In the remake of Casino Royale, James Bond connects himself from Montenegro to MI6 in London so they can figure out the poison Le Chiffre’s associate added to his drink. Remote medical monitoring in the real world might become a matter of business, based on something Microsoft has been developing.

The Times Online described a patent sought by Microsoft. This technology would monitor aspects of the physical state of a computer user connected to the system.

Someone who is feeling a little stressed out by their employer would end up sending a signal to human resources. Management could provide help to the employee as they see fit.

Take a moment to indulge in a little outrage yourself. If developed and implemented in the business world, this could be the most reprehensible invasion of privacy ever proposed.

Now we’ll tie it into the Fast purchase. The Norwegians have some fascinating products in their solutions mix.

In the category of Surveillance and Enforcement, Fast offers products that assist with threat detection and criminal investigation. These relate to data, of course.

But Microsoft’s patent would turn physiological responses into data. The company has been working on ways to assess data, based on the patent. We can’t see any reason why the Fast Surveillance and Enforcement tools couldn’t be part of the assessment chain.

Frustration in the workplace may end up being interpreted as more than pressure from an upcoming deadline. Imagine a world where physical responses to stress cause someone to be accused of thought crimes.

Stay tuned. Big Brother will be watching.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-the-fast-buy-and-big-brother-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/google-acts-fast-to-counter-microsoft-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/google-acts-fast-to-counter-microsoft-2008-01#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:55:39 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43389 An enterprise search play by Microsoft, a $1.2 billion purchase of Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer, may be on the minds of Google.

The vibration felt at Google may be nothing more than a plastic teacup dropping onto the carpet a mile away, but it appears they aren’t taking a chance at letting Microsoft gain momentum in enterprise search.

A little of The Fear stopping by the Googleplex for M&Ms, perhaps? The Google Enterprise blog exhorted business-types to “make a fast switch” to Google’s products.

Aside from advertising revenue, Google does some business with search appliance hardware. Their non-ad business represented about a fraction of a hundredth of the company’s revenue, based on its last SEC 10-Q statement.

Even so, Google wants people to continue to associate it with search, above and beyond the web-based version where they made their fortunes:

Last week’s developments in the enterprise search market are sure to bring confusion and uncertainty to many customers. Customers of existing enterprise search solutions will start wondering about the future of the investment they made in the past. Is their product still going to be developed and improved? What about support for a diverse enterprise IT landscape? How long before they’re asked to do a painful – and costly- migration?

Long-time Microsoft observers may recognize Google’s stance here as a familiar one: the old fear, uncertainty, and doubt approach. One can hardly think of FUD without recalling Microsoft’s campaigns against Linux in the last decade.

Yet undisputed search leader Google took this shot nonetheless. An interesting tactic from a company not usually associated with worrying about the competition.

Microsoft’s Fast purchase brought more than just the enterprise search technology to Redmond. It also pulled along a challenge for Microsoft to hammer out a unified enterprise search strategy. If Microsoft can quickly integrate Fast into a product like its SharePoint server, they will have a big selling point to emphasize to prospective clients.

That selling point, we are positive, will include suggestions that a client won’t need a separate search device, like, say, a Google search appliance, to accomplish their internal needs.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-acts-fast-to-counter-microsoft-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/fast-no-rapid-cure-for-microsoft-enterprise-search-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/fast-no-rapid-cure-for-microsoft-enterprise-search-2008-01#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:52:34 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43357 Even though Microsoft acquired Norway's Fast Search and Transfer, that company's enterprise search technology won't tie all of Microsoft's search products into one neat package.

We always thought if Microsoft was going to snap up an Oslo-based company, browser maker Opera would be a likely candidate. But the going away gift for Bill Gates isn’t an advanced web browser, but an enterprise search firm.

Fast wasted little time in embracing Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft said in a statement the two biggest institutional investors in Fast accepted the deal, while the Fast board gave Microsoft’s overture a unanimous thumbs-up.

