Dial 360000 and Ask Me

By Pramod Joshi

Bishwas Nepal, 22, a teacher, found it difficult to find a Newari restaurant in the city but was relieved immediately after calling 360000, a hunting number of Ask Me information centre in Kathmandu.

Similarly, Jeevan Prasain, 50, needed the fire alarms and security equipment to install in his newly built house but he did not know the whereabouts of the service outlet in the town. He found Ask-Me to help him install equipment in his house.

Likewise, one could get information about flight schedules, share market, the world time, etc. Ask Me is a first information centre of Nepal, started at the end of 2001. It is gaining popularity in town for availing the information about any business house, commercial products and general information about the town.

Dialling 360000 links the caller to the cubicles of centre for information about almost anything and the communication service officer of Ask-Me provides it.

Started by Himalayan Tele-Commerce Private Limited (HTPL), Ask Me gives business information and general information to the clients. "The main objective to start the Ask me call-centre is to provide information to the people and to bridge the information gap between consumers and manufacturers or business houses that provide services to the public," says Rabi Shah, a director of HTPL.

There are about 4, 000 incoming calls everyday and mostly the calls are to get telephone numbers. There are also some calls for answers to the quizzes, says Shah. But, he says they do not provide answers to quiz. People still are not fully aware about this information centre, says Shah.

They provide information of only those organisations or individuals who are registered with Ask Me. The fee is determined by the amount of information the companies want to provide. The service is categorised in two forms, general and premium which cost Rs. 1, 000 and 5, 000 per year respectively.

Shah states that the concept of this kind of services has not developed in Nepal. In foreign countries, every product has the hotline number to give the information. However, there have been good responses from the customers. "But the slackness in business has also affected Ask Me," says Shah.

However, business companies have mixed response to this information centre, and there are some big business organisations who do not want to take the help of Ask Me, adds Shah. "As we are here to make profit but so far it is like social service."

Ask Me has caught on fast with people tired of trying to call 197, Nepal Telecommunications Corporation's directory assistance, and finding that the line is often busy or there is no response. Or, they do not have the information. But Shah says that this information centre is nothing like the 197 that only provides the information about the telephone numbers. "It is more than 197" says Shah adding, "Our manpower can sell the service. We provide Tele-Marketing informs Shah." "The business organisation could target their customers, they can campaign for their services through telephone, and e-mail and can sell their products and services through Tele marketing."

He informs that in the near future Ask Me Helpline will start services of advising the victims and sufferers of women trafficking, HIV-AIDS and other social issues, in collaboration with Non Government Organisations.

Himalayan Tele-commerce is also the first company to start International call centre in Nepal. This will generate big amount of money to the country, says Shah.

In Europe and more so in the US, such call centres are either fully automated or are becoming very expensive to operate manually. That is why more and more businesses are shifting these jobs to countries such as Nepal or India, where they can find fluent English-speakers.

It is just as easy to bring such services here provided the company is assured it will be handled by trained, competent individuals. In the deal, this has become a new business venture for companies in Nepal that, with an initial investment in human resources and relatively common technology, can earn the country whooping amount of cash.

Thumbs: Key fingers for online youth

Not everybody lets their fingers do the walking

The use of gadgets such as mobile phones, wireless messaging units and game-playing devices has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands, according to an English Sunday newspaper.

New research carried out in nine cities around the world shows that the thumbs of people under the age of 25 have taken over as the hand's most dexterous digit, reported The Observer.

The change affects those who have grown up with hand-held devices on which the thumbs are used for keying-in text messages and e-mails.

'Changing each other'

"The relationship between technology and the users of technology is mutual. We are changing each other," said Sadie Plant of Warwick University's Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The University of Warwick is in Coventry, England.

"Discovering that the younger generation has taken to using thumbs in a completely different way and are instinctively using thumbs where the rest of us are using our index fingers is particularly interesting."

In her research, Plant noticed that while those less used to mobile phones used one or several fingers to access the keypad, younger people used both thumbs ambidextrously, barely looking at the keys as they made rapid entries. (CNN)

'Clinton' e-mail worm attempts to delete files

A new medium-risk Internet worm called "Worm/MyLife.B" that displays a cartoon image of former President Clinton is spreading quickly in the wild, according to Medina, Ohio-based antivirus firm Central Command Inc.

The worm, which is a slight modification of a similar worm last month called "Worm/MyLife," spreads through e-mail using addresses found in Microsoft Corp. Outlook address books.

The worm appears as a screen-saver attachment in an e-mail with the subject header "my life ohhhhhhhhhhhhh."

When an unsuspecting user opens the attachment, the worm displays an image of Clinton and copies itself into the system so it will run each time the computer is started.

The worm is also apparently coded to delete several types of files, but in its testing, Central Command didn't see one instance where files were actually deleted, said Steven Sundermeier, a product manager with Central Command.

