One Shot Design

The Economist posted a chart of the estimated price at witch “cybercriminals” are selling stolen information. In case of bank account details, the stakes can be pretty high if that information falls into the wrong hands. The text doesn’t mention what are the sources of those figures, but it gives a good idea of the types of digital information cybercriminals do prize the most.

In a September 2008 article, I published simple precautions to follow to protect your digital privacy and those tips are more relevant than ever.

Initially launched as an invitation-only release on the 1st April 2004, GoogleMail offered one of the highest storage capacity of the time: 1GB, compared to the meager 2 to 4 MB of the competition. Gmail, which was and still is in the Beta status, features a search-oriented interface and does not allowed to send nor receive Windows executable files or archive files containing executables (an efficient remedy to virus spread on Microsoft Windows). It features spam filters that I consider amongst the most efficient.

Gmail opened registration to the public on the 7th of February 2007 and it recently became OpenID, which mean that the same account data can be used to log on a broad range of Web sites. On the other hand, more than 30 privacy and civil liberties organizations have always expressed concern about the lack of clarity in Gmail’s privacy policy and about Google scanning messages to display content-sensitive ads. Arguably however, no single email user has the guarantee that one’s correspondence will be eyesdropper-proof unless resorting to tedious encryption standards or setting up one’s very own email server.

Gmail’s user base has risen to tens of millions and as of last week, when accessing a Googlemail account from a Web browser, one can now choose amongst predefined graphical themes.

After diversifying in the trendy luxury eyewear market niche, watchmaker TAG Heuer seems to have followed a cold-blodded logic by deciding to jump on the luxury phone bandwagon and releasing the € 3,400.00 Meridiist developed with ModelLabs.

Believed to be pitched against Nokia’s Vertu, TAG Heuer Meridiist features state-of-the-Art hardware. But as for the rest of luxury phones, I feel the days of over-expensive products are numbered due to the popularity of the iphone. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. Hardware fineness is arguable. I mean, are normal phones that cheap?
2. Like any computing device, luxury phones become outdated after a 6 months lifespan. Even if one is rich enough to spend several thousands on a phone, it isn’t nice to know that the expensive device bought six month ago now sucks.
3. Operating Systems and software have nothing particular and do not offer extensions.
4. It is not the iphone.

The reasoning goes like this:

• If rich people use the most stylish products
• If the iphone is considered the most stylish phone
• Then rich people must use the iphone

Besides being itself a fashion icon, the Apple phone and its craze gave birth to blogs dedicated to celebrities with the iphone. The Not only does it offer fine hardware, but its software is one of the most praised by the press. For the rich, there is the possibility of staying above the mass by customising the phone with a luxury carrying case, precious metal or precious stones; solutions that make the Vertu or the Meridiist redundant.

With 14 employees and an annual budget of € 2.5 million, Europe’s first joint digital library Europeana will open on Thurstay the 20th of November 2008. Users will for example be able to read Dante’s Divina Commedia, and view Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.

The library, created to compete with Google’s Book Search, will initially feature 2 million of documents and works of Art that have fallen in the public domain. Europeana was built upon the expertise of France’s BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), which opened a website in 2007 based on its experience with the 1996 Gallica project.

The European Commission plans to invest some € 120 million until 2010 and is calling for private companies to increase the resources and fasten the digitization of works.

UPDATE: upon official launch, Europeana overwhelmingly received more than 15 million hits per hour which ended up slowing down the servers. The Commission had the portal unplugged and plans to restore accessibility by mid-december. For more information, read the official press release.

Having had the undisputed strongest foothold in the business market until this year with its Blackberry smartphones, Canadian company RIM has been busy working on a touch-screen device that will be released in a couple of weeks.

At the moment, Apple doesn’t offer an all round solution of messaging server and client like RIM does; but never in the history of telecomunications had a handset maker been able to dictate conditions to a network carrier like AT&T: Apple asked for modifications to existing networks to enable “visual voicemail”, a 10% of iPhone sales in AT&T stores and 5 years of exclusivity.

Given the overwhelming success of the iPhone, which sales have now topped that of Blackberries, and the (tightly controlled) growing number of iPhone application, RIM has more than one thing to be worrying about. Yahoo recently released Zimbra, a server & client suite that supports the iPhone.