Fast fills a gap in Microsoft’s enterprise products, by giving them a search product that has been competing with the likes of IBM, Google, and Microsoft’s SharePoint for corporate clients.

The technology Microsoft will acquire goes beyond search. On their website, Fast lists products for data cleansing, e-commerce, and online media among its offerings.

Of particular interest given Microsoft’s aspirations in the local search ad market, Fast offers a couple of services related to multimedia and advertising. Their “Triple Play” Solution is a multimedia search and monetization platform, while the TV and Radio Solution provides a way to “reinforce local presence” for visitors.

Microsoft also picks up the surveillance and enforcement products, especially the IP Policing solution, Fast provides. They may be touting the deal as an enterprise search play, but there seems to be more to the deal than just search.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-making-fast-grab-in-norway-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/scoble-on-scobles-business-2007-12 http://www.webpronews.com/scoble-on-scobles-business-2007-12#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:26:46 +0000 Robert Scoble http://www.webpronews.com/?p=42670 Yesterday, while I was on a panel discussion at LeWeb3 talking about the future of video something happened that discussed my future. I was driving the computer during the panel discussion, demonstrating bleeding edge video technologies like Seesmic and Kyte on stage when someone wrote in my Kyte.tv channel’s chat room that I should check out TechCrunch. So, in front of everyone I pulled up the post. You’ve probably read it by now.
]]> Yesterday, while I was on a panel discussion at LeWeb3 talking about the future of video something happened that discussed my future. I was driving the computer during the panel discussion, demonstrating bleeding edge video technologies like Seesmic and Kyte on stage when someone wrote in my Kyte.tv channel’s chat room that I should check out TechCrunch. So, in front of everyone I pulled up the post. You’ve probably read it by now. It said simply: Scoble to Leave PodTech, Heading for Fast Company.

I’m sorry I didn’t break the news on my blog, but breaking it in front of thousands of people at a major industry conference is OK too (Arrington, who wrote the post, was in the audience) because people got to see my real, unfiltered, reaction.

UPDATE: I didn’t know that Arrington was going to post about it then. Dave Winer was sitting next to him in the audience and gives his point of view.

I told everyone that it was true that I had decided to leave PodTech, but that Fast Company hasn’t been signed yet and that I’m still considering two options, one of which is Fast Company. My last day there will be January 14th. I am working on a number of PodTech initiatives, including the CES BlogHaus as well as a Blogger Bus Tour to CES from San Francisco to Las Vegas which is sponsored by Microsoft (more on the bus, as well as how you can get a seat, next week when I get back into the office).

So, what will happen on January 15th? I told the audience at LeWeb that things haven’t been wrapped up yet. I have two options I’m considering on the table and will announce what I’m doing on January 15th.

How did it leak? Well, I needed advice between these two options and so I ask my friends to give me advice (actually, Rocky and I have been thinking a lot about this and have turned down a half dozen other options). I talk too much, which is my downfall, but also I got some world-class advice from people all over the industry.

Why didn’t I blog about it? Because I had family and other committments between the panel and now (it’s currently 2:24 a.m. and we’re packing to come home now).

Why not be transparent on the blog? Wasn’t that the lesson of Naked Conversations (our book that studied how 188 businesses used blogging)?

If you read Naked Conversations you’d know that we don’t recommend putting everything about your life on your blog. We even have a whole chapter about people who’ve gotten fired because they put inappropriate things on their blogs.

Certainly discussing career moves on a blog is inappropriate if you don’t have a clue what moves you’ll make (staying at PodTech was always on the table as one of the options until a week ago, for instance, when Rocky and I made some decisions about what would be best for our careers going forward).

