TechTakes

Media Monday – Print Blues and Online News

What a morning for media news – and I've just gotten through the New York Times. Who would be surprised that print journalism continues to lose advertising revenue to online search? Not many – but the numbers are shocking and the prognosis dire. Look for consolidation and failure to dominate the newspaper industry over the next couple of years, even as the journalism schools at Columbia and the City University of New York will receive $8 million from Dr. Leonard Tow to figure out how what's going on and how to plan the funeral for print journalism. Eric Pfanner reports that advertising executives "fear that [Google and Microsoft] want to extend their reach into traditional advertising" – and while some quotes in his article have a let's-make-nice ring, I doubt anyone other than Pollyanna is fooled. Meanwhile, internet users are spending more time watching online video, and live music and music downloads continue to displace CD sales as consumers shift their preferences. And while they are online, news outlets are struggling with ethical questions about control of information flow (following Tim Russert's untimely death) and catching politicians with their pants down, as the Huffington Post's Mayhill Fowler did recently.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking . . . and More

First keyboards. Then the mouse. Then touch screens. Now, multi-touch screens handling input from many fingers, many people, many locations, doing strange and wonderful things that until now have been buried in the arcane menus, commands, and instruction sets of complex software applications. The July 2008 issue of Scientific American has an article about the emergence of this new technology, already in use in high-end applications, that in the next three to five years will probably reach consumer-level pricing. The most popular example already in use: Apple's iPhone. Other highly visible applications: weather and voting results news broadcasts. Read all about it, and think about how multi-touch screens (we need a better name) will change your computer use at home or in your business. And be sure to check out the great video clip on Perceptive Pixel's web site, the company started by Jeff Han, whose pioneering work is at the root of this innovation.

SMS Messages Have Privacy Protections, Court Rules

The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that text messages are private communications. The court also ruled that service providers handling such messages are subject to the Stored Communications Act. This means that service providers cannot release the contents of text messages without the consent of the sender or receiver, even in cases where the device is provided to an employee by an employer. Ruling that the communications themselves are protected under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, employers seeking to determine whether messages are business or personal in nature can only seek redacted information such as the number called or the time of the messages, and not the contents of the messages themselves. In the event a crime is suspected, a search warrant may be requested seeking access to message contents. Thanks to K.C. Jones of Information Week for this item.

Increased Fraud Protection from EBay and PayPal

According to an article released by the Associated Press and published in today's New York Times, EBay and PayPal are taking aim at traditional credit card vendors by increasing protections for both buyers and sellers who use PayPal as a payment method. They're removing limits on full refunds to buyers if a purchase is not delivered, and eliminating reversal charges to sellers if a delivery fails or buyers claim that they never received the item. These improved benefits reflect increasing sophistication in authentication, verification, and fraud detection in the online environment. Let's see what the major credit card vendors do in response.

CNET Posts Cell Phone Radiation Numbers

Whether you agree or disagree or simply are taking a wait-and-see position on the debates over whether cell phone radiation poses a danger, the fact is that the United States, Canada, and the European Union have established standards for the amount of radiation a cell phone may emit. Tara Parker-Pope writes about it in the New York Times, and points to a list showing the radiation emissions of nearly all cell phone models published by CNET. The list does not contain any information on Bluetooth headsets, so if you're wearing a radio transmitter on your ear rather than holding the phone up to your head, you'll have to read the tiny print on the headset manufacturer's documentation.

Information: Valuable because Secret, or Secret because Valuable?

There are many areas in which this question applies. It was asked again yesterday by Neelie Kroes, the European Union's Competition Commissioner, in a speech in Brussels. She called for the Commission to "promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards," and also said that "When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information . . . No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first." Her remarks clearly take aim at Microsoft, whose recent announcement that they are committed to ensuring interoperability between their Office 2007 XML format, which was recently declared an international standard, and the Open Document Format, is the company's attempt to pre-empty Kroes's argument and preserve Microsoft's ability to sell to government agencies in Europe and elsewhere. James Kanter has his own take on the speech in today's New York Times.

ISPs Go Back to the Future on Bandwidth

Faced with persistent criticism for targeting high-bandwidth internet consumption by users running BitTorrent, Comcast has announced a protocol-agnostic metered consumption test in Beaumont, Texas. Time-Warner Cable also announced metered consumption tests in two local markets. While proponents of fixed-price all-you-can-eat rate structures will not be happy, these tests move the issue from the open access debate to a market-based utility model. The electric company doesn't ask whether you have electric heat or gas heat, run heavy-duty power tools or only have a refrigerator and television; they charge for the electricity you consume. The water utility doesn't ask whether you are watering the lawn with recycled rain water or with potable water; they charge for the amount consumed. With metered-rate consumption, small businesses and start-ups will not be at risk due to the data transmission protocols they use, but will have to build into their business model the cost of the bandwidth they need, just as they have to factor in power consumption. When heavy users of video-on-demand have to purchase additional bandwidth to watch movies at home, they will factor that cost into their purchasing decisions, and content providers will have to price their subscriptions accordingly. Let's see how the tests work, and whether the debate shifts from the politics of open internet to the economics of utilities and regulation of de facto monopoly providers.

Monitor Your Web Site(s) Performance

Here's an inexpensive service for monitoring the uptime and performance of your web site(s). Using a global network of servers, Pingdom hosts the tools and runs the service for you – nothing to install, no software to update and maintain. They offer a basic plan that will meet the needs of most individuals, and small business owners, and a more extensive business plan for larger enterprises or those with more complex web sites. Reports are delivered in near real-time via email and SMS for event management, and graphical output for trend and performance analysis.

Green Electronics

Take a look at the EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) for information on how to evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. You can find which manufacturer models meet these specifications, which are required for more than 95% of electronic device purchases by U.S. federal agencies, and are increasingly being adopted by other governmental bodies and private companies. You can reduce your energy consumption and minimize other environmental impacts throughout the product lifecycle.

Microsoft Will End Format Wars

Microsoft announced yesterday that Office 2007 Service Pack 2, slated for release in early 2009, will provide support for files in the international standard Open Document Format (ODF). Although Microsoft succeeded in having its own Open Office XML (OOXML) specification declared an international standard for document portability, allowing users to open, edit, and save documents in ODF or OOXML formats will reduce pressure on the company from governments and large customers worldwide who want documents in formats that provide a clear path for access and archiving. With Microsoft software on an estimated 95 percent of computers, this move may have the paradoxical effect of retaining Microsoft's dominant share if it successfully figures out how to play in the cloud against competitors such as Google.