NewsScan Daily, 7 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 7 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Skype Goes Calling on Businesses
        P2P Gets a Boost
        JotSpot Targets Wiki Capabilities
        eBay Boss Heads 'She Power' List
        All-in-One Memory Cards

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Copies of Copies

SKYPE GOES CALLING ON BUSINESSES
      Internet telephony service Skype Technologies is turning its 
attention to small- and medium-size businesses, hoping to duplicate its 
tremendous success with individual users. "We've been targeting Skype to 
the individual, not to the residential or business markets. But what we 
found in a recent survey is that 48% of our customers are people using it 
for business," says Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom. Skype uses 
file-sharing technology to form its network on the fly -- similar to the 
way that Kazaa file-sharing software works. That's no coincidence -- Skype 
co-founders Zennstrom and Janus Friis are also the original creators of 
Kazaa. Skype currently counts 12 million users worldwide and last month's 
introduction of Skype Out -- a service that enables users to make calls to 
recipients with regular phone service for a minuscule charge -- resulted in 
an additional 200,000 paying customers. And while up until now, Skype has 
been offered free, the company's new focus signals a change. "[Zennstrom] 
is migrating from free services. He's got a revenue plan," says one 
industry advocate. (Los Angeles Times 7 Oct 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-skype7oct07,1,4885345.story?coll=la-headlines-technology>

P2P GETS A BOOST
      Streamcast Networks, owner of the Morpheus file-swapping software, is 
releasing an updated version that incorporates technology called Neonet to 
speed up the search process on peer-to-peer networks. Neonet, authored by a 
pair of former Harvard students, uses "distributed hash tables," which are 
essentially a way of taking a snapshot of where every file on the network 
is at a given moment and scattering bits of that information around the 
entire network. To find a specific file, a user's search request bounces 
from computer to computer across the P2P network, with each hop revealing a 
little more information about where the file can be found. Usually just 
three or four hops are necessary before the file is located for 
downloading. "The main benefit is that it allows you to search the entire 
network instead of just a local area," says Jed McCaleb, chief programmer 
for eDonkey, which also uses Neonet technology. "It's probably faster than 
the way Gnutella works, and it's definitely technically superior." Neonet 
creators Ben Wilkin and Francis Crick say the technology also holds promise 
for newer applications such as Net calling. "It can be used for all sorts 
of distributed computing tools, and that's where we're going to go with 
it," says Wilkin. "It really eliminates the need to have any centralized 
infrastructure." (CNet News.com 6 Oct 2004)
<http://news.com.com/Super-powered+peer+to+peer/2100-1032_3-5397784.html>

JOTSPOT TARGETS WIKI CAPABILITIES
      JotSpot, a Palo Alto startup, is launching a Web-based product of the 
same name that will enable Wikis -- Web sites that can be written on and 
edited by multiple users simultaneously -- to move beyond text to such 
applications as data tabling or Web searching. For instance, the JotSpot 
technology would enable a company to use a Wiki for recruiting job 
candidates, setting up a space where the hiring committee could compare 
notes. Wikis could also be used for other collaborative tasks such as 
product development, procurement and sales. (San Jose Mercury News 6 Oct 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9848041.htm>

EBAY BOSS HEADS 'SHE POWER' LIST
      Meg Whitman of eBay has been named the most powerful woman in 
corporate America by Fortune magazine, toppling Carly Fiorina of 
Hewlett-Packard, who had headed the list since it began in 1998. Fortune 
ranks the women on criteria including the size and importance of a business 
in its market, the businesswoman's clout at her organization, her career 
trajectory and social or cultural impact. In Ms Whitman's case, there was 
one over-riding factor, the magazine said: "2004 belongs to Meg Whitman. 
Here's just one reason: The $60-billion market value of eBay, the company 
she runs, has surged past that of HP." The online marketplace is one of the 
fastest growing companies in history. This year it expects to report 
operating profits of about $1 billion on revenue of $3.2 billion. (The Age, 
6 Oct 2004) rec'd from John Lamp
<http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/05/1096949508672.html>

ALL-IN-ONE MEMORY CARDS
      Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brands, is 
now developing memory cards that can be used for a variety of purposes -- 
from making cashless payments to opening locks. In Japan, people are 
already using smart cards to board commuter trains, and cell phone models 
enable users to buy drinks from vending machines, pay restaurant bills and 
play games at a Tokyo arcade. Matsushita's smartSD Card features 
128-megabytes of memory, compared with Sony's FeliCa smart cards, which 
have only 32 kilobytes of storage. The enhanced Matsushita model will 
enable users to download movies or music and provide secure storage for 
documents, says Matsushita director Masaki Akiyama. (AP 7 Oct 2004)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20041007/D85IJ5C80.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is 
silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a 
standstill." (Barbara Tuchman)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: COPIES OF COPIES
      In his new book on Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox 
machine, David Owen writes:
      "Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior 
duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, the device by 
which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. We are distinct from 
chimpanzees because speech, through its irrepressible power of 
reproduction, multiplied our thoughts into thinking.
      "The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians 
transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets, they 
exponentially extended the human network that language had created. Writing 
freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made thinking permanent, 
portable, and endlessly reproducible.
      "Civilization has evolved at the speed of duplication. One mark in 
clay became two; two became four; four became eight. Like all doubling, 
copying accumulates slowly at first but compounds. Less than a millennium 
ago -- forty centuries after the Sumerians -- a single literate polyglot 
theoretically could have read every book in the world; today, copied 
language constitutes so much of the intangible infrastructure of existence 
that we consciously register only glimpses of the shadow of its shadow. A 
newsstand in Manhattan contains more duplicated text than did the legendary 
Library of Alexandria.
      "The earliest written documents were simple tallies: so many animals, 
so much grain. For centuries, that was all the writing in the world. Last 
week, a small plastic latch broke off my clothes dryer. I copied the number 
molded into its side and searched for it on Google. Less than a second 
later, my computer screen filled with a list of suppliers all over the 
country, with links to their inventories and their prices, along with half 
a dozen portals into a galaxy of intricately cross-referenced self 
promotion. Behind the copied words on the screen lay invisible sentences of 
ones and zeros, and behind the ones and zeros lay a babel of electrical 
impulses and magnetic fields: the ultimate modern repository of replicable 
meaning. The world we live in -- as distinct from the world we live on -- 
is made of supplicated language. We build our lives from copies of copies."
                                   ***
[See 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743251172/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
for David Owen's "Copies In Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown 
Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg: 
Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine" -- or use 
RedLightGreen.com from our friends at RLG to explore what's available in 
your favorite libraries. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and 
media recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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