Mercury News | 05/23/2003 | Kazaa claims 230 million downloads For those who don't know yet, Kazaa is the leading music sharing software. By comparison,

Kazaa's success even dwarfs the most highly publicized software introduction in history -- the debut of Microsoft's Windows 95 computer operating system. It sold 40 million copies in the first year, making it the fastest-selling software ever.

Which leads to an interesting thought. Why hasn't Microsoft produced its own version and bundled it with XP? Surely they can't pass up such a successful product category?

And given the sheer scale of the success, you have to think that the RIAA is tilting at windmills trying to stop it.

Music uploading and downloading via Kazaa is a great way of using broadband bandwidth continuously. Which has another side effect. It costs the ISP too much in upstream bandwidth fees.
They generally share bandwidth between subscribers at anything up to 50:1 contention on the assumption that we were all doing web and email only. That assumption is beginning to look rather less definite leading them to impose bandwidth caps or payment per Gb. [from: JB Ecademy]

1. Don’t go it alone.
2. Get your ‘Elevator Pitch’ right.
3. Find a mentor and work closely with them.
4. Concentrate effort on getting your first customer.
5. Grow organically.
6. Watch your cash like a hawk.
7. Avoid litigation. ‘Don’t litigate, negotiate.’
8. Know when to grow.
9. Enjoy it.
10. Make sure your people enjoy it too. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Times Online has copy of today's supplement produced in conjunction with UKOnline on Broadband for Business.

I guess it will be useful to someone, but it looks like a lot of fluff to me. They are at least raising questions about ADSL and recommending SDSL. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

BeyondBricks Mailing List
An open list for discussion about the Beyond Bricks SIG.

List home: http://www.ecademy.com/mailman/listinfo/beyondbricks [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I was just reading a piece in The Register about flexi-working for contractors and IT staff. I noticed that there was an ad from bCentral at the bottom.

So has anyone any experience with bCentral? care to tell us about it? [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I'm trawling for suggestions of news sources that are appropriate for the Beyond Bricks SIG.

- What news sources-websites do you read regularly for this area?
- Are there any weblogs that are specifically aimed at this area?

Tell me what you find, and I'll try and add it to Dailenews. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Register : UK Internet firms lack "business brains", according to first national IQ test of small business entrepreneurs. The UK's "dotcommers" came second to bottom in the test - only managing to beat those in the retail sector.

This looks like one of those surveys that sound nice but mean nothing until you notice it was organised by the Cranfield School of Management who have a pretty good reputation. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

How do you start a small business in the UK? And it's not "Buy a big business and wait" but allegedly to go to nationalsmallbusinessweek.co.uk [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

All-Party Parliamentary Small Business Group [APPSBG] Freelancer briefing: Background : The APPSBG is carrying out a briefing on freelancers. This will take evidence on-line and at a public hearing on June 11th 2003.

This seems to be particularly relevant if you're in the Hemel Hempstead or Hertford & Stortford regions. There's also an online survey. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

Distinctly strange explanation for why the latest generation of WiFi chips from Broadcom and Intel have no Linux support.

Linux-Kernel Archive: RE: Broadcom BCM4306/BCM2050 support : Don't expect specs or opensource drivers for any of these pieces of hardware until these vendors figure out a way to hide the frequency programming interface.

Ie. these cards can be programmed to transmit at any frequency, and various government agencies don't like it when f.e. users can transmit on military frequencies and stuff like that.

Hmm??? [from: JB Wifi]

Wireless-Doc (the Weblog) has some photos of using WiFi to access his weblog while walking through New York: started off at Battery Park (southern tip of Manhattan), and worked my way past the Verizon store across from Bryant Park, to Times Square. Cool! [from: JB Wifi]

I've just been talking to these people at the WiFi show. Myzones - The world's first intgegrated Wi-Fi Internet Service Provider : By subscribing to the MyZones service you can share your broadband connection costs. If you connect three other users and charge them £10 each, your broadband is free.......

