Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

LG Aims To Double World’s Top Products by 2010
LG Electronics has rolled up its beefy sleeves, raised its fists and shouted, “Come oooonnn!!!! Let’s be ‘aving you!” to the electronics world, declaring its intent to more than double its share of the world’s top products by 2010.
LG vice president Chun Myung-wo gave his best Clint Eastwood squint and socked it to his competitors, “Currently, we have five of the world’s top products. We plan to increase that number to a double-digit figure by 2010 through continuous efforts and innovation.”
With a direct hit on the spittoon, he continued, “By substantially increasing the number of flagship goods through our technological prowess, we aim to evolve into a bona fide powerhouse.’
The electronics sharp-shooter currently hogs the highest global market share of items such as domestic aircon units, optical storage, home theatres, DVD players and code division multiple access (CDMA) handsets, but it wants more. Much more.
Pointing aggressively, Myung-wo says he wants the global market for plasma display panel (PDP) modules, PDP TVs, liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, side-by-side refrigerators, built-in air conditioners and drum washers to be pwned by LG.
Rags to riches
The Korean company has seen a remarkable turnaround of its fortunes over the last decade.
Ten years ago, LG was nothing more than a big fish in a small domestic market, managing only a limited global presence.
A policy of rapid expansion and smarty-pants innovation resulted in LG grabbing the numero uno slot for optical storage in 1998, a position it continues to hold.
Similarly, when it comes to domestic air conditioners, LG rules the roost, and the company is now wrestling for the crown of King of Flat-Panel Displays, knocking out 730,000 plasma units last year to nudge past market leaders Samsung SDI.
“We think that our technical edge will help us win out in the global competition in flat panel display and in other fields both locally and globally,” Chun said, pointing out that the company manufacture the world’s biggest TV set and the smallest one.
LG homepage
19 June, 2006
Bye Bye Record Biz: Analysis
We’re frequently impressed with the observations of Marc Freedman from The Diffusion Group (TDG). This one is going to make for dark reading for those who work at music companies or those who own shares in them. Key quote – Technology has undermined the entertainment industry’s pretense of control despite its best efforts.
Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the RIAA, recently told CNET that digital music sales are “…rising at a value that is larger than the decline in physical sales” and that because of such trends there is “new optimism” for the music industry. Hate to spoil the temporary elation, Mitch, but it may be time to pause and reconsider.
Facing an Unpleasant Truth
A new Pali Capital report, US Digital Track Trends Weakening finds that while paid music download sales continue to grow year-over-year, sales have declined each week during the second quarter and are below last year’s year-to-date average.
Average Weekly Digital Music Single Sales per Four Week Period
(in millions)
1st 4 Weeks
2nd 4 Weeks
3rd 4 Weeks
4th 4 Weeks
2005
7.38
8.08
8.28
8.73
2006
17.56
17.03
16.94
16.68
But wait – doesn’t this data clearly demonstrate that average weekly unit sales have doubled year-over-year? Wow, this is great news! No doubt, but before the music industry pours itself another glass of champagne, we recommend a deeper look at the numbers.
The Pali report states that over the past nine quarters (since Billboard started tracking digital music sales) growth has never been less than 8% sequentially. That is, until now. In other words, for the first time since digital music download tracking was initiated by Billboard, average weekly sales are declining.
As illustrated, average weekly sales during the first four-week periods of 2006 decline from 17.56 million units/week in the 1st period to 16.68 million units/week in the 4th period (a drop of .9 million units or 5.1%). Compare this to average weekly sales for the first four-week periods of 2005 when average weekly sales grew from 7.38 million units/week in the 1st period to 8.73 million units/week in the 4th period (an increase of 1.4 million units or 18.3%).
So What Does Data Really Mean?
Pali’s findings are quite significant and are indicative of a market that may be encountering its first ‘glass ceiling’- for you MBAs in the audience, the S-curve appears to be flattening and a demand asymptote has been reached.
The implications of these findings for the digital music industry are very profound: the hypergrowth of the past few years is over and the buzz that drove digital music sales to new heights has essentially run its course.
