that a judge overseeing a US case – in which Apple claims its App Store trademark has been breached by Amazon – had expressed scepticism that consumers would indeed be confused.

But in its favour Apple can cite its massive $1.05bn software and design damages award against Samsung in August.

A judge will review the ruling next month – and consider Apple’s claim that several of its rival’s handsets be banned.

In the meantime, Apple has just filed a further claim against the South Korean manufacturer based on the allegation that version 4.1 of the Android system, which is installed on several Samsung devices, infringes its own software patents.

via BBC News – Apple loses Facetime patent lawsuit to VirnetX.

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Googles market share dips below 90% in UKGoogle remains the leading search engine in many countriesContinue reading the main storyRelated StoriesGoogle opens data centre in ChileGoogle told to reveal influencersCould Googles data hoarding be good for you?Search giant Google has dropped to its lowest percentage of the UK market share in five years, Experian Hitwise, a firm that monitors web traffic, says.October figures released by the company suggest 89.33% of all web searches in the UK were made using Google.Its main rival, Microsofts Bing, now has 5% of the market share, with Yahoos Ask in third place.Microsofts recently launched Windows 8 operating system has Bing installed by default instead of Google.Analyst Luca Paderni, from Forrester Research, said: “In the UK, Bing has been using very aggressive tactics of promotion for last few months, in preparation for the Christmas season.”But Google is still dominant, and we would need to see a trend over more months to call it a consistent decline.”Although Google is the leading search engine in many places around the world, alternative search engines have managed to get ahead of it in their home markets.In China, Baidu is number one, and in Russia, the leader is Yandex, with Google in second place.In Europe, Googles competitors would need to concentrate on services other than general purpose search to improve their chances of rivalling the search giant, said Mr Paderni.Search habits”Theres increasingly more space for search services specialising in specific industries or topics,” he said.Hitwise told BBC News it had used data from various internet service providers in the UK to track the search habits of eight million people.The firms digital insight manager said web users were “demanding more of the engines they interact with everyday”.”The search engines that remain reliable, relevant and useful will be the ones that profit in the future.”

via BBC News – Googles market share dips below 90% in UK.

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Why The Future Of Search May Look More Like Yahoo Than GoogleADRIAN AOUNposted yesterday28 CommentsWhen Nirvana was coolRewind to the late 90s. Almost everything you needed – email, news, sports, stocks, maps and more – was conveniently on one site: Yahoo!. Yahoo! was the “portal” to the Internet that strived to deliver everything you could ever want on its own properties.The crazy thing is how successful Yahoo! was at this. Few, if any, have ever done content or media online at that scale.But then Google came along and exploited the fact that the Internet was growing too fast for Yahoo! to keep up. Suddenly, Yahoo! was struggling to find its way, as Google made buckets of money by taking the opposite strategy: redirecting its traffic across the Internet to the best sites for each query e.g. popular topics landed you on Wikipedia, movies on IMDB.Search replaced the portal as the dominant paradigm, and it became accepted that no single organization could successfully cover every aspect of the web by itself.Portals rebornFast-forward to the late 2000s…Facebook and smartphones, primarily the iPhone, are the new portals, reminiscent of the days of Yahoo!. They have every experience you need, from weather and stocks to games and maps. The difference is that they’re not foolish enough to think that they can keep up by doing it all by themselves – instead, they use their platform to scale the portal with partners.As a result, today’s mobile and social portals offer distribution to third parties that develop content for their own platforms. In this world, the AppStore is the new Google.But wait,

via Why The Future Of Search May Look More Like Yahoo Than Google | TechCrunch.

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Steven Sinofsky, President of Microsoft’s Windows Division, said that in the Surface tablet “everything Microsoft has done is coming together”. Contrasting with his earlier presentation, the executive appeared relaxed and informal as he demonstrated the £399 tablet that the company hopes will be the best advert for its operating system and accompanying new interface.

Later that evening Microsoft opened a Times Square, New York, store dedicated wholly to its own Surface tablet, making no mention of other manufacturers who are also making Windows 8 devices. The company also took over the bulk of the Square’s advertising, with executives including Sinfosky in attendance. Rival manufacturers have already said that Surface could make them question their relationship with Microsoft, although consumers queued around several blocks to buy the device.