Why not stay at PodTech? PodTech went through a lot of managerial chaos earlier this year and I was trying to help PodTech get to profitability and help it get some focus, business wise. You’ve seen some of those moves already as PodTech has moved away from an editorial focus and toward an corporate media development one, which is where much of PodTech’s revenues (which are in the millions per year now) are coming from. That’s a decision I helped PodTech make and I think they are good ones and will help it avoid the TechCrunch Dead Pool. Companies need a lot of help creating media, so PodTech has a pretty good future opportunity ahead of it, which is why its investors continue to support it.

When did I make this decision? In the past week. I know that back in October I said I wasn’t going to leave PodTech, but a lot has changed in that two-month period. PodTech’s new management team has been working together a lot better, and the direction it’s been going is different than it was back in October.

Now that PodTech is getting some focus I found that my show needed a new home in order for it to get to the next level, too.

Before I go on, I want to thank Seagate for sponsoring my show, which enabled me to interview more than 300 people over the past year or so. Looking back at that year it’s amazing how many people have come in front of my lens.

I’m a geek, a user advocate, and enjoy doing my show more than anything else in the world other than hanging out with Milan, Patrick, and Maryam. This week I got to do all three together in Paris thanks to Loic Le Meur, and I’ll always be in his debt for that. I’ll also, too, always be in debt to PodTech and John Furrier for hiring me and encouraging me to do a daily video show and giving me the resources to do that.

I’m also seeing significant changes to how you all interact with each other. Over the past year we’ve seen Twitter, Facebook, Kyte, Seesmic, Ustream, Justin.tv, Pownce, Jaiku, and quite a few other technologies get popular.

This interview with Mogulus’ CEO and Chris Pirillo’s pioneering efforts with his own live TV channel played a key role in getting me to see that there’s a new kind of TV channel possible — one that’s participatory instead of one-way — and one that would be very low cost and potentially have high revenue possibilities compared to the cost.

Remember, you don’t need a large audience to make a lot of money in this industry. I used to help edit a computer magazine, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (which later became Visual Studio Magazine) and that only had 100,000 subscribers, but millions in revenues. I also love the Demo series of conferences. There the audience (usually more than 1,000 people) pays more than $1,000 each to attend and everyone on stage pays $18,000 to present to that audience.

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press conference where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my professional camera in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard several times, including on the panel discussion yesterday where Jeff Pulver showed off video he shot on a small pocket camera of the recent Led Zepplin concert. He told the audience that Led Zepplin wants to buy his photos and videos because they were better than the professional ones).

At the Google Open Social press conference, instead of doing “professional journalism” and cranking out an article like other bloggers and journalists in the room I opened up Twitter and started telling people what I was hearing. Then I listened to them and asked questions during the press conference that they wanted answered. It changed how press conferences should be done in my eyes forever. Add streaming video, like AMD used the other day in another press conference, and things would be dramatically different.

Which gets me back to the headline I used here: it’s your business.

I’m watching how Loic Le Meur is building Seesmic by including the community into every decision he makes. His software doesn’t have the most features out there (Kyte.tv beats it by a mile, particularly on the mobile phone side of things, which is why I love Kyte so much) but Le Meur is building up a ton of love in the community for his approach.

The participants are in control there. It is your business.

I’m tired of getting used by companies who just use and use and use without giving me anything in return. I remember three years ago when I first heard the words “user generated media.” That term still pisses me off. I’m not a user, I’m a participant. I actually love it when Christopher Coulter calls it “loser generated media.”

So, whatever I do next will place that philosophy at the center. It is your business.

One other thing: I really have hated not being open and transparent the past year. Whatever I do next will have to put up with me talking with my friends, telling you openly what’s going on in the business and in my life, and we’ll build something fun together where we’re all equal participants. Our Photowalking series gets damn close to what I’m thinking of. It’s not lost on me that our videos in the photowalking series has more comments per video than the average ScobleShow videos do and those generally have more comments than other PodTech videos do. That’s media made by participation, not by some committee or some gatekeeper or some “A list blogger” somewhere. But using the newest technologies we can even bring participation in a photowalk to a whole new level. Justin.tv demonstrated that to me.