Digital music sales rose to a point where they essentially offset the decline in CD sales in 2005. (Bainwol was right on that point, but that was for last year.) With the hypergrowth behind it, digital music sales can no longer make up for the hemorrhaging of physical music sales nor will it return the music industry to its prior glory days.
Moreover, elements such as mobile music downloads, ringtones, and paid P2P will remain ancillary to the overall digital music business equation and, as such, will not make up for the shortfall in revenue. Growth in digital music sales was the primary means of offsetting this negative trend, and without continued growth in download sales, the damage of declines in physical unit sales will be more immediate.
Of course, this is bad news for online music sellers not named after a fruit. One can ignore competition when the market is exploding, but as growth slows and the market matures, competitors eventually find themselves squared off in a zero-sum environment – a context in which one gains market share only by taking it from someone else. In such an environment, branding and integrated offerings become critical to customer acquisition. Wouldn’t you know, these are precisely Apple’s core strengths. Apple may actually benefit from this trend, as it validates Apple’s ‘razor blade’ strategy and underscores the fact that the real money for Apple is in the iPod.
The Long-Term Implications
The long-term message is that the music industry’s real problems can no longer be obscured by success in the digital world. The transition to digital is not a panacea for what ails the music industry – the disease runs much deeper.
Unlike the transition from albums to CDs or video tapes to DVD, ‘going digital’ is not a simple format media transition. The use of digital technologies and the Internet has and will continue to fundamentally change how entertainment is created, stored, distributed, and consumed. Technology has undermined the entertainment industry’s pretense of control despite its best efforts.
For objective observers, there never was any doubt about the decline of the music industry. The predictions were issued several years ago. Since then, industry cutbacks, layoffs, and consolidations have been ongoing. Labels are focusing more on management, multi-channel merchandising, and Internet marketing, efforts which are by and large reactive and incremental.
Ironically, the digital music industry has long cried that “the sky is falling” because of a variety of different threats including piracy, iPod copying, P2P, and so on. But now when it seems the sky may indeed be falling, the industry appears to have gone blind, duped by its “new optimism.”
It’s time to put the rose-colored glasses aside and look at things a bit more closely. The sky does indeed seem to be darkening and this time you can’t wish it away.
Lemming image – credit Josh Neuman
16 June, 2006
NSA To Harvest Social Networks?
Think carefully the next time you edit your Flickr or Myspace profile. New Scientist reported last week that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” For many the move is hardly surprising given the ongoing erosion of personal privacy as a result of 9/11 and makes George Orwell and Philip K Dick’s dark imaginings about the workings of big government (they gave us the concepts of thought-crime and pre-crime respectively) a depressing reality.
Many are saying that it bears all the hallmarks of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program or the “blueprint for the total surveillance society” as it was dubbed by Lee Tien of the EFF. The program aimed to gather digital information from a variety of sources to aid in the tracking and capture of terrorists but was suspended in 2002 after a public outcry over privacy.
The New Scientist report speculates that the NSA plans to use semantic-web tools to plot connections between individuals. A paper promoting just such a process was delivered at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh last month. The paper, titled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, described how conflict of interest in the scientific peer review process could be avoided by plotting the relationships between individuals, by analyzing the RDF tags of data from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social software service and the computer science bibliography website DBLP. New Scientist noted that the research was part-funded by Advanced Research Development Activity who spend the NSA’s research cash.
This news follows the report by USA Today on June 1st that the FBI had asked companies including Google, Microsoft and AOL (amongst others) to store Web usage histories for up to two years to assist with the investigations into child pornography and terrorism. Lee Tien observed that the Justice Department was “asking ISP’s to really become an arm of the government”.
In Europe, the adoption of similar approaches has been attempted with less success. In 2003 the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that the government abandon plans to get ISP’s to store usage data for six years but should still ask the companies to keep data as and when law enforcers required.
The APIG report (PDF), which was delivered ahead of the consultation process for the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) Part 2, made the specific recommendation that
“a specific prohibition should be put into RIPA to prevent access to communications traffic data for ‘predictive use’. If particular patterns of behaviour were highly correlated to criminal behaviour then it might become possible for ‘fishing expeditions’ to detect these patterns to be seen a proportionate action. We agree that this type of access to traffic data raises considerable concern and do not believe it should be permitted under an ‘internal authorisation’ regime.
