It seems that the 21st Century Digital Revolution, as it may someday be called, is getting bigger and bigger with each passing month. As is well known, financial losses faced by the movie industry and the music industry are increasing monthly as bootlegs made possible by digital versions proliferate. New digital models that could not have been predicted a decade ago are supplanting traditional business models so quickly that both of these industries are in very real danger of collapsing altogether.

Now, however, another, more unlikely victim may be added to the list: The publishing industry.

The New York Times recently ran a story profiling Philip Parker, an entrepreneur who has invented a way for books to be written by a computer algorithm. Or, rather, a way for books to be “compiled”. He doesn’t simply distribute existing books online; he’s created a business where the books themselves are written not by people but by a computer program.

From the article:

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

The technique isn’t perfected yet; and the end result at this point does leave something to be desired:

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.”

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.” Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

Should authors be worried? Probably not, at least not yet. There’s a wide gap between what a computer can compile and the nuanced hand of a skilled artist. Still, this news is a bit unsettling to those employed in the creative arts. And, taking the music industry as an example, it doesn’t seem well advised to underestimate this sort of development. It’s the kind of trend that could as easily become a dead end as an overnight sensation. Either way, it’s worth consideration.

Click here for the original story. More on the Digital Revolution in the coming days. Stay tuned.

When you first decided that you needed a website — and therefore, a web hosting provider — you probably did what most of us do: You went to your favorite search engine, typed in some variation on “web hosting” or “website host” and then sorted through the results that followed.

The problem is, how to make the right choice in web hosting providers when there are so many to choose from? California-based news website “Best Syndication” reports that there are now “more than a staggering 50,000 web hosting providers” competing for your business. (Read “Web Hosting Providers Rule The Web” here.) And anybody who’s ever searched Google or Yahoo for hosting services can tell this firsthand.

Now each and every week it is estimated more than 50,000 websites are launched and need to be hosted somewhere online. This figure continues to grow and grow.

In fact the current monthly count for the number of searches at Yahoo for the term ‘web hosting’ is a whopping 2,149,851. That’s right, over 2 million!

Also just recently it was reported that the popularity of blogs was seeing tens of thousands of new blogs launched each and every day. While many of these are hosted freely, the more serious bloggers each require an account with a reliable web hosting provider. …

By far the most popular top level domain is the .com There are currently over an estimated 40 million of these registered.

The .com top level domain currently holds over an estimated 70 percent of the domain name marketplace. The .net top level domain currently holds just over an estimated 10 percent of the domain name marketplace.

The good news for web hosting and domain name customers is that incredible deals have become available as competition increases among web hosting providers.

So how to choose, then? Considering just how competitive the web hosting industry has become, Aplus.Net is particularly proud to be among the most long-lived of all these companies. We just recently celebrated our tenth year of web hosting, and we’ve actually been in business since 1992 — try to find a competitor who’s been around that long.

But what does the average consumer care if Aplus.Net has been around longer than our competitors? How does that translate into value? For one thing, since we specialize in partnering with small businesses to provide all their online needs, it’s a source of comfort to know that the partner you trust has an almost two-decades-long track record of stability. It’s also a source of comfort to realize that any company, in any industry (and especially a technology-based industry) must have a history of innovation to be able to survive in such a notoriously competitive market for so long, while so many other start-ups have fallen by the wayside.

Most of all, though, you can be confident that Aplus.Net’s history of award-winning services couldn’t have been achieved without making a lot of customers happy. Our plans and prices speak for themselves. We’ve also recently entirely rebranded our hosting plans to make the process of choosing the right plan even more easy for our valued customers, including simplifying our plans, adjusting prices and eliminating set-up fees.

So, if you’re an Aplus.Net customer, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve made the right choice, however difficult that decision may have been. And if you’re not yet a customer, now is the perfect time to make your choice: Give Aplus.Net a try and see why we lead today’s web hosting industry. Click here to check out our award-winning services now.

Although written for a European audience, we found a recent CNBC Business Report entitled “Top Ten Tech Trends” very much applicable to the United States as well, if not for the whole modern world.

And that’s not just because it’s based in large part on American technology giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. It’s also because Europe has shown itself adept at applying innovations on a large scale in a way that often wins enthusiastic response from the consumer and business markets.

