Category Archives: Web

VoIP: Very over-Inflated Price

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This morning’s Observer column…

First of all, an apology. In previous editions, this column may have suggested that VoIP (internet telephony) stood for ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’. Now it turns out that it is, in fact, an acronym for ‘Very over-Inflated Price’. The proprietors deeply regret this error and hope that it has not caused any reader to make foolish investment decisions.

This matter was drawn to our attention by an announcement made last week by eBay. The company reported that in the quarter just ended, it will take £700m in write-offs and charges related to Skype – for which two short years ago it paid £1.3bn in cash and stock, plus what was enigmatically described as ‘a potential performance-based consideration’ estimated by industry sources at £750m. That’s £2.75bn in total…

I also wrote a short piece on the Wikipedia-obituary kerfuffle.

Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube

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Yep — according to TechCrunch…

The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.

The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…

Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.

Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.

How to do it

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Halo 3 arrived from Amazon today, and so I guess no homework will get done today in the Naughton household. Sigh. But behind the delivery is an interesting story about customer service.

We pre-ordered Halo 3 ages ago, along with another game. Then the launch date for the second game slipped — to November. I assumed that Amazon would then split the order and deliver Halo 3 on launch day. Came the day and the postman was anxiously awaited by the Naughtons. No Halo 3. None the next day either. And so it went on. Eventually — yesterday — I went onto ‘Track My Order’ on Amazon.co.uk and found that Halo 3 hadn’t been dispatched. Wading through the site to find a way of communicating with Amazon, I came on a button labelled (I think) ‘Phone Call’. I clicked on it, entered my mobile number and 30 seconds later the phone rang. It was a real human being wondering what the problem was. He looked up the order, found that the Halo 3 shipping date was bound to that of the other game, asked me if I’d like to cancel the second order, and scheduled Halo 3 for immediate dispatch.

After hanging up, I looked in my inbox — to find two emails from Amazon one confirming cancellation of the second order. The other asking me for feedback on whether the phone call had been helpful.

A long time ago, I wrote in the Observer that Amazon was really just a world-class customer-service outfit that happened to be on the Web. I was right. I wonder how many other firms can match that kind of performance.

Harnessing collective IQ for reviewing patent applications

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Interesting Technology Review report on “Opening Up the Patent Process”…

A new website called Peer-to-Patent intends to harness the power of online collaboration to streamline patent review. By creating a community around each application, the site facilitates public discussion and lets people upload relevant information. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is currently involved in a limited trial of Peer-to-Patent, with the hope that it will bring openness and transparency to a review process that was previously limited to communication between the applicant and the examiner vetting the patent.

“There’s never been a bridge built between the information available in these expert communities and the government institutions that make these important policy decisions,” says Peer-to-Patent founder Beth Noveck. Noveck is a professor at New York Law School and the director of the school’s Institute for Information Law and Policy. She is also the director of the Democracy Design Workshop, which is running an experiment, called Do Tank, to encourage research into projects that foster community and encourage citizens to take action.

Peer-to-Patent could benefit an overloaded government organization. The USPTO faces mounting difficulties stemming from large numbers of patent applications of increasing complexity. According to the USPTO, 173,771 patent applications were approved in 2006. The government agency claims that it is currently backlogged with more than 800,000 patents. This means that new submissions have a pendency, or time from filing to first action, of up to 52 months…

Ad Blocking and the future

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This morning’s Observer column…

I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…

Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia

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This is lovely — a Wikipedia page detailing errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.

This page catalogs some mistakes and omissions in Encyclopædia Britannica (EB) and shows how they have been corrected in Wikipedia. Some errors have already been corrected in Britannica’s online version.

These examples can serve as useful reminders of the fact that no encyclopedia can ever expect to be perfectly error-free (which is sometimes forgotten when Wikipedia is compared to traditional encyclopedias), and as an illustration of the advantages of an editorial process where anybody can correct an error at any time. However, this page is not intended to be a comparison of the overall quality of both encyclopedias, nor as a dismissal of concerns about the reliability of Wikipedia.

Thanks to my colleague Andrew Cupples for the link.

Cloudprint

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John Markoff reports a new initiative by HP in today’s New York Times

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 18 — Hoping to alleviate a frustration of mobile computing, Hewlett-Packard has quietly introduced a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world. Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of H.P. Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, store and print documents using a mobile phone.

The service emerged as the result of a conversation begun at the laboratory this year over how the computer and printing company might benefit from the introduction of the Apple iPhone, according to Patrick Scaglia, H.P.’s director for Internet and computing platforms technologies at the research lab.

“The world is going to flip,” Mr. Scaglia said. “We want to ride the wave of the Web.”

The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user’s computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer.

The service requires users to first “print” their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user’s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user’s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

eBay starting to move with the times?

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Well, maybe. here’s today’s New York Times take on it…

“We have to make sure our old users stay with us, but we’re going to be more bold around product changes than we’ve been in the past,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview last week in Boston at eBay Live, an annual conference for the site’s sellers. “I think people expect more from eBay.”

Certainly, analysts do. As the company has expanded beyond its auctions business into Internet telephone service (with its acquisition of Skype), event ticketing (with StubHub) and comparison shopping (with Shopping.com), auction volume has slowed considerably from years past. As of early this month, the volume of eBay’s United States listings was down by 3.8 percent compared with a year earlier, according to Citigroup.

Analysts said sellers were moving to other places on the Web in search of buyers who had grown weary of an overwhelming array of product choices on eBay.

“You could go to the site looking for Star Wars items and get the same results as you’d have had in 1999 — a thousand results all sorted by what auction is closing first,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. “Are you looking for a Star Wars pendant? Poster? DVD? It doesn’t matter. You’ll see everything.”

Ms. Whitman said that chief among the changes was a new home page design. The company is testing simplified layouts that are less likely to confuse shoppers than the old version, which analysts said was among the most cluttered in the e-commerce industry…

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Wikipedia deficiencies

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Dan Bricklin has some interesting reflections about the Wikipedia entry on the spreadsheet. I’ve always thought that Dan invented the spreadsheet, but the Wikipedia entry begs to differ. I’ve just looked at it and it fails to give a date for the first release of VisiCalc and doesn’t mention Microsoft’s first stab at a spreadsheet program — Multiplan — at all.