In September 2005 the European Commission adopted a proposal that would see telecommunications data held for one year and Internet data for six months and, last month, the European Court annulled the agreement which compelled airlines to submit private data on passengers flying to the US.
It’s not just us that thinks that the Global War on Terror has been used by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to infringe personal liberty with precious little evidence of positive results. Privacy groups have warned about the dangers of “automated intelligence profiling” citing the potential for inaccuracies, misuse and abuse.
Governments have hardly proven themselves capable custodians so far. In the UK recent blunders at the Home Office have seen thousands of individuals wrongly branded as criminals due to inefficient manual administration systems. Add government fecklessness to the huge quantity of incomplete, exaggerated and plain wrong data entered by ourselves about ourselves on social software sites and you could have the ingredients for a totalitarian, bureaucratic hell, worthy of Kafka.
12 June, 2006
Anti-DRM FlashMobs Hit Apple Stores
Saturday saw anti-DRM protests at eight Apple stores across the USA organised by DefectiveByDesign, who are running an on-going ‘Campaign to Eliminate DRM.’
The protests took place between 10am and noon, where those involved got dressed up in brightly coloured HazMat (hazardous material) suits, stood outside the shops carrying placards and handing out leaflets.
They argue that it is unreasonable, among other things, that purchasers of music tracks on iTunes are not able to resell their music once they have finished with it – a right they previously had when they used to buy physical media.
Where as to most people DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, Defective By Design label it ‘Digital Restrictions Management.’ Their particular beef with Apple is that, because of the use of DRM, Apple are locking-in people who buy music tracks at the iTunes store.
It’s the first time we’ve heard to a flashmob being used for anything approaching useful.
Being online-types there’s loads of media to look at whether is be photos and a number of videos from Chicago and San Francisco.

List of Apple stores affected
Apple Store – 1 Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Apple Store – 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
Apple Store – 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105
Apple Store – 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141
Apple Store – 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153
Apple Store – 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h
Apple Store – 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093
Apple Store – 189 The Grove Drive Los Angeles, CA 90036
DefectiveByDesign call to arms
12 June, 2006
Billy Bragg vs MySpace
There’s mutterings of some discontent around MySpace, the insanely popular social site.
Billy Bragg, well known in the UK for his rebel-rousing tunes, has taken a stance against MySpace by removing his music in protest of MySpace’s Terms and Conditions.
Bragg and ‘his people’ posted a comment on their MySpace blog (we do love it when a companies tools are used against them), decrying what they say are completely unreasonable terms.
TERMS: (as of 17th March 2006)
By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully- paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the Content posted by you may remain on the MySpace.com servers after you have removed the Content from the Services, and MySpace.com retains the rights to those copies.
The summary? MySpace can exploit the music/content that is put on the site, worldwide, without payment – and sub-license it infinitely.
The original Bragg posting was made back in mid-may, but was highlighted when it was picked up by the New York Daily News this week.
Since then, there have been many announcing the impending death of MySpace with thoughts that all musicians would follow suit and MySpace would implode. As yet we haven’t seen any signs of this.
It appears that MySpace didn’t intend to own everything and are putting it down to sloppy lawyering and say they intend to straighten things out. MySpace spokesman Jeff Berman, told the New York Daily News, “Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist’s work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends,” adding the all important. “Obviously, we don’t own their music or do anything with it that they don’t want.”
There’s a difficult balance to be had here. Clearly MySpace is putting out millions of musicians tracks daily and needs to be able to do this, without having a separate contract with each artist. Running alongside this need is the equally important need not to terrify the musicians into thinking that all of their music are belong to us (MySpace).
Billy Bragg’s MySpace
9 June, 2006
Mobile Consumers Are Lapping Up Convergence
Sad but (supposedly) true: a new study by Nokia has found that over one in five mobile owners said they’d find losing their phone more upsetting than their wallet, credit cards and – unbelievably – even their wedding ring.
Tempted though we are to find those people and give them a reality-introducing slap around the face with a wet fish, the survey does reflect the growing importance of mobiles in everyday life.
