Rasmussen receives two-year ban - Michael Rasmussen is suspended for two years by the Monaco Cycling Federation following his expulsion from last year's Tour de France. [bbc cycling news]

Ubuntu Full Circle #14 Is Out

Its that time again. The latest issue of Full Circle, the Ubuntu community magazine, is out and ready for download.

[tectonic]

Open Source Phone Runs Free

Open source mobile phone maker, Openmoko, yesterday announced the release of the Neo FreeRunner phone. The Neo FreeRunner was shipped to distributors in Germany, France and India initially with plans to ship to other parts of the world later.

[tectonic]

Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha-1 Released

The Ubuntu development team has announced the first alpha release of the forthcoming Ubuntu 8.10, also called Intrepid Ibex. This is still s very early release so is not recommended for general use.

[tectonic]

Firefox 3 Shows Strong Uptake

A little more than 10 days after its release and Firefox 3 is already starting to dominate browser usage. Tectonic readers are generally ahead of the general trend when it comes to adopting new technologies but the growth in Firefox usage over the past week has been significant.

[tectonic]

http://gigaom.com/

by Evan Paull, who is a software engineer for Mark Logic and a startup consultant.

What’s in a company name? Plenty. It’s your first opportunity to brand yourself. Get it right and you’ll stand out as clever, useful, and memorable to potential users and investors — even if your product isn’t any good. But get it wrong and you’ll flame out before your product even gets out of beta.

So, what makes Brightmail, PayPal and IronPort great names, but Lycos, Xobni and Vidoop really lousy? It turns out there’s a formula for effective naming and it’s surprisingly simple.

Look at many of the most successful brands and you’ll notice they’re often compound names, consistently made up of two components:

• a word that relates to the company product in a direct, literal sense, establishing a clear association between the brand and what the company does.
• a word not literally related to the product, but rather a metaphorical adjective to evoke a differentiating characteristic or “feeling” about the company’s product.

Our minds are built to make connections, mostly at a subconscious level. When a metaphor is detected, it triggers a process in our brains that associates the metaphor with the next object or reference. This naming system forces the mind to take the cognitive step of associating the metaphor to the product it represents, thus forming a positive association to the brand. And once your brain has woven the connection, it sticks, so there’s a great chance your company name won’t be forgotten.

So when we break down the name Brightmail, we see that “mail” indicates what the product does — they make email — while “bright” is metaphorical, framing their product in a positive light. This same logic applies to PayPal; “pay” is literal, “pal” is metaphorical. Ditto with IronPort, a provider of email and web security products — “iron” is a metaphor for strength and “port” is a literal reference to what the company product protects: network ports.

Search company Lycos tried a made-up word, to ill effect. After all, what’s a lycos? Xobni makes a cool email service, but someone had to tell me that xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards. Vidoop is just yucky. Reminds me of, well, you know.

Of course there are startups that get so far out in front of their competitive fields, or whose products are so exemplary, that names which ought to have been tricky are nevertheless well received.

Consider Twitter. If you had asked me a year-and-a-half ago, I’d have said it was a terrible name — all I could think of was “twit.” But people’s associations with Twitter are good because its communication tool is first-in-class and offers a great experience.

I was recently asked to consult with a startup that is considering re-naming itself. It’s a good thing, because the name they’re using now is totally confusing. It’s one of those Google-wannabe made-up words that sounds vaguely Latin, but isn’t. Worst of all, it doesn’t tell users like me anything about the company’s product (they archive web pages). When the company explained the name to me, I got even more confused.

In my view, while site archiving is useful (and they do it well), this probably isn’t a broad-based enough service to be elevated to the level of a consumer utility, as search or micro-blogging (Twitter) have been. This means their made-up name is unlikely to ever be turned into a verb (like “to google” or “to tweet”).