How will we make revenues? Well, there’s a variety of companies that are leading the way in participatory philosophies: You know, those that design products with their customers, or treat their customers as participants the way that Loic does with Seesmic. HP, for instance, is bringing its customers into help design its products. I saw a laptop at HP that was partially designed by a customer. A participant. HP is far from alone in leading that charge as well.

So, anyway, thanks for all the nice notes and let’s talk again about this on January 15th after I make my final decision and start my show down a new path.

Oh, and in late January I’ll be going to the World Economic Forum, where we’ll kick things off.

Comments

Sixty-one percent said "downloading DVD quality films in five minutes" was the most interesting capability for future broadband services. Eighteen percent said they downloaded films but it was the online activity they spent the least time on. Surfing and checking email were still the most popular activities.

The survey was conducted to get an idea of what users might want from the next-generation broadband as the UK plans on when and how to move to faster services. Sixty percent responding indicated that they would either not be prepared to spend extra for the service or did not know.

The services that people were most interested in for next- generation broadband were the ones they currently spend the least time on.

"From our results it does appear a little contradictory that respondents rated ‘watching TV’ or downloading films as being the least amount of time spent on the Internet in a week and yet when asked which future service would be of most interest rated them as the most popular," Michael Phillips, product director at BroadbandChoices.co.uk told the BBC.

"It could be that current services are not at a high enough standard to warrant utilising video services. If speeds were improved, consumers are more likely to use broadband to watch TV and/or download films," said Mr. Phillips.

All may not be well in the Adobe household. Chizen’s fourteen years with Adobe hit a sudden stop, with the company announcing his departure today.

Chizen will wrap up his seven years as CEO on November 30. Adobe said he will remain on the board through the spring of 2008, and in a strategic advisory capacity through Adobe’s fiscal 2008.

Adobe made sunny financial predictions about the remaining fiscal year. They expect revenue at the high end of their $860 million to $890 million predicted range for the fourth quarter, and approximately 13 percent revenue growth through 2008.

Investors were not as cheerful about the news of Chizen’s departure, cited by an Adobe spokesperson as a personal decision. Shares of the stock fell to $41.35 in after hours trading, after they had closed at $42.19 today.

follow me on Twitter

Here’s Amy’s description of the panel and panelists.

My thoughts and notes …

Honesty and transparency – is it ever okay to mislead or deceive my omission? Compensation and influence – how does that affect what you say or don’t say….

Do people change the way they review, to continue to have access to junkets such as TV previews or book reviews ….

Bloggers do not necessarily get the respect that journalists get, but does this taint / color how they write to get that legitimacy? Small town newspapers, smaller media publications, also have the same problem, though. It’s a question of credibility – my credibility.

Astroturfing – it does happen on blogs and social media, but what can be done, and how do you expose it. Should it be exposed, and what is the responsibility of the blogger being spun or the corporation doing astroturf.

To acknowledge an error on the post is to be ethical. To just change the issue, you’re lacking transparency and not being smart about it.

::I called out the bullshit that there needs to be an organization, but that blogging wants to be both professional and still amateur – it wants its cake and to eat it too. There is Media Bloggers Association that is trying to get an insurance policy together, to protect bloggers::

Don’t be lazy – it’s a good aspect of ethics for life, no matter what you are doing.

Is anyone who they really say there are online, though. There are times that people have pseudonyms, but is that unethical? There’s a line that you have to protect yourself (career, etc) – but what is that line. Do you hide behind a pseudonym to be a prick and attack – then it’s not ethical. To protect and save yourself (job), then it appears fine.

Does character blogging fall into unethical? If it’s disclosed, does it violate the sense of ethics in blogging?