They are providing some fairly standard APs that have had the firmware updated to work with a centralized Radius server run by them. This gives access control for Home, SME and hotspot access. The interesting bit is that they claim that this can be done using home level ADSL such as Openworld for the backhaul. Reading the BT T&Cs, it looks like this is perfectly reasonable for purely home use. However the quote above from their website suggests that you can sub-contract the access to get your money back.

Quoting from the BT T*Cs " 11.3 When we provide you with the service it, and any associated software, is intended for your use only. Therefore, you must not re-sell, transfer, assign or sub-license the service (or any part of it) or the associated software to anyone else. "

Hmmm? [from: JB Wifi]

BPO Solutions are at the WiFi show. They've just announced a mesh networking solution that appears to be written on top of Microsoft Windows and uses an MS Windows PC connected to virtually any WiFi hardware. I'm surprised that you can get deep enough into the MS networking stack to do any sort of mesh routing, but if they've managed it, congratulations. More as I find it out. Unfortunately there's nobody sufficiently technical at the show to give me the details. That's annoying as I'm left with a whole load of the usual questions about routing protocols, IP address allocation and so on. [from: JB Wifi]

You may have seen this report from Guy Kewney in The Register : David Hughes normally sells WiFi hotspots for BT. Today, at the WLAN Event, he predicted that WiFi was the future of the mobile phone, not just the laptop computer. And he said that voice applications would cover the country using hotspots.

This gets interesting for all sorts of reasons. Not least because BT Openzone is not covered by Oftel because it's not a telecommunications company. You might also want to check out VON 2003 (June 9th in London) where Jeff Pulver has a user group meeting on Free world dialup. This is a directory and relay system for VoIP using the internet. They currently have >25,000 people signed up. You can use a variety of hardware and software VoIP systems to play including MSN Messenger. [from: JB Wifi]

via: The Register :

The Cloud - the UK-wide broadband wi-fi network that's part of Inspired Broadcast Networks and Leisure Link Group - is to launch its service in more than 1,000 pubs in the UK later this week. ... Talking of pubs, BT also wants to bring wireless broadband to thousands of boozers across the UK.

So it looks as though BT will be the main initial WISP working through the managed service provided by IBN.

The monster telco is unveiling a new 'off-the-shelf' product developed in tandem with Toshiba that will turn an ADSL connection into a wi-fi "hotspot". The wi-fi "hotspot in a box" costs £400 or under £300 for the self-install version. BT is looking to flog the gear to pubs, restaurants, small hotels - even garage service stations..

This is really interesting and is one of the ideas we were suggesting last year. I don't yet know all the details and it will be very interesting to find out what what level of ADSL will have T&Cs that allow you to do this. Equally interesting to discover what the relationship is with BT post installation. Will you have to offer access via Openzone? Or will you be able to offer it for free?

Then we have this promotion.

And anyone who buys BT's Voyager ADSL wireless modem for the home from the Carphone Warehouse will get six months free Openzone 120 access, worth £60. ®

Openzone 120 seems to be a subscription service where you get 120 minutes per month of access for £10. I'm not at all sure I get who this is targeted at or what they would do with it. But it does mark the first foray of Openzone into tied deals between Openzone access and other services. I'm not sure if Oftel would let them, but I can see a lot of benefits in doing similar deals with Openworld and Retail customers to bundle some level of Openzone access into their broadband bill.

BTW. I haven't yet been able to find URLs with descriptions of any of this, whether on the BT Openzone or Carphone Warehouse sites. If you do find solid detail, do post it in comments here. [from: JB Wifi]

I'd like to see an email whitelist system that support webs of trust and a peer to peer mechanism for transferring white list information between trusted parties.

White list spam rejection systems usually work by asking each contact that you have to verify their email address and to reject email from everyone else. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of Spam arrest, mailwiper or Plaxo knows how annying it can be to receive multiple requests for verification from multiple people who actually know each other. It feels like it ought to be possible have an automatic mechanism for people to share their white lists with some trust mechanism to weight how much you trust the results. This is potenbtially very large so it probably needs to be de-centralized and built as a peer to peer system with some built in controls to prevent the lists being poisoned by unscrupulous people. It also raises quite a number of issues to do with privacy and security. And of course it needs to be able to support all the major email readers and address book systems.

