Category: Web

AOL’s New Stand-alone Browser

AOL are working on a new own-brand web browser just as the browser wars enter a new phase. Recently, Microsoft really has shot itself in the foot – it looked like the once-bitter war was over and that just about everyone had given in to browsing and authoring the web according to Internet Explorer… but then massive security gaffs prompted users to look elsewhere.

Let’s face it, no-one dumps IE because of a lack of features – Microsoft’s browser supports just about every technology available on the web today. Users migrate to other browsers because they’re sick of having spyware and malicious scripts installed on their PCs through the many still unfixed security flaws in Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s loss is Firefox and Safari’s gain, and the forgotten conflict for the top browser spot has been reignited.

AOL Browser, as it has been imaginatively titled, is based around IE at its core, but introduces a number of new features. Amongst them is the currently fashionable, try it once and you’ll never want to go back, tabbed browsing feature currently employed in Firefox and Safari. Instead of launching a number of instances of the browser to view multiple pages, surfers can keep everything in one window and tab between them – and even tear off tabs to drag into a new window if required.

The new browser will also incorporate Microsoft’s pop-up blocker, introduced in recent updates. The blocker simply does not execute scripts that launch a new child window unless you specifically click on a link to do so. Power Browsing features let users zoom in and out of pages and use high contrast colours for the vision impaired.

No doubt AOL’s decision to base their new offering on IE was helped by their right to use Microsoft’s browser without paying royalties for the next six years, as part of a US$750 million (€604 million) anti-trust settlement won by Netscape.

The browser will not be integrated into AOL’s software, and won’t even be tied to AOL’s internet service and content, it will instead be available as a free download to everyone. This would bring the AOL branding to a much wider audience, and encourage surfers to try out AOL’s services and features.

Google has recently denied a forthcoming GBrowser, but let’s face it – if they managed to code a secure browser that supported web standards with proper Java and plug-in support, no-one else, Microsoft included, would stand a chance.

AOL

OFT’s Spam Crackdown

The Office of Fair Trading, a UK government organisation set up to protect consumers, has launched a new initiative to protect internet users from spam and misleading websites. The OFT are promoting global co-operation at a conference in London today bringing together consumer protection, data protection and telecommunications agencies from more than 20 countries.

John Vickers, OFT Chair, said in a statement: “Spam is not just annoying and intrusive. It gets in the way of legitimate e-commerce, and is often a vehicle for scams and computer viruses. International collaboration by enforcement agencies, the efforts of the computer and communications industries, and smart consumers at home (who take steps to protect themselves) are all needed to combat the internet scammers.”

To date, the OFT has fought a couple of successful actions against spammers and scam sites – but with a lack of results from other global initiatives, it remains to be seen if this latest conference will have any effect. Global spam traffic increases every week, and the numbers of scam sites, viruses and spyware applications is simply going up, not down.

The OFT’s main policy at the moment is to educate the public – their site has the usual hints and advice for email and web users, but these are hardly “tips to help you fight back”. A spam filter is not “fighting back” by any definition. Fighting back would be giving the anti-spam laws some teeth, and giving global law enforcement agencies the funding and co-ordination to combat spam at it source.

The OFT

US Government Sues its First Spyware Merchant

The US Federal Trade Commission has struck its first blow against spyware manufacturers by shutting down the Seismic Entertainment Productions and smartbot.net.

Seismic are accused of producing and secretly installing a spyware application that nagged users to buy an anti-spyware product from the company. In effect, the application was creating a problem for the PC user and then require US$30 (€24) for removal. The complaint was brought forward by a Washington-based consumer group, the Centre for Democracy and Technology.

The individual behind Seismic is Sanford Wallace, who has been accused of illegal practices and pursued by anti-spam authorities for the past few years. He is currently looking for sympathy on his personal website, and has published the following statement:

“We believe the U.S. government is attempting to enforce federal laws that have yet to be enacted. We feel this is a political move and it is being made at the expense of legal business operations. I am not surprised at all that my companies and I, Sanford Wallace, were picked as the ‘poster boy.’ I find the timing and target of this action to be extremely convenient and painfully obvious. We deny any wrongdoings and plan to pursue all legal protections, remedies and freedoms.”

Given the number of people he’s upset in the past, he’ll have a tough job, but there is currently no anti-spyware legislation in the US – the FTC moved against Wallace under legislation relating to deceptive business practices.

FTC’s media advisory on the Wallace case

Sanford Wallace. Background on Wikipedia

Rod Stewart to Webcast Invite-Only Concert

Little did I know when I woke up this morning that I’d be writing an article about pretend Scotsman and sometime popular singer, Rod Stewart – but then life’s funny that way.

