In the pub last night with Stef Macbeth we got to talking about how many 'good business ideas' we'd come up with in pubs over the years which we'd either forgotten about the next day or (more likely) turned out to be very bad ideas in the cold light of day. But somewhere along the line there must have been a genuinely good idea or two that was missed off the back of the proverbial napkin. How, we wondered, could we sort the good from the bad or just plain remember what had been discussed?

We then started talking about Greatvine, a service that basically enables people to sell advice over the phone to consumers on everything from parenting to business. Pretty neat and, through some odd logic, kind of what we were looking for. Now, one option would be to have a service provided through Greatvine in which you pay to have someone with business expertise (or at least minute taking skills) to listen in to your discussion and provide feedback on your ideas the next day. Useful but also kind of creepy.

Better yet would be an automated Shazam-style good idea/bad idea recognition system. Turn it on while you discuss your idea and it utilises voice recognition to synthesise your ideas into text (based around key phrases) which it then checks against existing businesses and business models for uniqueness, probability of success, profitability or whatever else you're interested in. Maybe investors could pay to listen to the best stuff. Needless to say this will require (a) ridiculously good voice recognition (b) semantic understanding beyond what is probably possible at the moment and (c) a clever algorithm for determining business quality. If I can just sort those minor issues out I think we might have a good business. Until then we'll just have to stick to the napkins (or maybe Evernote).

Many pixels have been spilt in the last few days on the part social media has played in the coordination and possibly outright creation of the riots currently springing up around the UK. What seems to be missing however is the wider technological context within which social media finds itself. It is certainly true that social networks have played a role in some of the more organised looting taking place in London - Blackberry phones in particular, with their free, private messaging network have clearly proven useful. And the arrest of Facebook users whose status updates were viewed as an incitement to violence demonstrates that some have tried (though with what success it is hard to know) to use more public platforms as a means for drumming up support for misbehaviour.

Yet the very fact that Facebook users have been apprehended shows that social media does not place its users beyond the law. Indeed, it may have made it easier than ever before for police to precisely identify perpetrators. The same is true of other technologies available to the police. Yes, looters can organise themselves more easily but the police can use technology to monitor and coordinate their personnel, intercept communications and identify individual rioters. A private phone message is useful but probably not as useful as GPS, infra-red cameras, CCTV and a network of command centres (and, as Olly Benson pointed out, helicopters). And, shocking as it may seem, the police also have a (relatively) private means of communication - radio. If anything the technological balance seems to be more in favour of the police than those intent on causing mayhem on the streets.

If we plotted two graphs, one showing technology as an enabler of crime over time and the other showing technology as a means for supressing crime over time I suspect they would look almost exactly the same. At some points one or the other would find itself 'ahead of the curve' but ultimately the same technologies are available to both 'sides'.

As far as I am concerned any hand wringing about social media and rioting is a distraction. Facebook and Blackberry are not responsible for riots any more than Ford are  responsible for a robbery that uses a Transit van as a getaway car. The police also drive cars and use computers so let's worry less about how the riots were or were not organised and get back to the serious business of trying to understand why they happened in the first place.

If you're a Gmail user then keep an eye out for a malicious looking email that arrived in my inbox today claiming to be from our good friends at Google:

Dear Gmail User,

We are informing you about a regular routine maintenace
of our servers. Please verify your email account by clicking below

Please Verify your Access.

This upgrade process would ensure your Google Account is
stable even after long periods of inactivity.

Thank You
Google Accounts

'Please Verify your Access' is a link which I've removed here for reasons of good sense. The email is sent from no-reply@google.serv.com via  vhs4.frajaweb.nl, neither of which sounds like a very likely source for a Google communication. Mark this one as Spam. Don't know how it managed to sneak its way past Google's filters in the first place. I would imagine they were particularly vigilant about use of domain names with 'google' in them.