Now there's a challenge. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'd like to see a system that handled search, communication and billing for arbitarily large numbers of experts. Another Lazyweb challenge.

There's a large number of people out there who bill for their time and have a lot of knowledge and advice to give on their chosen domain. Typical examples are doctors, lawyers, personal coaches, financial experts and so on. I think there's potential for a system that combines broadband, voice and video over IP, instant message systems, a search engine, reputation management and a payment engine to allow these people to earn some extra money and develop new contacts. The idea is that they would run an application on their local machine when they were available (perhaps a few hours each week). People who needed some specific help would search the system for an online expert. They'd connect and after an initial introduction, the time would be billable at the experts advertised rate. The system would handle money collection and distribution with a small amount skimmed off the top.

There's quite a few systems such as Google Answers and Globealive that are nibbling around the edges of this. There are some knotty technical problems around IM, video, voice and NAT gateways to solve. And building the payment engine is not exactly easy either. There's also some social issues around keeping out the idiots and deciding if the advice was actually worth the payment.

This also has potential to solve a very different problem which is creating a distibuted call centre. There are a large number of westerners who could do call centre work on a part time basis from home. The trick here is to use Presence technology to distribute the call centre work in real time to the pool of people who have decided to be online at that time. This would allow the individuals to join in and leave the cloud as and when they were able while still presneting a consistent face to the end customers. This gets very interesting when the call centre operatives are house bound people in rural areas. Could this be a way of combatting the outsourcing of call centres round the world? [from: JB Ecademy]

Some new features for you all.

Two new displays of weblogs
- Click on "Recent weblogs" in the box on the right. Get a display of all people who've posted a blog in the last 90 days.
- Click on "Weblogs" on the home page or "Titles" on a blog page and see a dated list of just titles.

Search in Clubs (and RSS)
- Full text search of the Club home pages
- Full text search of the Club forum messages, optionally for this club only.
- RSS feed for a single club forum eg http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=club&op=feed&c=club_id where club_id is the ID of the club. Add &n=xx for xx number of messages. [from: JB Ecademy]

UK parliament to investigate freelancers

THE ALL PARTY UK Parliamentary Small Business Group is to investigate freelancers, a group which it reckons numbers half a million here in the UK.

The group is conducting an online survey of UK freelancers in such areas as consultancy, IT, engineering – and, yes, journalism too.

This seems to be particularly relevant if you're in the Hemel Hempstead or Hertford & Stortford regions. There's also an online survey. I guess there's probably quite a few people here who would like to make their voices heard. [from: JB Ecademy]

Interesting article about Deliverance: the Unlicensed Marriage of Wi-Fi and WiMAX. The article is largely about the US experience of commercial broadband wireless broadband delivery. There's much more to be said about the equivalent issues in the UK.

A key factor here is the UK Government's regulatory environment. We appear to be going down the 3G route again. The license exempt 2.4Ghz band (and the 802.11a 5Ghz band) is hemmed around with regulations that essentially prohibit long distance point to point links for broadband distribution. The 3.6Ghz band is being treated like 3G with the government attempting to auction off rights to use it in 15 or so large regions in the UK at a high price for each. Not surprisingly, the market is turning it's back on this. The one initial license with Tele2 has been a failure with Tele2 failing and then being bought out.

Meanwhile alternate methods of ensuring the wide availability of back haul bandwidth are stuck in a mess mostly due to the problems of dealing with BT's monopoly. Even the widely reported target of broadband in every school, which might have been expected to jump start remote distribution, is being diluted.

This all raises questions about the government's role in promoting infrastruture investment. What we need is fibre to every exchange and ultimately to every home. As an alternative to this and where this is difficult or impossible, we need an environment where bottom up development is possible. Where a local community and small scale commercial groups can arrange distribution at relatively low cost. Conceivably the government could make this happen by providing funding if they can work out a way of doing it without simply giving the money to BT. But the cheapest way to do it is to create a regulatory environment where alternate groups can afford to do it themselves. [from: JB Wifi]