Most of those infected so far have been home users, and the risk to businesses seems small, Sundermeier said.

That's because most corporations already filter out such attachments, and even if they don't, it's relatively easy to filter out this one by subject header or attachment type, he said.

Most antivirus tools are apparently already being updated with information about the new worm, he added.

Sunnyvale, California-based antivirus firm McAfee.com Corp. has also classified the virus a medium risk, with about 100 samples of the virus coming in overnight from Australia and 20 in the U.S. by midday Friday.

The file-deletion aspect of the virus means that it merits attention, however, a McAfee spokeswoman said.

Sam Costello of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.

(IDG)

Wireless developers target IM over e-mail

A survey of developers building applications for wireless devices such as cell phones and handheld computers pegged instant messaging as the technology du jour, according to a survey released last week.

Overtaking e-mail as the most popular wireless application being developed for corporations and consumers, more than half of the 600 programmers polled said messaging is their new love, results of a survey from Evans Data Corp. showed. Conducted every six months, the Santa Cruz, California, market research company uses the Wireless Developer Survey to follow trends in software programming.

Considered by many a consumer application, instant messaging has crept into the workplace at an increasing rate. As well as using standalone messaging products, organisations are integrating the technology into internal applications so employees can collaborate on projects and communicate quickly over the Internet.

"A majority of developers working on messaging applications are creating them for business purposes," said Jay Dixit, an analyst with Evans Data. About 32 per cent of the developers polled said they are building commercial applications used by consumers and businesses that incorporate instant messaging technology.

Another 23 per cent of developers are developing internal applications with messaging capabilities, and about 10 per cent said they are building instant messaging applications for individuals or small workgroups inside a corporation.

Separately, the study observed changes in the wireless standards being used by developers. Wi-Fi, a popular standard for wireless networks, is now used by one in four developers, compared to one in five developers polled six months ago. Also known as 802.11b, the wireless protocol was the only technology to gain ground since the previous survey.

The popularity among developers of Bluetooth and HomeRF (home radio frequency) held steady since the last survey, Dixit said. About 14 per cent of those polled said they are working with Bluetooth, and about 8 per cent chose HomeRF. Meanwhile, the most used security standard, according to Evans Data, is HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer, or HTTP over SSL), a protocol for accessing secure Web servers or encrypting Web pages. About 39 per cent of those polled said they are targeting HTTPS above other security standards.

A security standard used with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) called WTLS (Wireless Transport Layer Security) is being used by 9.6 per cent of developers, the research company said, while RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) is used by 11.5 per cent of those polled. Another 40 per cent of respondents said they use various other security protocols, according to the survey. "That suggests that we're still very early in the battle for wireless security protocols," Dixit said. (CNN)

Nextel, AOL team on wireless web

AOL's Instant Messenger and Internet content will be available on Nextel mobile phones.

Adding to the company's growing presence in the wireless market, America Online said Wednesday that it signed a deal with Reston, Virginia-based Nextel Communications that will allow Nextel subscribers to access AOL's Instant Messenger and Web services over their cellular phones.

AOL's agreement with the carrier comes on the heels of a number of similar arrangements AOL has struck with carriers such as AT&T Wireless Services, Sprint PCS Group, and VoiceStream Wireless, furthering the company's AOL Anywhere initiative.

Nextel subscribers in the U.S. will be able to send instant messages, and have access to AOL Mail, news, driving directions, and entertainment information sent over the carrier's always-on packet data network, the companies said.

The AOL services should be available to Nextel customers within 90 days, according to AOL Anywhere Senior Vice President Lex Felker.

AOL Everywhere

Through its AOL Anywhere strategy, the mammoth Internet and media company has been steadily racking up agreements to catapult its content and services off the desktop and onto mobile devices.

In recent months, the company announced a deal with Nokia to preinstall the AIM service in new mobile phones, Felker said.

"We've seen usage [on the Nokia phones] skyrocket and it's increasing everyday," he said.

With AIM becoming a powerful presence not just on desktops, where it is responsible for sending 1 billion to 1.5 billion messages a day, according to Felker, but also on wireless devices, some users have begun to wonder if the service will be interoperable with rival messaging applications.

However, Felker said that the wireless AIM service "does not provide for combined communities and we have not taken steps [toward creating interoperability] for a variety of reasons."

Interoperability aside, AOL has plans to splash its instant message and Web services across a number of upcoming wireless devices through licensing agreements and manufacturer deals, Felker said. It seems that if the company gets its way, AOL won't just be anywhere, but everywhere. (CNN)

CERT warns IM users to beware of intruders

Tens of thousands of people have reportedly been tricked into downloading malicious software onto their computers from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and instant messaging (IM), said an incident report released by the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

CERT, a Pittsburgh-based security research and information service, said the intruders then use the victims' computers "as attack platforms for launching distributed denial-of-service attacks."