For the last few weeks the University of Liverpool's library services have been reporting that access to their cross-collection search engine EBSCOhost is being blocked by firewalls in Zimbabwe, Syria and Saudi Arabia. I don't know if the same is true of access in China but that might be because the whole system is blocked or there are no online students to report the problem there. This is potentially a big problem for UoL's e-learning systems, which are widely accessed by students across the Middle East and Africa (myself included). Fortunately there are a few other options for students to access the system (and access to individual collections is apparently not affected).

My suspcion is that EBSCOhost is being blocked because it usually requires proxy server access rather than for its content per se but it would be interesting to hear if any other education services are being filtered. A blanket ban on proxy server use would be a big step back for users in the affected countries but I would be more worried if EBSCOhost was being targetted directly. One to watch I think.

Looking for a freelance web writer / producer who can dedicate between 1 and 2 days per month on creating and managing content for a new destination website for kids.

Ideally, I'm looking for someone who has the following experience:

* Creating and writing content for kids between 8 and 16
* Experience of basic web technologies, including knowledge of CMS
* Blood-hound-like nose for a good story - the ability to find the most interesting stories from across the internet
* Experience of working with Flash content (e.g. games)

If you, or anyone else you know, might be interested, could you please ask them to DM me at natashabilling@gmail.com

Just a quickie. Went to pay my Econet (sorry, their website is still down, so no link) broadband bill today and as usual I asked if there was any update on their fiber network being activated. As it has been for many months now the answer was the same: they're still waiting for approval from Potraz, who run all things telecommunications here in Zim. No surprise there. But what I did learn is that Econet now has all the infrastructure required to offer proper Blackberry services in Zim but are struggling to get approval for this too. Read into that what you will...

This morning I was doing my usual bit of (slow) browsing on my Econet/Ecoweb @Home broadband connection when I thought I'd try out something new - streaming radio. Now, anyone who has used an Econet Internet connection would probably consider this a pretty foolish thing to do. Most of the time it's barely possible to load Gmail so why on earth would I be able to listen to BBC Radio 4? But to my surprise the live stream started almost immediately on both Real Player and Windows Media Player (WMP) and then ran crystal clear and uninterrupted until I decided to switch it off to conserve bandwidth.

Why is this possible? A quick packet capture (using Wireshark) tells all. Real and WMP both transfer data to you using the UDP transport protocol, which, unlike the TCP protocol used for most of your email and web browsing, features no congestion control. When the connection is busy (i.e. all the time on Econet) TCP shares out the bandwidth fairly by basically reducing the rate at which you can send and receive data. UDP, on the other hand, is greedy. In fact, UDP will use all the bandwidth it can get its hands on and the more TCP backs off the more UDP takes. In other words if someone with whom you share a link is receiving a load of data over UDP your web browsing experience is likely to become much slower.

This is such a big problem that a lot of organisations and ISPs either ban or throttle UDP traffic on their network (UDP security weaknesses don't help either). It's quite surprising then that Econet (who are sharing final mile links between far too many people) haven't chosen to take action on this. Slowing down UDP (or even banning it altogether) wouldn't stop streaming media from working - Real and WMP both operate on TCP too - but it might help ease the pressure on some of the bottlenecks in their network.

I'd be interested to hear if they have plans to do this (or even if it appears to be a big problem from their perspective). In the meantime I'll be enjoying a bit of BBC Radio now and again. Sorry neighbours.

After much fighting with the upload speed of my internet connection here in Zim my new website is finally up and running. This is pretty much my portfolio at the moment (including graphic design, web design and some of the management/strategy stuff I've worked on). I had fun making it using HTML, CSS and a bit of jQuery plus the excellent ColoBox JQuery plugin for the slideshows. All feedback gratefully received as usual. In the next few months I'll start adding some free resources (time and connectivity permitting) and tailoring this blog to match the look and feel of the new site. I could build my own blog on the site I suppose, but who can be bothered with that when Posterous will do it for you?

Don't forget to make a new year's resolution to hire me for some work!