Clicking ticking mobiles
Nearly half (44 per cent) of mobile owners now use them as their primary camera – 68 per cent in India – with over two thirds predicting that music-enabled mobiles will soon rule the world, replacing MP3 players like iPods.
It doesn’t look like a good time to invest in Timex stocks, with the study finding that seventy two percent of mobile users no longer own a separate alarm clock – and nearly three quarters use their phones as their main watch or clock.
Nokia commissioned the research in 11 countries around the globe to discover people’s attitudes towards current and future mobiles, and generally found that people *heart* the things the planet over.
Such is the love for mobiles that users want to see them integrated even closer with their lives, with 42 per cent wanting their phones to be able to chat to their home networks, printer, PC, stereo, TV and mobile devices.
Curiously, 72 per cent of Saudi Arabians also wanted their fridges to be included in this network.
Surfing on the move
Mobile surfing continues to rise in popularity, with over a third (36%) of respondents browsing on their mobiles at least once a month, with Japan going for it big time, with 37% going online daily.
“The results strongly demonstrate that people are buying into the idea of convergence – they really do want one device that does it all, from taking quality images, to storing their music collections and operating a digitally connected home,” commented Tapio Hedman, senior vice-president of marketing, multimedia at Nokia.
Nokia
7 June, 2006
A Third Of UK Business Employ Email Snoopers
New research from messaging security specialists Proofpoint has revealed that more than a third of blue-chip companies in both the US and UK hire dedicated staff to snoop on their employee’s emails.
Their survey of 112 “email decision makers” at UK enterprises with 1,000+ employees found that 38 per cent of firms employed staff to read, analyse or generally sniff about outbound emails from staff (a figure that rises to 40 per cent for companies with more than 20,000 employees.)
A total of nearly 62 per cent UK companies were found to perform regular audits of outbound email content.
UK companies estimate that nearly 1 in 5 outgoing emails contains content that poses a “legal, financial or regulatory risk” with the most common form of non-compliant email content containing “adult, obscene or potentially offensive” content (or, more likely, staff trying to lighten the misery of their dull jobs by sharing a joke).
With companies becoming more concerned about internal security breaches rather than external threats, 34 per cent of companies claimed that their business was impacted by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information over the last year.
With all this secret email snooping going on, bosses have been delivering “You’re Fired!” messages with gusto, with more than one in three sacking an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months.
There’s also been lots of finger wagging going off in the boss’s office, with over 70 per cent of UK companies disciplining an employee for violating email policies in the last year,
The report goes on to sat that just over a fifth of UK companies have given employees a shoutdown for violating blog or message board policies in the past 12 months, with 3.6 per cent getting the boot for their troubles.
Fear the email
Nearly half of UK companies declared themselves to be concerned about Web-based email being used to send confidential or proprietary information, with 81.3 per cent saying that it is “important” to reduce the legal and financial risks associated with outbound email in the next 12 months.
Of course, it’s worth noting that the folks who commissioned the survey – Proofpoint – just happen to run a business offering secure/filtered messaging systems, so it might be an idea to seek out the saltcellar when reading their report.
Email-free workzones
Looking to the future, Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, sees the automated blocking of outbound mail as the future security choice for most companies, as it would sidestep the current grey area concerning the legality of monitoring personal emails.
Quite how they’d the deal with terminally bored employees deprived of a lifeline to the real world may be another matter though.
