UK heading for a fight over cookies
The rhetoric over cookie legislation ratcheted up a notch on Tuesday, as the Information Commissioner’s Office told companies they “must try harder” in working out how to comply with the new rules on online privacy.
Christopher Graham, the commissioner, suggested that very few companies had yet come up with ways to get permission from online users to collect their details, as required by the new law.
Lifeline for Iceland’s data centre hopes
Iceland’s hopes of becoming a global hub for data centres came a step closer on Thursday, when plans for a new transatlantic subsea cable were announced, that would link New York and London via Iceland and Ireland.
Iceland has long been trying to market itself as a prime location for data centres. Its plentiful, cheap geothermal energy is attractive to data centre operators who are becoming increasingly worried about electricity costs, and the cold climate means cooling the racks of servers is virtually free.
Why government should not touch the internet
The London Cyberspace conference is an elegant metaphor for why government involvement in the internet should be limited as much as possible.
Even its name is already out of date, as quaint as calling it the “information super-highway” these days. A roomful of young people, convened as a “Youth Forum” on the fringes of the conference, were asked if anyone used the word “cyber” any more. No one raised their hands.
Icann chairman urges patience
Repurposing Churchill quotes is popular among those involved with Icann. Those pushing for reform of the organisation that manages the world’s internet domain names call it the “worst system of internet governance, apart from all the others”.
Steve Crocker, Icann’s newly elected chairman, has his own favourite quote: “It is not the end, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.”
A veteran computer scientist who help create the very foundations of the internet, Mr Crocker wants people to be patient with the Californian non-proft company, which is only 13 years old and just beginning to get into its stride in improving the structure of the internet.
Spam, spam and slightly less spam
At first this looks so promising. Volumes of spam are down nearly 70 per cent from last year according to a report from Symantec, the IT security company. In June, there were 39.2bn unsolicited, “spam” messages in circulation each day, compared with 121.5bn a day in June 2010. This echoes findings earlier this month from rival McAfee, which suggested spam levels had halved in the last year.
But sadly, this doesn’t mean we are winning the war on cybercriminals and botnets. Rather, it is a reflection on how use of the internet is evolving to become more centred around social networking sites and mobile phones. Spam on Twitter and Facebook is becoming a growing problem.
Summit has few answers on hacking crisis
It was appropriate that the day that Google was unveiling details of a new Gmail hacking attack, an august group of politicians and business leaders gathered in London, at a security summit organised by the EastWest Institute, to tell each other that, well, cyber security is a big problem.
Internet returns to Egypt
(Chart by Renesys)
Internet services returned to Egypt on Wednesday morning, with even previously blocked sites such as Twitter available.
Brussels is not going to eat all the cookies after all
“Don’t panic” – the words on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – should also be emblazoned on the front page of the EU telecoms package, which was voted through on Tuesday.
This update on European telecoms and internet legislation has been highly controversial. Profound division on issues, such as whether persistent illegal downloaders can have their internet access cut off, had already delayed its passage by several months.
Then, in the few weeks run-up to its approval, a new panic emerged: Would the new laws force companies to completely change the way they use internet cookies?
Euro tech luminaries lined up for Seedcamp
A who’s who of European technology entrepreneurs will be providing guidance and mentoring to a new generation of start-ups at this year’s Seedcamp. Founded by Saul Klein of Index Ventures and run by Reshma Sohoni, formerly of 3i and Softbank Capital, Seedcamp aims to build and support a community of European tech entrepreneurs, culminating in its main event in London this September.
The best-known entrepreneurs on this year’s advisor list are Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, the internet telephony service, and more recently Joost, a web video provider; and Brent Hoberman of travel site Lastminute.com and, latterly, Mydeco, an online furniture retailer.
The rest of the advisors are all big names on the European start-up scene too, as founders of many of Europe’s largest recent tech exits. They are: Michael Birch of social networking site Bebo and Kevin Cornils of online marketing provider Buy.at, both bought by AOL earlier this year; Martin Stiksel of Last.fm, an online community of music fans for which CBS paid $280m in May 2007; Marten Mickos, chief executive of open-source database provider MySQL, sold to Sun Microsystems for around $1bn in January; and Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and Tommy Ahlers of Zyb, mobile application firms acquired by Google and Vodafone respectively.
Alongside UK entrepreneurs who have yet to flip their companies for millions of dollars, and representatives from the big US tech companies who’ve been writing the cheques, this group will bring contacts, business advice and generally help start-ups at the week-long conference to “think big and aim high”.
Since May, Ms Sohoni has travelled led mini-Seedcamp events in Paris, Berlin and Kiev. But in spite of increasing numbers of new tech companies springing up in eastern Europe, she says London remains the main event. “We see the UK and London as a critical hub for start-up activities,” she says, especially for European companies with global ambitions.
Common technological themes among the entrepreneurs presenting across Europe so far include online and mobile gaming, personal finance applications, open source and variations on the “semantic web” – “the idea of using natural language to bring intelligence out of the information that’s out there”, according to Ms Sohoni.
But for those teams still applying to one of the 20 places at Seedcamp, she notes a preference of investors for business models based on transactional payments rather than advertising. “Everybody likes to put [advertising] up on their slide as a business model,” she said. “We were careful about that last year but are even more so now.”
Ms Sohoni also warns that almost half of last year’s applications came from social networking sites – none of which received investment.
“We are looking for globally applicable businesses that can grow beyond their local languages,” she says.
Seedcamp Week runs from September 15 to 19. The deadline for entries is August 10. The Financial Times is a media partner at the event.
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