Summer Sale Madness!

June, July and August are typically quiet months for us (Maybe you too?).

So it’s a great time to do IT work while people are away.

Office moves, upgrades and updates, hardware refresh, training etc.

Book in a project (Anything not IT Support) over the summer months and recieve an additional 20% discount.

Call 020 3031 4734 or email eric@theengineroom.co.uk

(NB: August is now pretty much booked but July still has some out of hours slots available.)

Free IT Consultancy Supporting #StartUpBritain

Start Up Britain is an exciting private initiative to get Britain off it’s backside and reinvigorate small business, the engine of our economy.

A new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched today! Designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK, it has the full backing of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and HM Government.

They believe that many of the important functions and services necessary to foster and champion new enterprise can be open-sourced, instead of provided by government directly. They aim to do this by creating a living market-place online for the wide range of enterprise support that is already available.

To Support this initiative The Engine Room is offering 10 hours free IT Consultancy to kick you off, or get your small business back on track. Ongoing we will offer Start-ups 50% off all ongoing services.

Let’s make Britain GREAT again people…

Is Baidu the new Google?

Baidu is the largest search engine in China. It’s their answer to Google with a 75% market share in China (63% Global share) compared to Google’s dwindling 20% (27% Global share). It is China’s first company to be included in the NASDAQ 100 with 2010 showing revenues of $1.2bn, profits totalling $534m and a market cap of $40bn (Google’s is 5 times that but impressive stuff all the same).

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Baidu.com_(BIDU)

Is it better than Google? Will it become the biggest search engine in the world? Will it capture any of Google’s search revenue (notably the ONLY cash generator in the Google stable).

Under the bonnet

Look familiar?

The direct translation of Baidu is ‘hundreds of times’ which is said to describe the never ending service that it provides, and that you will get great service ‘hundreds of times’. Ok, doesn’t translate so well but hey, we’re not Chinese.

Baidu Growth

This is the impressive bit. The company’s profits more than doubled for the last quarter in 2010. This puts their net profits 171% higher than the same period in 2009. Total revenue for the year increased by 78% to $1.2 billion. So, time to take note huh.

Google Baidu Differences

The Differences: Well to start, it’s in Chinese (Simplified Han) which to me is ‘wow, what the hell is that and where do I start’. Under Chinese law you can download mp3’s completely legally (http://bit.ly/axWiQW). Other clever apps and services increase its stickiness, with e-commerce and social media being two massive growth areas Baidu is investing.

“Social search products represent a significant portion of our total traffic,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said. More here

Is Baidu better? Well no is the short answer. In blind tests Google proved better as people find what they want quicker:

Motorola will add the first search and map widgets from Bing.com to its Android handsets in China in the next few weeks. It changed the default search from Google to Baidu months ago. However, people spend longer on Baidu which suggests it’s not as efficient as Google:

Mobile Search

Worldwide, mobile services are huge business and 2011 will continue to grow exponentially. China has approximately 338m internet users but an estimated 600m residents have mobile phones. So we’re talking $billions in potential mobile revenue. As smartphones spread in popularity, Baidu and Google are locking horns for their share. Since September 2009, Google has been no.1 for revenue generation in the global mobile internet market. In China it is tied with Baidu.

Can Facebook succeed where Google failed?

Google pulled out (Kicked?) early 2010 and now run operations from Hong Kong. Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook, visited China late last year and his first stop was Baidu which is understandable but also raised some eyebrows. Russia and China are vast markets Facebook has yet to conquer. Like many other online services, Facebook is blocked in China. Does Zuckerberg have a plan to overcome the great firewall of China, and can Baidu help him do that?

To Conclude

So far the vast Chinese market has proved to be an unsolvable riddle for Western companies. The Chinese economy will no doubt continue to grow and although Google’s perch has been nobbled, 96% of visitors to baidu.com are Chinese, loving the local service. If Facebook manages to convince China to open the doors to its 1.3bn users it will be a huge win for the site and hopefully other platforms including the re-introduction of Google but it’s a long shot. Currently there doesn’t appear to be any real threat from Baidu as a global offering so if you want to invest in a ‘Search+’ business, continue to invest in Google. However, does Google want, nay need, a piece of the Chinese pie? Damn right, especially the mobile market, but will they get it? We don’t think so.

[It must be noted that Google isn’t officially ‘in’ China and hasn’t been since March 2010. It moved operations to Hong Kong which weirdly sits outside of Chinese law in many respects.Read more .]

IPv4 to IPv6. What you need to know

This article may look a little too geekalicious but it will affect us all very soon so I strongly recommend you have a read and at least get the gist for when you have to take action.

