Four of the top newspaper companies in the country have teamed-up and invested in ad network, quadrantONE. The New York Times Company, Gannett, Hearst Corp. and the Tribune Company will work on offering a more effective and more attractive package for advertisers that target a wider public audience. The four companies will launch a coordinated advertising sales network by pooling together their inventories to offer a more attractive package for advertisers looking to reach a national audience.

SOURCE: Internetnews

Oracle recently released its latest version of its software, Identity Manager. For those who are new to this, it’s a user provisioning and administration software application that enables companies to update, upgrade, and add or remove user accounts from other applications and directories. Oracle states that the latest version of Identity Manager improves compliance since it provides “granular” reports which identified which users has access to specific data and other pertinent and sensitive information – which has always been a challenge for companies who wish to meet “regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley, FFIEC and PCI.”

SOURCE: Internetnews

Today when organizations are distributed at various locations, getting everyone together is a bit difficult at times. For instance, in case of most of the organizations, sometimes half of the team of a company would be based somewhere in the US, and half in some other part of the world. In such cases, web conferencing is a savior! Web conferencing technology is now a mainstream medium through which individuals or groups can meet face-to-face in real time to interact.

Web conferencing technology supports sharing of slides (PDF and PPT), video, whiteboard, chat, voice using Asterisk PBX, and desktops.

Web Conferencing features include the following:
• Asterisk based web conferencing allows instantaneous conference calling where the user can select any group of contacts, or any e-mail or calendar appointment and automatically initiate a conference call to all the recipients
• Web conferencing allows to join the Asterisk VOIP based voice conference from within the client using a built-in SIP phone
• Hosted Asterisk based web conferencing allows chat with other users including private chat
• Web conferencing facilitates to view the presenter’s slides and cursor
• It helps share a video stream (webcam) with other participants
• Web conferencing also facilitates uploading of slides (PDF or any office document supported by Open Office)
• In web conferencing, the presenter can mute or eject listeners from the voice conference. In web conferencing, the presenter can share their desktop (yes, even on Linux).

Also, don’t forget to enjoy the benefits of the best application hosting solutions, such as hosted VOIP PBX, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, etc., which has become the preferred way for companies to implement business software.

Is this even possible? According to The Business Roundtable which is an association of CEO�s of established US companies, the threat is �urgent and real.� The breakdown of such critical information infrastructure has a 10 to 20% chance of happening in the next ten years. This can be a result of many incidences. It can be natural such as calamities or even man-made disasters such as malicious codes, code errors, or terrorist attacks.

The group also stated that an Internet meltdown, if it would ever happen, will result in reduced productivity. Profits will fall as well as stock prices. Consumer spending will erode and a liquidity crisis has a big possibility of happening. This was also discussed in �Growing Business Dependence on the Internet � New Risks Require CEO Action� � a Business Roundtable report based on earlier risk analyses done by the World Economic Forum in Geneva.

Source: ComputerWorld

Green Bay and Milwaukee Wisconsin are pretty lucky as people there will now be able to avail of HBO on Broadband. HBO subscribers and Time Warner high-speed Internet and roadrunner.com Internet service users will be able to avail of this particular service. About 600 titles and 400 hours of content such as documentaries, movies, and special HBO original series can now be downloaded. There will also be entire sets of HBO series available every month, not to mention trailers upcoming shows.

Hopefully this service courtesy will soon be brought out to other markets and talks with other local cable operators for some expansion.

Source: Market Watch

Poor old television has just lost to the Internet according to a survey released by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA). Apparently, a majority of the 7,000 survey participants in 10 European go online between five and seven days a week. Only 77 percent watch television just as often with 48 percent saying that their TV consumption has been reduced because of the Internet. A European teen spends an average of 11.9 hours of Internet time every week. 32 percent of the respondents cite the e-mail as particularly indispensable. Participating countries were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.

I wonder what the results will be like in the rest of the world. I guess it must be the same. I myself don�t even watch TV anymore. And if I do access my TV, it�s to watch DVD�s. Ask me about the recent TV commercials and I won�t be able to answer you. I even get my news over the Internet.

Source: Yahoo! News

If you’ve noted that there seems to have been some sort of email silence coming from your Indian or Mid Eastern counterpart, don’t be angry. They’re not under some tight government censorship of any kind. They’re having a small problem: they have been disconnected from the World Wide Web because of two damaged undersea cables in the Mediterranean.

There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.
UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centres have been affected by the outage.
Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.
International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Not to worry though as the repair team are on their way to make the internet service available to the affected parties.

Source

To most people, the Internet is simple a wide area of space given by technology which can do no harm. Wrong! It can also be a disastrous way of losing your earnings and sanity. You just have to be aware of the scams going on in the web.

Meeting people on the Internet is fine. But the thing is, you have to be wise when dealing with them. Internet strangers should be treated in the same way that we do to people in real life. Refrain from being too close and divulging personal information temporarily. Give it time and then re-evaluate if you can really trust your cyber mate.

(Source) Boston Globe

Thanks to gamers from all over and l33t-speak (that�s hacker language for the laymen out there) shout — “w00t!” — has just been named as the “Word of the Year” by the Merriam-Webster Online Web Site. According to the Merriam-Webster Web site, the word �w00t!� (spelled with two zero�s instead of two letter O�s) is an acronym for �We owned the other team,� but is mainly used as an interjection to express joy, most especially in the case of triumph.

Such as other coded languages, l33t-speak was developed for exclusivity so as to make it harder to detect hackers� online conversations. And as the nature of speakers of coded languages, despite the popularity of “w00t!,� I�m sure that these guys have moved on and have coined another term to substitute for it. But I�m sure that whatever that new term is, it would eventually get out of its exclusivity and may even be the next catch phrase of 2008.

Source: Yahoo! News

Yep, those bloody pirates have struck again! But the British police were right to save the day as they conducted a dawn raid in Cardiff, Welsh and arrested three people suspected of involvement in Internet-based music and film piracy rings. Two men (one of which is the ring leader) and a woman were said to be part of the biggest suppliers of pirated music and films in Britain, earning about 3,000 pounds (6,173 $) a month. Now I understand how these cyber thieves find the piracy business a lucrative one. Too bad it�s considered illegal and unethical. But piracy is not going to end unless people stop buying from them. Just some food for thought, folks.

Source: Reuters