CNBC’s Tony Glover is confident that several of the new innovations we’ve seen lately are just the beginning of larger trends that will revolutionize the telecom and IT industries over the next few years. Looking at some of the examples he sites, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions.

Best of all, he feels that these consumer tech breakthroughs will result in “unprecedented opportunities for small and medium-sized players” — great news for small business owners looking for new ways to compete with the big guys.

The basis for his review is the big 3GSM Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile technology industry. The GSM is a worldwide mobile communications network that originated in Europe and is now used by over two billion people in 212 countries, according to the article.

Once again Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be going toe-to-toe to decide who will dominate the next generation of computing. But the fact that the US computing industry’s major battleground in 2007 will be high-end wireless handhelds is testimony to the global success of the GSM network, the European Commission’s mobile communications standard. The number of people using GSM has mushroomed from around one million in 1993 to over two billion today, operating across 212 countries.

And the top ten trends are:

1. If there is one trend that will dominate in 2007, it is the globalisation of mobile communications. The mobile phone industry estimates that around 1.3 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2007, with the rapidly developing economies of India and China being the main engines for growth. Mobile operators in India, for example, are signing new mobile phone owners at the staggering rate of about a million a week. …

2. The second trend … is the way in which mobile communications are becoming more sophisticated and relying less on basic voice services. Mobile operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, predicts that all phones will be email-enabled by 2010. This will effectively leapfrog consumers in markets like India and China from the 19th to the 21st century. They will be able to move from being without a phone or PC straight to the world of always-connected email and internet services simply by signing up for a mobile phone. Way before this happens, devices such as Apple’s new iPhone will have introduced users to high-definition mobile audio and video. Electronic gaming, music and even TV programmes will become available to millions almost overnight. …

3. The third major trend … is the continued convergence of IT and telecoms. Not only will mobile phones behave increasingly like computers, but telecoms operators … will also use their broadband services to supply services such as internet TV (IPTV) to customers. … BT (British Telecom) has recently struck a string of deals with content providers including Universal Music and Time Warner in order to be able to provide an ever-wider choice of on-demand entertainment. …

4. The fourth trend will see the rise of increasingly sophisticated forms of internet-based advertising as IPTV takes off. Microsoft is now determined to take Google’s ball away and run with it. It has, for instance, developed its own form of Google-style paid-for search that uses Microsoft’s vast database of personal information to allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups.

“Advertisers can see the age and sex of web surfers clicking on their ads as a result of information gathered by Microsoft properties such as MSN Hotmail, which requires those registering to submit their age bracket and gender,” says James Colborn, product manager at Microsoft’s adCenter research labs. He adds that advertisers do not have access to the names of those visiting their sites, merely a demographic overview of their age and sex.

According to Colborn, the adCenter labs on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle are about to release even more precise online advertising tools. Microsoft is launching a trial IPTV advertising service with an as-yet-unnamed major US retailer that will make a technological prediction made by Bill Gates last year a reality. …

5. The fifth major trend [is] the way in which all consumer IT devices, mobile and fixed, will become content guzzlers. The competition to acquire quality content will become intense, but ironically, the very technology providing consumers with the ability to access such a wide range of content will also make it increasingly difficult for major content owners to derive any revenue from their products.

6. This is a result of the sixth trend, which will be the proliferation of free services. The early years of the internet trained users to expect internet-based services to be largely free, and this has become a well-established trend. It will benefit small and nimble players with low overheads offering the kind of services capable of generating advertising.

Traditional entertainment giants like the Hollywood film studios will become increasingly vulnerable. Having been weaned on free music download sites such as Kazaa, many younger consumers now see nothing inherently wrong in using file-swapping services based outside the US to download copyrighted film and TV content for free.

7. The seventh trend will be the growing familiarity of the letters DRM – short for digital rights management – as traditional content providers such as the major Hollywood studios fight tooth and nail to protect their investments. New US laws designed to give long prison sentences to movie pirates are just the start.

8. The eighth trend [is] mobile operators such as Vodafone finally starting to accept that consumers will never use their handsets to access high-priced data services in the way these companies anticipated when they started to build their 3G networks at an estimated cost of €200bn. Instead, these operators will turn to business customers. Companies like Vodafone are already seeing business revenues rise as corporate users install 3G cards on their laptops.