Rod will be webcasting his next gig – an invitation-only affair at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre – on AOL. The concert will also mark the release of his latest album, The Great American Songbook, Volume III. Some tickets are available through radio station competitions and give aways, and through his fan club also.

The concert will be webcast live on October 18th at 9pm EST on AOL Music and you can find it using the AOL Keyword “Rod Stewart”.

Rod Stewart

Google Launches Google Print

Researching things on the web is an essential part of everyday business – but too often books and other printed sources get left behind.

Google’s aim is possibly one of the the most daring and challenging I’ve seen announced by any company: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To bring them another step forward, Larry Sage and Sergey Brin announced Google Print, at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Designed to help people discover books , Google Print allows users to search across the full text of entire books. Sadly, as with Amazon’s own book search facility, users cannot read or download the entire book, but there are links to buy a copy. Printing and image copying is blocked on book pages returned from searches. So you don’t read an entire book for free by doing multiple searches on the same title, Google keeps a watch on the number of pages you’ve viewed from a particular book – though this is not associated with user information, so no one can tell what books you’re looking at online.

Google is encouraging publishers to send copies of their books to Google for scanning and indexing, free of charge – the company hopes that it will make revenue from advertising on the search pages, and from the links to online book sellers. Currently, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic and Penguin are amongst the first publishers to submit titles for inclusion in Google’s new venture.

Handy if you’re looking for something that might be contained in a book that’s in print, but what about the many thousands of books that are out of print? There’s no incentive for publishers to put books they don’t intend to reprint online, as there’s no physical book to sell through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Making out of print titles available electronically for a fee really would be a step towards making the world’s information universally accessible as they account for millions of pages of text that is currently hidden from any search engine.

Try Google Print

RealArcade Celebrates 150 Million Downloads

RealNetworks are celebrating the 150 millionth game download through their RealArcade service. Founded in 2001, RealArcade now serves about 1.8 million downloads every week, from a catalogue of over 250 titles. With RealNetworks claiming 45 million downloads of the Arcvade client itself, that means that the average user has downloaded just over three games each.

RealArcade’s games are aimed at casual, pick up and play gaming – you won’t find any Final Fantasy VIIs there as the company wants to cater to customers who just fancy a quick blast of something. Popular titles on RealArcade include Jewel Quest, Shape Shifter, and the favourite in August, Feeding Frenzy. I might download Insaniquarium Deluxe just for the title alone.

“Millions of everyday people are experiencing games for grownups because they find casual games to be simple, accessible, friendly entertainment for the whole family to play,” said Andrew Wright, vice president of games for RealNetworks Inc in a statement: “We’ve been able to capture a lot of that growth at RealArcade by offering a product that consumers consistently rank as one of the best on the Web.”

An internal survey from Real indicates that two thirds of Arcade’s customers are women, and two-thirds of those have children. Almost half of RealArcade’s users say they visit every day, showing that the site is definitely “sticky”.

RealNetworks quite research from IDC: “Against common expectations, this market isn’t comprised of the ‘typical’ gamer, but rather a diverse spectrum of players who would never consider themselves to be gamers. As a result, this market has grown explosively by successfully tapping into new markets,” said Schelley Olhava, of IDC. “Double digit growth rates in the paid downloadable games space alone will result in U.S. revenues of $760 million (€619 million) by 2007.”

The RealArcade platform is DirectX-based, making development of new games, and porting existing titles simpler, but limits the platform to Windows PCs only.

Real Arcade

Netflix’s Subscriber Growth

Netflix have released their latest subscriber numbers, and whilst the company’s user base has certainly grown, the future is certainly in online movie delivery.

Netflix had 2.23 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2004 – up 73% from 1.29 million on its books at the end of Q3 2003. Only 4% of its current subscriber base are on free trials, and those 96% of paying subs brought in a projected US$21 million in Q3 2004.

Netflix’s current business model is to rent up to three DVDs at a time to customers via the postal service. With the growth of home broadband, sending films out in the mail evidently has a limited lifespan, and so the company recently partnered with TiVo in a venture to designed to switch the delivery mechanism to online – finally putting the “Net” in “Netflix”.

However, the company believes that their 25,000 title DVD library still has some legs on it – CFO Barry McCarthy commented in a statement: “Three years ago we shortened the estimated useful life for our DVD rental library from three years to one year. For a young company with limited operating experience, that accounting estimate was management’s best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content at that time. However, with several years of operating history behind us and based on analysis of this historical data, management’s current best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content is three years.”

SG Cowen and Co. report that things won’t be so simple for Netflix, and that they will face stiff competition from Blockbuster when they go online – Blockbuster’s brand and market share will impact Netflix’s subscriber base, both in its DVD by post and online rental business, over the next few quarters.

