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Hi $name

I hope you enjoy the monthly Century newsletter; if you would like to see anything in particular in next months issue, please let me know.

Smell enhancing the cinema experience

A Japanese company have developed a system which emits mixtures of 6 different scents in conjunction with specific parts of a film. Love scenes are accompanied by floral scents, whilst the more tear jerking scenes are linked to a mix of peppermint and rosemary.

The smell sequences are sent to boxes placed strategically around the cinema which contain the oils which are mixed and released at the specified time. Cinemas will be able to download different scent sequences from the Internet for current and future films including "The New World" which opened in the States in December.

Humans often associate different smells with different situations; in fact how often have you walked past a shop and a recognisable fragrance wafts out, which immediately makes you think of a person or familiar situation? Applications within the advertising industry are also on the horizon.

I wish you all the best for the rest of the month.
Rob Green (MD)

NTL:Telewest try hand at fourplay

Apologies for the double entendre, but NTL have finally joined up with Telewest to become a force that may scare Sky and BT.

The new company will be re-branded as Virgin (as they've just bought NTL), once the Virgin Mobile staff have been brought in to "spruce up the lack lustre customer service". At an analysts meeting early in April it was revealed that there would be a "significant participation from the Virgin Group and Virgin Management to secure Virgin culture and ideals throughout the organisation," which would lead to "significant operational improvements with [an] …. improvement in customer care".

Given the success that Telewest have had with their 3 (TV, Broadband and fixed telephony) for £30 deal, it is anticipated that the addition of a mobile element will be just as well received….. ok so they still have to get the customer service side up to scratch :

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Viruses on smartphones?

F-Secure, a well known vendor for smartphone antivirus software has issued a cautionary statement that "mobile viruses could reach the prevalence of PC viruses within a few years". However to date it has been very difficult to spread viruses to mobile devices.

Smartphones now share a number of similarities with PCs, which makes them a lot more susceptible to viruses. Users can now download emails, files and surf the web, which means that the chance of contracting a virus which at best, will mail itself to all of

your contacts in your address book, and at worst, could completely crash your phone, has increased dramatically over the last couple of years.

There are just over 200 mobile viruses "in the wild" at present, many of which can spread across mobile platforms, from Symbian to Windows Mobile and J2ME, using Bluetooth and SMS; although Blackberrys currently appear to be unaffected. 80% of companies are using smartphones in some capacity, but of those, three out of four are not protecting them from potential viral or trojan attacks.

At present mobile viruses and trojans don't pose as much of a problem, as the more basic security problems like loss of contact data through theft of the device. The publicity late last year surrounding the loss of a smartphone and subsequent publishing of embarrassing data files, by Paris Hilton should be treated as a shot across the bows for businesses.

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SMS to the rescue

You're sat in a restaurant, you've ordered the lamb, and then been presented with the wine list. Be it the presence of the sommelier or the prospect of wading through a wine list that rivals the

yellow pages in weight and size; choosing the correct wine for a meal is an experience many diners dread.

If the above situation rang true then a new phone texting service which has just been launched by an enterprising wine company may be just what the doctor ordered. Research by Hardys has shown that although 8 out of 10 people in the UK drink wine, only 1 in 10 is actually confident about matching it with food.

To access the new service, just text the name of the meal, or type of food, together with your date of birth to 64007 to get the perfect wine suggestion for your meal. The texts cost between 10 and 20p, and users are limited to 10 text messages per day.

Obviously you might want to be a little discrete about texting this service, especially if you're trying to impress your dining partners.

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Microsoft Storage Farm

Microsoft have just paid $1.08m for 75 acres in the States, where they are building three structures totalling 1.4 million square feet to house thousands of data-serving computers.

They are designed to house free web pages for small businesses and photo and file sharing for consumers, who Microsoft hope will pay a few dollars a month to store backup copies of their files. "We're investing a lot at being able to store massive amounts of storage in the cloud, as cheaply as possible" says Brian Arbogast, Vice President of the Windows Live communication platform.

With the soft launch recently of the Windows Live platform and their continued acquisition of terabytes of data storage, Microsoft are signalling their intent and quite probably the IT markets intent to push on-demand software. We have discussed this before, using salesforce.com as a perfect example. Do you already use on-demand software including salesforce.com? How do you feel about storing your sensitive company data on someone else's servers?

Please send all feedback to Rob@centurycomputing.co.uk and we'll report the results next time.

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