Proofpoint
7 June, 2006
Google, The Next Dark Empire? Pt2
Google Earth/Maps
If you haven’t heard of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) you’re not a techie. It’s the buzzword of the moment and Google Maps uses it brilliantly (Google Mail is another example). It’s pretty old technology that uses the power of the client to locally render information delivered by the server. With Google Maps the browser loads a small Javascript application and sends data/requests back to the server which then delivers the next bit of data which the client then renders i.e. moving around a map.Google Earth is the next step in actually showing satellite data of the area you’re looking at (you can see cars parked in your street). Why would they want to offer these services? More advertising. Do a map search and you can also see information on local services (or restaurants, petrol stations, bars etc).They are both very powerful, easy-to-use apps. Google Calendar
Google’s latest AJAX application, Outlook calendaring but hosted centrally so it can be accessed from anywhere. Of course it’s more than just a calendar as it allows subscription to other calendar/events, sharing of calendaring information and even mobile synchronisation.Privacy
There’s been a lot of media interest in what information Google store about you as they could abuse it and the authorities could request it to see what you’ve been doing. It’s uncertain how much information they do store, but it could be quite considerable. They actually might not know it’s you personally, but your computer. Google uses cookies which are used to track your personalisation settings, but they can store a lot more info, though Google are likely to just use the cookie as the identifier which enables them to quickly personalise things.Just looking at the information they could store when you do a search, it’s the search criteria itself, then which sites you clicked through to. But that can be combined with other info like what Google Map info you looked at, who you emailed through Google Mail and your previous search history. That may lead to a bleak picture if you’re committing illegal acts.The other side to it all is that the processing of all this information is extremely resource hungry and though Google are particularly good at correlating information, they might not bother. They will for some aspects, but most of the time it’s probably not worth it and they’ll keep succinct summarized information.If the authorities want to know what your doing, it’s actually much easier for them to go to your ISP and request the information from them (if they are running caching equipment which speeds up Web access for all users, they don’t just know what searches you’ve been doing, but every Website you’ve accessed and everything you’ve down or uploaded).The Future
Google are encroaching into territory that used to be securely within the MS domain, desktop search and now IM. In the IM market they’re using open protocols which will gather traction from both the open source community and allow interesting applications to spawn from it.With things like Google Maps/Earth, searching has been moved from the electronic (or Internet) world to the real world. Google are already toying with mobile, but you can be sure that’s the space they’ll enter next.Imagine your smartphone or PDA with a local Google application installed. As you move around, it uses location based services and delivers relevant local information straight to the device. Looking for a restaurant? It’s got Google Talk too, so you can chat or really talk to the restaurant and book a table before you get there. Google are going to dominate the desktop and the mobile space and it’ll all happen in the background.Microsoft must be quaking as Google are their biggest threat.Let’s hope the Google Empire is benevolent and doesn’t become an evil behemoth.References
GMail Drive shell extension
2 June, 2006
Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications
“Would you like a single piece of sheet music that contains all your favourite pieces, and never needs to be turned over?”
Well, duh! yes, of course. No musician has ever been born who didn’t burst into a fury of invective when playing a piece from music, when the page turned itself back three seconds after you turned it over. No musician has ever been born who didn’t lose a sheet of music. No player has ever failed to snap the spine of a book of music, trying to get it to stay on the page you’re playing.
I work with e-paper – a lot. Of course, there is none on the market yet, apart from something pretty primitive from Sony and something slightly less primitive from iRex; but I spend my time playing with the products of 2008 – and this week, I got to see some of them “in the flesh” as part of a design competition at the London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. And it was astonishing to me just how many bright ideas are buried in the simple concept of an e-Page.
An e-Page is related to the concept of an e-book reader in the same way that an iPod is related to a CD player. Each is a use of e-paper, designed as part of an entire ecosphere; with authors, distributors, performers and hardware makers and customers all considered, fitted into the big picture, and happy with innovative leaps into the wonderful future.
The universal piece of music wasn’t even the first prize winner in this competition. It was a contest sponsored by one of the world’s leading e-paper technology designers, Plastic Logic, which has demonstrated a flexible sheet of A5 “paper” that has the contrast and readability of real paper, the flexibility of soft cardboard, and the power consumption of a watch. And the prize went to something that is, in the end, “just a book.”
I can’t give all the secrets of the contest away; Plastic Logic is planning a press announcement for later this week, where all the short-listed entries will be showcased. My job was to be one of the judges of the competition (in my role as Founder of AFAICS Research along with my partner, Nick Hampshire, and Tony Chambers, Creative Director of Wallpaper – as well as a senior executive from Plastic Logic, and technology evangelist and financier, Herman Hauser of Amadeus Capital. They were there to make sure the technology was of value in the market, of course.
But it was a genuine eye-opener for me.
When you invent a new technology, you always start off by producing something which you know has a market already, and which you think you can do better.
For example, if you wander around the woollen mills of the early industrial revolution, you’ll see machinery which faithfully replicates the actions and movements of the people who wound bobbins or spun thread. I remember seeing one room full of spindles that “walked across the room” the way a human would have done, winding up wool, then walked back to the wall pulling out a few new feet of thread, before winding up again.
