Even as the light has long dimmed on the dotcom boom, and the feverish partying is now just a faint hangover, the technology crowd is massing once more. But this time, instead of clamouring at the bar at a packed-out First Tuesday event, Britain’s e-business people are hitting the web sites before hitting the bars. This time it’s not about WANs, Wi-Fi or wireless networking, but real live networking, enhanced

Thankfully I was wrong. It turned out I hadn’t been recognised by my photo in NMA, but the one on Ecademy.com, the networking site which last week announced its intention to reach 10,000 active members by next year. So this is the state of business in the new millennium. Meeting people who we have encountered on Web sites. As bland and somewhat geekish as that sounds, it’s going to become

When a newspaper’s front page hits the newsstands, it creates, so the saying goes, the first draft of history. But how much history can news websites contribute, when their "front pages" rarely linger more than a single day? And will the trend towards charging for access to online archives eventually destroy the historical archives of the new media industry? It was thoughts like these which began to occur to online

The Tom Cruise character lives in a world 52 years hence where we have given up many of our innate human rights in return for security and public humiliation in every shopping mall. The real issue here is one of data and of cost. Today we have most of the ‘Minority Report’ technologies, they’re just too expensive to implement. Only the security services have enough cash and political will to

Charmed.com was not your typical Silicon Valley start-up by any means. For a start its CEO was the 27-year-old Katrina Barillova, an ex-Czechoslovakian spy who’s cover had been to work as a fashion model. When Eastern Europe turned capitalist she left to become a bodyguard and security advisor to billionaires in the Middle East. After leaving for the US, she teamed up with an ex-MIT graduate to form InfoCharms, a

The prize is a future of mass participation in the local affairs of the nation, instead of the lacklustre voter turnout that’s long become the norm. But although a world where we vote on everything from politics to monetary union with Europe via a PC, TV or mobile phone seems inevitable, society at large may have other ideas. In this year’s local elections around seven areas will be testing different

But what of the battle to actually own the online video space? RealNetworks helped kick off the revolution in Webcasting when it brought out real RealAudio in 1995. Two years later it came back with RealVideo, just as Microsoft launched NetShow and Apple produced QuickTime. Since Microsoft entered the market it has been at loggerheads with RealNetworks to offer access to the biggest video events, trying to achieve as many