But, what is transparency and does there need to be a blogging code of ethics, a la Tim O’Reilly. Can you really set a standard and code for a bunch of divergent people, especially when the majority of bloggers are likely small bloggers and not into the whole scheme of things like a lot of the more seasoned or professional bloggers.

::For PR, this is an important issue – PR seems like it could and would violate the basic rules of ethics to get what is needed to be done for the clients (this is the PR people that are not involved in social media, nor understand it). It seems like the astroturf / fake blog would be the first thought in the brainstorm::

Payperpost (and in some ways, Federated Media) come up in a way that marketers are paying bloggers for chats and posts. If it’s not disclosed, is it unethical. There are all kinds of compensations that are meaningful, such as gifts, junkets. Is it relationship building, though? There are hospitality suites … and that’s part of it. Even link exchange, in a way, can be considered a way of bribery. Heck, we even got a wine offer for friendship from Christopher Calicott as an example of how it is just about relationships, but it can be misconstrued.

::Ethics is a tricky issue. At the U, it was always fun in the ethics classes because there really is no right answer. If you are a utilitarian, you do organ harvest from your own kid for the greatest good (if you’re saving the great minds of the world). But, that seems unethical. There are all these stories and issues::

Tris Hussey also wrote up the panel here. And, Amy Sample Ward is going to post also.

Comments

Tag:

Allinanchor is a Google search command that searches for internet pages that contain inbound links with a certain keyword in their anchor text. Anchor text is the text used in the link back to a website. For example, if you see a link on a web page that looks like this: Submit Free, then the anchor text is "Submit Free".

The reason allinanchor search is so important is that is shows a list of web pages that have a high volume of inbound links with a particular keyword. There is a strong correlation between the allinanchor results for a "term" and the general Google web results for the same term.

To highlight the importance of allinanchor on rankings, one of the key search terms we optimize for is "fast google inclusion". As you can see from the images below, we’re the number one ranking for the term on both "allinanchor" and Google’s normal web search.

To conduct an allinanchor search, simply use the following in the Google search box:
Allinanchor:[your search term] (e.g. allinanchor:fast google inclusion]

Watch the video below to see it in action:

It’s well known that link building is one of most important factors in improving your ranking in Google. While you focus on getting inbound links to your website (in a natural way), remember that the anchor text plays a vital role in your Google ranking success. Use allinanchor to help monitor your progress and also keep an eye on your competition.

Comments

A Car In Every Garage, Fast Internet On Every PC

This involves, he said, changes in regulations to ensure universal broadband access and adequate competition in the marketplace.

"To compete and win in the new global economy, we need a national broadband strategy that encourages competition and expands access," said Kerry, who is also Chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

"Previous generations put a toaster in every home and a car in every driveway as signs of economic progress-it’s time we do the same with high speed Internet access."

Kerry criticized the Bush administration for failing to live up to its promises of universal high-speed access.

Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein echoed Sen. Kerry’s call for opening up broadband competition. "Only rational competition policies can ensure that the U.S. broadband market does not devolve into a stagnant duopoly, which is a serious concern given that cable and DSL providers now control approximately 96 percent of the residential broadband market."

Kerry also pushed the FCC to change its outdated broadband measurement methods, which have been cited by incumbent broadband providers as arguments against regulation and Net Neutrality.

The FCC has received similar criticism from within via Commissioner Michael Copps. "The FCC’s current efforts at data gathering are woefully out-of-date and out-of-whack," said Copps. The Commission is still calling 200 kilobits per second ‘broadband’ and assuming that if one person in a ZIP code has broadband access, everyone else does as well.

"This is 2007, not 1997. We need a more credible definition of speed and more granular measures of deployment, as well as to start gathering data on price and the experience of other nations."

The US is ranked about 15th in the world in terms of broadband penetration and speeds, maybe 16th, now that Hong Kong telecoms are offering up to 1 Gbps fiber connections for around $200 per month, about 30 times the speed of Verizon’s fastest fiber offering for about the same price.