Similarly, the first e-paper concepts take things which are made of paper, and where it’s more robust to use e-paper. One concept that was actually my favourite, was a replacement for tags for patients. In a sense, you could say “It gets rid of the printer” and at a simple level, that’s exactly what it does. But it does far more; because the data is held in digital form, it’s machine readable as well as machine writeable, and the whole thing becomes part of a holistic system.
After the afternoon’s judging, I went home, with my mind buzzing. We sat down and had an impromptu Board Meeting of AFAICS Research, and hopefully, over the next few weeks, I’ll be able to pass on some of our ideas. But the nub of it is: “We really need to start planning the e-Page industry!” because if we don’t, we’re going to end up with a hundred pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, none of which make up the same picture.
2 June, 2006
Google, The Next Dark Empire?
Google, a name synonymous with Internet searching, is now permeating the desktop. Currently it’s the PC (i.e. Windows environment) they’re moving into, but Apple Macs and even Linux are the likely next moves.
Microsoft (MS) has traditionally owned the operating system (OS) and many of the applications, but Google’s new tools allow searching in that space without having to directly access any of the aging empire’s software directly.
Google Desktop Search
The newest version (2) has the option of a sidebar or deskbar and searches can be entered directly into these. It also installs a search bar into Outlook. It’s possible to directly search items using these without ever going through the Windows “Start” menu. Whereas MS has had tools such as Lookout (actually produced by another company, which MS bought) which allowed searching in Outlook, it’s no longer needed as Google does a better job and searches more file types.
There are potential privacy concerns as Google will search Email, Chats, Web history, Media files, Text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Journal and other files and send relevant info back to Google, however that can be turned off.
Once Desktop is started it sits there a while locally indexing the info and then searches are very fast, new files are indexed as they are created or arrive etc. Google Talk
Though Google Desktop (ableit in an more limited form) has been around for a while, Google Talk is new and is their take on the Instant Messaging world.
The client is quite basic, it currently supports simple chat and voice. You need a Google Mail login to use the service (GMail accounts now support 2.5GB as standard) and it can check your GMail inbox. Chats can now be logged into the Google Mail system.
The voice quality is superb, Google have licensed some pretty good codecs (the software that translates analogue voice into digital form or vice versa) and it’s as good as Skype if not better.
Google Talk actually uses the XMPP open protocol (better known as Jabber) so any Jabber client can be used with Google’s server (including Gaim for various platforms and Apple’s iChat for Macs), though voice functionality is currently only available with their own client. However, that’s about to change as Google have released ‘libjingle’ a programming library which implements their voice services so others can incorporate them into their IM clients.
Jabber allows server connectivity to other networks and sure enough Google have just enabled this feature, so Google users can chat with Jabber users on other Jabber networks (if the other network connects).
Since the client is only v1, new functionality will be added as time passes, one can only wonder what but it’s likely they’ll be some form of search capabilities, maybe even adwords based on the conversations that are taking place.
Jabber itself has a lot more to offer itself, like conference rooms, which Google are sure to implement.
Google Mail
Another service that’s been around for a while (and again sparked heated privacy debates) Google Mail or GMail now offers 2.5GB of mail storage. The premise is you never delete mail, but just keep everything. All mail arrives in your INBOX, but then it can be sorted using various criteria and moved to various folders.
This concept isn’t new, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, now long gone) had this idea with their Altavista mail service, whereby all mail arrived in your INBOX and the client just put everything in the right place. Google just got it right and made it a Web service.
Some people will use all their space, but many struggle to use even a small percentage of it. An enterprising developer has made an application that allows Windows XP users to utilise it as a remote file store with drag and drop capabilities. There’s no guarantee it will keep working as Google can alter their systems at anytime. There’s a link at the end of the article.
Part two of this article will be out tomorrow.
GoogleMail
GoogleTalk
1 June, 2006

	1st 4 Weeks	2nd 4 Weeks	3rd 4 Weeks	4th 4 Weeks
2005	7.38	8.08	8.28	8.73
2006	17.56	17.03	16.94	16.68