The CERT advisory said the messages often warn users that they have already been infected with a virus and instruct them to go to a Web address and download a program to clean their machine or face being banned from the IRC or IM system they're using.

"This is purely a social engineering attack since the user's decision to download and run the software is the deciding factor in whether or not the attack is successful," said the report, authored by Allen D. Householder, an Internet security analyst at CERT. "Although this activity is not novel, the technique is still effective, as evidenced by the reports of tens of thousands of systems being compromised in this manner."

CERT warned that once a system has been compromised, attackers may be able to:

Exercise remote control, Expose confidential data, Install other malicious software and a Change or delete files. Dulles, Va.-based American Online Inc., which has more than 100 million registered users of IM sending 1.3 billion messages daily, said it was aware of the CERT warning and urged all of its members to use common sense and skepticism when chatting with others on the Web.

If a message ever "appears from out of the blue" warning a user of a threat, such as those cited in the CERT example, users should be skeptical, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said. Most people would question the credibility of a stranger calling on the phone asking for financial information, for instance, and they should carry that wariness to their online activities, he said.

"Never download files from strangers," Graham said. "Online, know who you are dealing with. As for hyperlinks, the same also applies ... don't click on an unknown or strange link."

Those sentiments are shared by CERT, which also recommends that home users have the latest version of antivirus software installed on their machines. Graham also said that home users should instruct their children in how to use the computer safely, noting that it makes no sense to take precautions just to have another user make a mistake.

(CNN)

Online, e-publishing become footnotes

At last year's Paris book fair, e-books and online publishing were the Next Big Thing.

This year it seems the burst dot.com bubble has deflated them to the size of footnotes.

"The area given over to multimedia, outside of e-books, has been halved compared to last year," one of the trade fair's organisers, Veronique Cordier, admitted to AFP.

Fellow organiser Serge Eyrolles said companies selling traditional paper books were rushing in to fill the void left by failed cybereditors.

Companies such as Encyclopaedia Universalis, which had abandoned print to put its information only on CD-ROMs and the Internet in anticipation of the virtual gold rush that never happened, have taken a back-to-basics approach. (AFP)

Its encyclopedia is now available again in traditional book form.

"We noticed that the interest for paper is still there," the head of the company's French subsiduary, Jack Mayorkas, said, adding that the day the Internet will be the only reference for readers "won't be tomorrow".

Others were in an even more advanced state of logging out of the book fair.

Cytale, one of the first e-book makers in France, pulled out of its stand at the last minute after failing to pay creditors. (AFP)

E-tags for first time offenders

High-tech Singapore plans to electronically tag first-time offenders convicted for minor offences and allow relatives of inmates to hold videoconferences via the Internet, a report said Wednesday.

The electronic tags will allow prison authorities to monitor the movements and curfew hours of the convicts, who would be placed under a home detention scheme instead of being put in jail, the Straits Times said.

Singapore, a wealthy island-nation, already has a home detention scheme using electronic tags but only for those serving the last six months of their jail terms.

It now plans to extend the scheme to cover people convicted for the first time for minor offences. (AFP)

Among those who could be covered are traffic offenders, shoplifters and thieves who may wear the electronic tag for up to a year.

The prisons department is studying a range of penalties to fit various crimes in the modern city-state, which is among the safest countries in the world.

"We are still at an exploratory stage," prisons director Chua Chin Kiat told the newspaper.

"But primarily we are looking at offences which tell us that the offender is not a bad character, that the offence committed is more the result of an accident or negligence, than a deliberate act of evil," he said.

In another scheme called the Internet Televisit, relatives of convicts can hold video conferences from their home with the inmates through a web camera and a computer with Internet access. The system could be ready in two years' time.

Under the current system of teleconferencing, relatives have to go to two video-link centres to be able to talk to the inmates who can be seen on a 35-inch display screen.

"It is quieter at home and there is more privacy," said a production worker whose husband is in prison. "Our relatives can also come here and let him know we are waiting for him," she told the newspaper. (AFP)

Philips inks deal with Dell

Royal Philips Electronics said Wednesday it had entered a five-year supply deal with Dell Computer Corp., the world's leading personal computer maker, that could be worth up to five billion dollars (5.7 billion euros).

The deal calls for Philips to supply cathode-ray tubes, flat-panel monitors, storage devices, connectivity solutions and other components to US-based Dell for use in computers.

Dell will become a preferred global supplier to Philips of server and data-storage products, workstations and personal computers. Dell will also market and sell a range of Philips-brand peripherals and related products.

Philips said the deal could be worth up to five billion dollars based on projections of 25 per cent year-on-year growth. Further financial details were not released.

The companies will also work together on technology planning, marketing and optical-storage standards.

Potential expansion of the scope of the alliance to cover other technologies and business opportunities is possible, Philips said. (AFP)