The internet giant seeks new ways to foster innovation
FEW companies are as creative as Google, which serves up innovations almost as fast as its popular search-engine serves up results. This week the firm unveiled a new version of its Chrome web browser and launched Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of an online newspaper in much the same way that they leaf through its pages in print. On September 30th the company will roll out another fledgling product, Google Wave, for a test involving some 100,000 people. …

Frozen credit markets present an opportunity for some
INNOVATION is a dirty word in finance these days but, with securitisation markets gummed up, fresh thinking may be just what credit markets need. Prosper and DebtX, two online marketplaces with very different customers, are among those who think they stand to gain.
Prosper’s principal business is as an online peer-to-peer lender, matching up individual borrowers and lenders. Since October, Prosper has been dormant as it goes through registration with America’s Securities and Exchange Commission. But on April 28th, thanks to special dispensation from …

By Dominic Casciani
BBC News home affairs reporter
Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.
The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.
The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.
The Tories said the Home Office had “buckled under Conservative pressure” in deciding against a giant database.
Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications …

Nikolay Grebennikov
In February 2005, Joe Lopez, a businessman from Florida, filed a suit against Bank of America after unknown hackers stole $90,000 from his Bank of America account. The money had been transferred to Latvia.
An investigation showed that Mr. Lopez’s computer was infected with a malicious program, Backdoor.Coreflood, which records every keystroke and sends this information to malicious users via the Internet. This is how the hackers got hold of Joe Lopez’s user name and password, since Mr. Lopez often used the Internet to manage his Bank of America account.
However …

A behind-the-scenes conflict appears to be under way—but not the sort you might think
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
IT IS the new frontier for military and intelligence activity: cyberspace. For years military experts and computer scientists have speculated about the possibility of a nation’s infrastructure being attacked using computers, rather than bombs. There have been dark warnings of the danger of a “digital Pearl Harbour”—an unexpected strike in which digital attackers shut down America’s electrical grid or air-traffic control systems, or hack into nuclear-power stations and cause them to overheat. In recent …

Internet television moves from the computer to the living room
IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. Yet a growing number of people are poised to do just that.
At your correspondent’s home-from-home in Japan, …

Illustration by Otto Steininger
Technology is making health care more portable, precise and personal
HALF a century ago, in a film called “Fantastic Voyage”, a tiny Raquel Welch and her team were sent into a dying patient’s body in a nano-submarine to save his life. Technology has still not advanced quite that far, but today’s sophisticated devices and diagnostics are getting ever closer.
At the university hospital in the German city of Aachen, near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands, complex heart surgery that would once have required a lengthy and costly …

By David Reid
Reporter, BBC Click
Electronic book readers are still a minority pursuit for book lovers, but the devices have the potential to become the norm one day.
With newspapers in crisis, there are now suggestions that e-books might offer journalism a new portable platform and subscription model.
One French firm already taking advantage of the electronic subscription model is Ave! Comics which provides cartoon strips to paying e-book users.
“Our idea is to get cartoons more widely distributed to another public and in the end an international public,” said Allison Reber from Ave! …

Illustration by Otto Steininger
How far can interactive digital medicine go?
THE advances in digital medicine described in this special report have already started to move patients from the margins of the medical system to its centre. Some think there are bigger things to come. “The key is patient-driven research,” explains Gregory Simon, head of Faster Cures, an advocacy group in Washington, DC. Most of the push for adopting electronic health records has come from institutions anxious to cut costs and reduce medical errors, but he thinks the biggest gains will come …

By Greg Sandoval
(CNET) — Universal Music Group and Google are now partners in the music-video business.
The largest of the four top recording companies and YouTube’s parent company announced on Thursday that they are working together on Vevo, a new music and video entertainment service set to launch later this year.
YouTube will handle the technology while Universal Music supplies the content. The two companies will share ad revenue.
The companies said and at this point it appears that Universal’s content and artists will be the only label represented on the site. However, …