9. This move to increased business mobility will be accelerated by trend number nine, as new types of mobile device from companies like Intel bridge the gap between mobile phones and laptops. Ultra-mobile laptops are shrinking, as evidenced by OQO’s Vista handheld computer. The key element to this trend is that the computing industry will finally abandon its one-size-fits-all philosophy. This will offer new opportunities for small and nimble companies to deploy mobile workforces and save money on the cost of centralised offices.

According to Intel, this revolution in portable computing will not merely be a question of physical dimensions. Portable computers will also be manufactured for specific environments such as schools and hospitals.

10. The tenth trend will be an extension of this kind of dedicated computing as machine-to-machine wireless communication becomes increasingly important. Machines ranging from in-car computers to heart monitors and other medical devices will be able to communicate with one another. It is estimated that by 2011 there will be over 100 million wirelessly connected devices.

Check out the original article in its entirety here.

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the agency that eventually morphed into the Internet, is celebrating its 50th birthday tonight in Washington, D.C.

In Monday’s Washington Post, Stephen Barr writes that DARPA “pulled together researchers who created the blueprint for the Internet.” The organization also “sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse (the first was carved from wood and had one button).”

DARPA is a part of the U.S. Department of Defense, created way back in 1958 as a technological solutions group prodded into action by the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, history’s first satellite. Since then, DARPA has been responsible for pioneering much of the forward-thinking technology that the military has needed over the past decades. And, not surprisingly, much of that technology has found its way into the lives of everyday Americans in recent years.

Of course, the history of all the events and people that came together to create the Internet is much more detailed than this one organization, but it is true that it provided the foundation, without which the World Wide Web would not exist as it does today. DARPA created the concept of computer networking, which of course is the very foundation of today’s Internet.

Mr. Barr tells us more about the organization:

Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions.

About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities.

By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has “a constant freshness of people and energy,” Tether said. “Everything else we do stems from that.”

One of those short-term managers returning for Thursday’s anniversary dinner is Lawrence G. Roberts, who led a DARPA team that designed a network that evolved into the Internet. He made some of the key decisions in 1967, when he was 30. As Roberts described it, “Putting A and B together and getting Z. Taking obscure things and seeing there is an intersection there.”

He hopes that DARPA will always be able to focus on innovation — “working on something that should change the country and generate the economy shift that the Internet did.”

Read the entire article here.

Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians’ rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better.

So begins a story from today’s New York Times that offers some good news: The American Internet infrastructure is, apparently, just fine.

Not only just fine, actually, but among the best: The story cites the latest Global Information Technology Report as ranking the U.S. fourth on the worldwide list, behind Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland (in that order).

The study was done by Insead, the business school near Paris, on behalf of the World Economic Forum, a policy and conference group based in Switzerland. It used an index generated from 68 variables including market factors, political and regulatory environment and technology infrastructure rather than just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds.

Despite the positive report, however, some remain skeptical.

“My gut feeling is that we don’t have the type of deployment you have abroad,” said David J. Farber, an Internet pioneer and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “If you are looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems. We are slow as molasses in deploying the next generation.”

Ultimately, though, although it’s just one report, it paints a much more positive picture than what we’ve been hearing lately. That’s good, of course, but it inevitably leads to claims that the information is flawed, since its conclusions are so much different than similar studies.

… Last year a range of statistics on global bandwidth use indicated that the United States was trailing other industrial nations in both broadband network consumption and penetration as a percentage of population.

For example, statistics maintained by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development gave a conflicting message. The average advertised broadband download speed of 23 American providers was 8.8 megabits a second, while the average for 23 providers in Denmark was a considerably slower 5.9 megabits. At the same time the number of broadband subscribers in Denmark was 34.3 for every 100 inhabitants, compared with 22.1 in the United States, according to a study in October 2007.

However, one of the authors of the Insead report said the narrow measures had failed to capture the true impact of the Internet when it was considered in a cultural, economic and political context.

… An O.E.C.D. economist acknowledged the nuances in taking into account government regulatory and related factors, and said it was hard to draw a single conclusion from the data. “I think we can say that a lot of the situation in the United States is a result of the lack of competition,” said Taylor Reynolds, an economist in the Internet and Telecommunications Policy section of the O.E.C.D. “In Europe we have adopted an unbundling strategy wholeheartedly.”