We’re running out of IP addresses. Latest estimates suggest we will run out by the end of this year. Every web device on the planet (Mobile, server, PC, website etc.) has an IP address. I’m sure you’ve heard the term. It’s the physical address of your ‘thing’ on the internet.

For example, www.google.com resolves to 165.165.38.147 which is the physical address of their server I am currently connected to (Note, they have gazillions of servers and therefore gazillions of IP addresses so if you ping them you will get a different IP). Want to know your own IP? Go to www.whatismyip.com

The history

In the early 70’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) http://www.darpa.mil/ created and developed the internet. IP (internet protocol) addresses were established which were allocated to individual unique internet plugins (users).  A specific address is allocated which is called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The original range is referred to as IPv4 (version 4). IPv4 uses a 32 bit address field which provides for 4,294,967,296 unique Internet addresses which I’m sure you’ll agree is a fairly large number. However, in 1992 it became apparent that this number as large as it may be is finite and at some point there would be a ‘drying up’ of available addresses, and therefore connections to the internet. A number of very intelligent people got together and with much chin rubbing and pizza ordering developed a solution to this ever increasing and speedily approaching problem. IPv4 has done a valiant and impressive job and continues to do so. But, whilst staying in the building please exit stage left and make space front and centre for the newly created and highly polished range of IPv6!

IPv6 uses a 128 bit address field quadrupling that of IPv4. So a mere 4,294,967,296 from IPv4 becomes  three hundred and forty trillion, trillion, trillion with IPv6. Celebrate, break out the champagne, phew, crisis over, well, almost.

The implementation and adoption of IPv6 has not come about as quickly as originally predicted. This is due to the development of technologies such as NAT (network address translation), routers etc, which allowed for singular unique IPv4 addresses to be split thus spreading further and increasing the longevity of IPv4’s journey toward its inevitable exhaustion. If you work in an office, chances are your router is using NAT.

The introduction of this new ‘unlimited’ range comes with a couple of provisos. The technology that we all have bought and love, will need to keep up with the times. Many expect some disruptions as the IPv6 shift takes place. Web sites could be slow or inaccessible, companies could have a harder time setting up new services, Internet service providers could have a hard time keeping up with subscriber growth, and security will have to adapt to the new technology but do not despair, the internet will not collapse!

What the experts say

“If you have a Web site, you are basically going to have some customers coming on wide gauge and on narrow gauge,” Daigle said. “Narrow gauge is going away.” Read more

Joe Klein, a security researcher with Command Information, says many organizations and home users have IPv6 enabled on their systems by default but don’t know it. They also don’t have protection in place to block malicious traffic, since some intrusion detection systems and firewalls aren’t set up to monitor IPv6 traffic, presenting an appealing vector through which outsiders can attack their networks undetected.

“Essentially, we have systems that are wide open to a network,” says Klein, who is a member of an IPv6 task force and will be speaking about the issue tonight at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York. “It’s like having wireless on your network without knowing it.” Original article here.

IPv6 Day is on 6th June 2011 http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/

What Happened to IPv5?

In short, IPv5 never became an official protocol. Many years ago, Internet Stream Protocol (ST) was considered IP version five by industry researchers, but ST was abandoned before ever becoming a standard or widely known as IPv5. Work on ST and IPv5 is not expected to ever restart. Original article here.

However, with the number of hosts on the Internet growing steadily, the larger address space will eventually be critical to further expansion. IPv6 also offers better security with IPsec, a part of the basic protocol suiteWith an entirely different address notation, called CIDR, and addresses written in hexadecimal instead of the familiar four octets of decimal numbers used by IPv4, there will be a learning curve for IT administrators. The time to tune up your IPv6 skills is now, before the transition becomes mandatory.

As a business, what do you have to do?

Don’t set your hair on fire just yet. As the year unfolds we will get a clearer picture of what needs to be done and when. Your IT Support will start getting in touch and simple configuration changes will be made to machines and backend IT kit. However, it is your responsibility to understand the changes and how they could affect your business. The good news is that your system is almost definitely IPv6 compliant already. The inevitability of the transition was best indicated by the fact that from Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 & Mac OS X 10.3 (Several years old now) IPv6 was enabled by default. The bad news is that the new system *may* open us up to new types of attack from hackers and malicious users on the web. We just hope the media doesn’t blow it out of all proportion like the Millennium bug fiasco.

Tech Trends To Watch In 2011…

2011 Tech Predictions:

Incidents of (state sponsored) tech terrorism will rise (as will inflation and interest rates):

Microsoft will continue to flounder everywhere (Sell shares soon!) except with the office staples such as Windows and Office (Office 2010 is rather good). Apple will continue to conquer & niche the covetable product arena (Watch out for the new iPad Spring/Summer 2011):

Read More