I suggested some new names, based on the two-part formula:

ArchiText: Archi sounds like architect, a good association. It also refers to archive. “Arch” as a prefix is “chief,” so metaphorically it evokes priority. Text is literal for content. Combined you might get: “storage for vital web content.”
PermaPage: “Perma” evokes impermeability. “Page” is literal.
ArchWeb: “Arch” for “archive,” and the metaphorical “priority.” Web is web.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

By Chris Summers
BBC News

It's 2008 and sex seems to be everywhere. So who holds the line between permissiveness and obscenity? What is obscene these days? And how do those people entrusted to make these calls cope with the harrowing work?

"People think 'what a great job - you sit and watch porn all day'," says Inspector Andy Shortland, who heads the Metropolitan Police's Obscene Publications Squad.

"I think to myself you really would not want to see this stuff. It's not top shelf magazine stuff or soft-core porn which you might hire at Blockbuster. This is really horrible stuff. And when I say that it usually stops them dead.

"But it's just human nature to laugh about it," he adds.

The squad, the only one of its type in the country, consists of 12 officers, including one woman. Its role is threefold - to monitor what is on sale at licensed sex shops, to target and convict pedlars of illegal pornography and to advise other law enforcement agencies.

But what, in these more permissive times, is considered obscene?

During the trial of American pornographer Larry Flynt in the 1970s, his lawyer Louis Sirkin observed: "One man's obscenity is another man's art." In England, the law is governed by a piece of legislation almost half-a-century old - the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

It defines obscenity as "content whose effect will tend to deprave and corrupt those likely to read, see or hear" it.

It helpfully adds: "This could include images of extreme sexual activity such as bestiality, necrophilia, rape or torture."

Insp Shortland says: "What was socially unacceptable 10 or 20 years ago may be acceptable now. There is a moving line. For example Lady Chatterley's Lover was once considered obscene but certainly wouldn't be now.

"But bestiality, necrophilia, rape and torture would still be considered obscene," he says, as would depictions of sexual gratification through lavatorial functions.

The Obscene Publications Squad works closely with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which is responsible for censoring and labelling all films released in the UK, whether they are movies for the cinema, videos and DVDs for the regular retail market or specialist sex shop material.

Straw Dogs release

Rape and torture scenes - sometimes in mainstream movies - have been problematic for both the police and the BBFC.

"There is quite a high threshold," says Insp Shortland. "Some caning films can have bad injuries - which are not life-threatening - and that is considered to be obscene. Some rape films are 'fake' with actors portraying rape. It is quite a difficult line to judge."

The case of the 1971 film Straw Dogs, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, is well known to many film buffs. Originally banned because of a horrific rape depiction, the BBFC passed a different edit of the film in 2002 - which included the scene.

It would be wrong to assume the decision was due to greater tolerance of sexual violence, says the BBFC's senior examiner, Murray Perkins. Far from it.

"Sexual violence is one of the areas where our position which has not changed much over the years," says Mr Perkins. "It's still one of our main concerns. The mixing of sex and violence is something which concerns people and rightly so.

"The makers of Straw Dogs had done their own edit and in the process the film gave the impression that the female character enjoyed the rape. In the full uncut version, that was balanced by another event in the film which gave it context and that was why we were able to pass it."

'They want to be here'

Viewing the scene is deeply unpleasant even for someone who appreciates the film's artistic merit. So how do those who must watch this sort of material for hours each week cope?

Insp Shortland admits it can be tough on his team, but says there are safeguards in place to ensure officers' mental health is not endangered.

"They will not be monitored all the time. If there is one officer dealing with all the material then they will be offered open access to the occupational health department.

"If someone comes to me and says 'I can't take any more of this' I will listen to that. But at the end of the day they are here because they want to be here. They work as a team and are quite open about what they can and can't manage to watch. Each person knows their limit and what they feel less comfortable with."

The workload for Mr Perkins and his fellow examiners at the BBFC is less gruelling.