Netflix

Yahoo’s Personalised Search

Yahoo have been fine-tuning their portal and search offering of late, as part of an effort to fend off new rivals and reduce the gap with Google. Their new wheeze is personalised searching – allowing users to save results that they find most useful, attach notes to saved searches and share results with other users via email. Yahoo promise not to harvest submitted email addresses for marketing purposes.

Saving search results is quite handy, but then if I’m impressed by a page I generally bookmark it anyway, making the save feature less useful. Being able to attach notes to results makes the feature more relevant, but then again being able to export the notes and results to a word processor would make it even better.

Saved pages go to a MyWeb section in Yahoo, with details on how pages were found in the first place. Users can categorise results to make navigation easier, but as it stands this is just like a slightly more useful version of bookmarking pages. Pages and results that you don’t want can be blocked from future searches, making whittling down answers much easier.

Links and notes can be shared from MyWeb, though I feel that Yahoo have missed a trick – I would like to see what searches and pages other Yahoo users have stored, and would like to share my information with them – almost like Apple’s iMix feature in their music store. As it stands, I can only email links to people I know and can’t publish my search for other people to use. How much time would you save if you could consult someone else’s tailored search, complete with notes?

Yahoo’s MySearch

BT Bars Scam Diallers… For Now

BT has responded to the growing problem of rogue telephone diallers by blocking 1,000 premium rate numbers used by the downloaded applets.

Diallers are generally installed without a computer users knowledge, often through a website or as part of an application or virus. The dialler then replaces the users’ ISP details and instead access the internet using an expensive premium rate number. BT admit that they have dealt with 45,000 complaints from subscribers who have fallen victim to this scam, with another 9,000 cases pending.

With the offending numbers blocked, diallers will not be able to get through – for the time being. This is only a temporary fix – new diallers are released almost daily and I’m sure it might take somewhere in the region of about a week for someone to come up with a dialler that can check a regularly updated table of numbers that haven’t been blocked yet. Putting BT and its subscribers back where they started.

Realistically, the only way round this is for concerned subscribers to block access to all premium-rate numbers – which can be inconvenient. BT report that some 1.5 million customers currently use this approach, and the company provides premium-rate number blocking as a free service.

Gavin Patterson, BT’s group managing director for consumer and venture business said in a statement: “We have taken the decision to block numbers suspected of being associated with diallers as soon as we are alerted to a problem. We have offered free premium rate barring to all customers, and a removable bar for premium rate and international calls for UK£1.75 (€2.54)a month. We have made it clear that we are not the ones profiteering from people’s misfortune. In fact, we will continue to forego our share of the call revenue generated by these disputed calls.

“We will be emailing all of our dial-up customers again to give them advice on how to avoid falling victim to a dialler, because customers need to take action as well to protect themselves, as we believe many cases aren’t fraud but are due to a lack of awareness from customers. In fact, we are seeing that many cases are cleared up when we explain where these charges have come from, which underlines our view that there needs to be greater awareness of how these services operate.”

BT comment on diallers

Vivisimo’s Clusty Takes on Google

Search engine company Vivisimo have launched the beta of their new Clusty search engine, and it’s open to the public to try out.

Clusty’s main selling point is that it clusters results into separate categories, hopefully making it easier for users to sift through searches that return hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of results. For example, a search run today for Kubrick returned 182 initial results – but Clusty split those for me into ten categories, including Film-maker, Space Odyssey and DVD. More categories were available if I wanted them, and could be applied to the entire 200,000+ results returned.

Vivisimo have gone for the current fashion of a simple, uncluttered search page, though there is something about it that says “Ask Jeeves” to me. The search box itself has a a row of tabs across the top, allowing users to search for different formats of information, including News, Images, Shopping and, a new one, Gossip.

As search engine catalogues get bigger and, inevitably, more the same, the big brand search engines need to provide a unique benefit or reason for people to stay loyal. Hence the recent introduction of new features such thumbnail views of web pages, multimedia searching and new ways of navigating the millions of results returned. Whilst Clusty acquires its search results themselves from a number of other engines, Vivisimo’s clustering technology is proprietary and is fully automated – no maintenance is required and the company claims that it can cluster any type of textual information with little or no customisation.

The clustering feature is interesting – but is it really enough to distinguish it from Google? And without patenting the concept, what’s to stop Google from developing its own clustering technology and staying out in front? Or just licensing it? However, Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo is sure it’s enough to win them new fans.

“The success of today’s search technology has left users awash in information,” he said, “The net result is that users cannot or will not wade through all of the options a search engine offers up. The fast and friendly Clusty.com puts users back in control and ensures that they truly know the full extent of resources that are available to them in the vast online world. Clusty also helps them zero in on what they were looking for and, often, leads them to discover new things along the way.”

Try Clusty for yourself