Surface runs a version of the new Windows 8 software called RT, which can’t run existing Windows programmes such as Photoshop and iTunes. It does, however, claim a 10-hour battery life and a unique Soft Cover keyboard that is just 3mm thick.

Although the hardware has been almost universally praised, the software’s lack of apps and occasional holes has been called ‘heart-breaking’ by some critics. Sinofsky said it was “great to see so much passion for the potential” of Surface.

Windows 8 has been subjected to a total of 1.24billion hours of testing in 190 countries, and is forecast to make up the vast bulk of the 400 million computers that will be sold in the next year. In the main presentation in New York, both Sinofsky and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer pointed to the 1,000 products that will be licenced for use with the software when it goes on sale today in more than 200 markets.

via Microsoft pins Windows 8 hopes on Surface – Telegraph.

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Its hard to imagine now, but original sites on the world wide web, written in HTML code or hypertext mark-up language, were made up of little more than text.Continue reading the main storySpecial Report: The Technology of BusinessAngola beats most of Europe to 4GCan social influence sites be trusted?Can images stop data overload?21st Century eureka momentKeep the social media cowboys at bayCorporate web designers were well aware that most of their customers had slow connections and would not tolerate much of a wait.Even a simple black and white image could irritate a user, as it gradually appeared on the screen revealing itself one painful line at a time.That began to change as modem speeds gradually crept up and content makers used more sophisticated methods to encode their multimedia content.Macromedias Flash, now an Adobe product, made all the difference when it arrived in the mid-nineties. Animations, video sequences and graphics became more sophisticated.But since its invention in the early 1990s HTML has not supported video natively.That is why HTML5 is being received so enthusiastically by businesses in particular. The latest version can perform all kinds of dynamic tasks and visual tricks. The web is progressing faster now than it has in a long time.Going nativeApplication developers, like Kevin Sweeney who works at Vimeo, a video-sharing website based in New York, have already embraced the new tools that are built in to HTML5.

Watch the video and full article via BBC News – Coding the future: HTML5 takes the internet by storm.

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Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The decision is designed to limit traffic to the world’s leading BitTorrent site but in the short-term it had the opposite effect. Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks. “We should write a thank you letter to the BPI,” a site insider told TorrentFreak.

Last Friday the UK High Court ruled that several of country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay website having ruled in February that the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.

The blocks – to be implemented by Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media (BT are still considering their position) – are designed to cut off all but the most determined file-sharers from the world’s most popular torrent site.

On hearing the news a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that the measure will do very little to stop people accessing the site and predicted that “the free advertising” would only increase traffic levels.

It’s not possible to buy advertising “articles” from leading UK publications such as the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph, but yesterday The Pirate Bay news was spread across all of them and dozens beside, for free. The news was repeated around the UK, across Europe and around the world reaching millions of people. The results for the site were dramatic.

“Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before,” a Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak today.

“We should write a thank you note to the BPI,” he added.

The blockade, which was not contested by any of the ISPs listed above, will be implemented during the course of the next few weeks. While that time counts down, The Pirate Bay say they are viewing the interim period as an opportunity to educate site visitors on how to deal with censorship by bypassing it.

“Another thing that’s good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship,” the insider added.

In court papers released today, Mr Justice Arnold said that since the terms of the court order (how the blocks would be implemented technically) had been agreed to by the ISPs in question, there was no need for him to detail them in his ruling. However, The Pirate Bay told us that by taking a range of measures, any blocking technique employed by any ISP can be overcome.

Read More on Torrent Freak > > > > Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips | TorrentFreak.

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We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.  And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.

When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance.  One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes.  What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.

There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much.  This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s.  They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes.  They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate.  Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.

As a graduate student, I didn’t have much time for this ecology line of thinking.  I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment.  We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though the sociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts of lottery winners.

As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of technology and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.

More and more in tech, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.

Think of the differences between generations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently from Gen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials.  Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.

Read the full story on Forbes.com > > >  Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years – Forbes.

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Did you know that you can link Youtube videos together to make a little website type of video. When you start playing around with this it gets really addictive and if you are creative then there is a huge opportunity to market your business. Youtube do not allow you to link away from their platform just yet, although that may happen in the future.
I would suggest you start by linking 3 or 4 videos you already have to get used to it, once you have the knack and your creative juices are flowing, who knows what you will produce.

I have tried to include all the information in the videos below, if I missed anything, just use the comments box at the bottom!

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