"Some people think it sounds like the best job in the world," says Mr Perkins. "But the way we do the viewing you are disengaged to a certain extent because you are making notes and are hyper-sensitive to the language and the context. You are viewing it as a job and you've got to be mindful of policy, guidelines and public expectation."

But do examiners risk becoming desensitised?

Legal defence

"If you see something which is raw, misogynistic, aggressive and violent you don't become desensitised to it. What is not right is never right."

Last year the BBFC issued 1,159 films with an R18 rating, meaning they could only be sold in licensed sex shops. Of those, 27% required cuts.

"The majority of the cuts were little sections rather than a whole scene. It may be strong abuse, violent behaviour, temporary strangling, or it may be a reference to under-age sex," Mr Perkins says.

While an R18 rating is not a legal defence for a pornographer, it would be very unlikely for the Obscene Publications Squad to take action over a film passed by the BBFC.

Insp Shortland says they have had very few trials as few pornographers are willing to pin their hopes on 12 jurors. And he thinks pushing smut has become too easy nowadays. "You just get a master DVD burner and make thousands of copies in your attic. The overheads are very low."

Back at the BBFC, there have been glimpses of more permissiveness in what it's willing to license for mainstream distribution. Films given a regular 18 certificate are only supposed to contain "simulated sex" but there are exceptions, such as Michael Winterbottom's controversial 2004 movie Nine Songs.

The censors judged it to be "exceptionally justified by the context of the film". Surprisingly, perhaps, the only DVD rejected outright by the BBFC was a box set of season two of the TV series Weeds. That was not because of sex or violence, but a scene was seen as promoting drug use.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/17/is-linkedin-worth-1-billion/

The big news tonight is business social network LinkedIn raised $53 million in Series D funding at a valuation of $1 billion. The new round is led by Bain Capital (the same genius investors who also funded Vonage) brings the total money raised by the company to about $80 million. I wasn’t going to write about this, given everyone had already jumped on the story.

Anyway the valuation of $1 billion -not as insane as the valuation placed by Microsoft on Facebook - was jaw dropping. Sure, LinkedIn has more value than plain vanilla me-too social networks but is it really worth a billion dollars? I ended up doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations while watching Boston Celtics celebrate their 17th NBA Championships.

The question of over-valuation had first popped up when I read about this round in May 2008 on Venturebeat. Techcrunch then reported that Allen & Co, the New York bank was helping Reid Hoffman’s company raise fresh capital at the $1 billion valuation.

So I decided to do a back-of-the-envelope comparison with XING with some of the publicly available data on XING, a European Social Network that is publicly traded in Frankfurt. It is a pretty good proxy for a business-focused social network, such as LinkedIn.

It has a market capitalization of about $300 million. It has 5.71 million subscribers. XING had revenues of around $11.6 million at the end of first quarter 2008; about 70 cents per month per subscriber. That works out to about $52.30 per subscriber. For sake of comparison, Facebook’s reported $15 billion valuation works out to $125 per subscriber.

If you use those numbers, then LinkedIn’s rumored 20 million users are worth $1.04 billion. The company is adding about 1.3 million new subscribers a month, so by those estimates it should end the year at around 29 million subscribers. USA Today reported that LinkedIn was on target to do between $75-to-$100 million in revenues this year. Lets be generous and assume that they indeed do $100 million that works out to about 29 cents per month per subscriber (assuming that the number of subscribers at the end of the year is about 29 million.)

My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if your user the value per subscriber of then LinkedIn’s $1 billion got a market valuation. On per-subscriber revenue basis, LinkedIn seems a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump.

What do you guys think?

Can Stoner be stopped? - Casey Stoner fast whatever the weather at Donington Park, making him the clear favourite for Sunday's British Grand Prix. [motogp]

Lorenzo: This is a bad time for me. - Triple 2008 MotoGP pole position holder Jorge Lorenzo to start just 17th on the grid for the British Grand Prix. [motogp]