SearchCIO.com, 2 Feb, reports on the emergence of sophisticated speech recognition software which can highlight words that can indicate trouble on the line such as ‘confused’ and ‘cancel’. The software can also monitor in real-time telltale changes in the pitch, volume and timbre of a customer's voice which indicate hostility or rising anger.

‘Social bookmarking’ is the name given to the family of technologies which began to appear a couple of years back to allow you to share your favourite internet sites with others and to ‘tag’ them with sets of keywords known as a ‘folksonomies’.

Maurene Grey in Collaboration Loop January 03, 2006 reports that two years after being signed into law, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have released their report to the US Congress on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Reuters report, Jan 6 2006, that some users are taking their lead from tagged animals and having minute RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Chips storing their personal codes implanted into their hands to allow them automatic access to computers and access-controlled locations. But its going to make you think twice about changing your password. To read Computer chips get under skin of enthusiasts.

Message archiving software can help organizations and teams achieve regulatory and corporate policy compliance, reduce the cost of eDiscovery, and reduce storage costs through mailbox management. The top message archiving software vendors include Computer Associates, EMC, IBM, Open Text, Symantec and ZANTAZ. Forrester have evaluated their strengths and weaknesses across 74 criteria in a newly published research report: (December 05) Message Archiving Software, Q4 2005

Good single-function design is the secret

In a competitive and crowded market a trap for new entrants is the temptation to try to do all things well. This goes against the timeless design principle of cohesiveness. Cohesiveness is about ensuring you do the main thing better than the competition. Cohesiveness is particularly important in today's market for high tech products such as portable digital devices and web-based applications.

The owner of a business in the Channel Isles has successfully used a new anti-spamming law, The Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications, to win out of court damages against a UK company who sent him spam. The spammers ignored him when he wrote asking for an apology and claiming damages under regulation 30 of the privacy regulations according to Court victory hailed as spam stopper (December 28, 2005). This legal action is thought to be the first of its kind under the directive and may be a landmark case.

Imagine a scenario a couple of years from now where our governments and commercial enterprises discover that 99% of their documents are stored in a proprietary format (Microsoft) and some serious legal or technical issue has arisen which threatens their long-term accessibility. Fortunately this scenario is now much less likely due to an important international standards initiative known as Open Document Format.

Microsoft Research tool sorts your email inbox by importance

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – in this case automatically ‘triaging’ inbound email by user defined importance. SNARF allows the user to design their own personal email importance criteria such as the "number of emails sent to me in the last month". Such metrics can, in turn, be combined to create overall importance criteria for sorting your inbox.

Collaboration2.0 - a new generation of virtual collaboration products or just slicker marketing?

A hot topic at present on the web is the suggestion that we have now reached a new level of products, services and suppliers. Some are calling it Web2.0 and others such as BusinessWeek are calling it WebSmart.