Who really wants to be a millionaire?
Hurry -this is the last week for students and academics in Britain to pitch for part of a prize fund of £1 million established by Launchit2001. This competition is backed by Cross Atlantic Capital Partners (XACP), a venture capital management firm, and Brainspark, an internet and technology incubator ,and supported by the Guardian. Details of the competition, which closes on February 28, are at www.launchit2001.com.
It is open to any individual in higher education or teams that include a student or academic staff member. The best two or more ventures will be eligible for direct investment ranging from £100,000 to £500,000. There is also a prize for The Most Innovative University. Ideal entries will have products and services that are ready to be commercialised or ideas that have passed a proof of concept. Entries will address one of four areas: new enabling technologies (including optical networking, nanotechnology, and materials science, but excluding biotechnology); internet infrastructure; enterprise software; e-communications and wireless infrastructures and applications.
Crackerjack
I have been following the 'hacker/hack' means with interest. Isn't the common sense approach to accept that the same word can have more than one meaning?
Similarly with 'cracker/crack'. It's usually perfectly clear from the context what meaning is intended.
David Harris
da.harris@ntlworld.com
Lost property
It appears that a company called Propertysellers.co.uk has registered a domain name which is a misspelling of our website, www.findaproperty.com. Its version, www.findapropety.com, takes browsers to its site rather than to ours. Because of this, your article (Online, February 15) states that we charge £29 per week, which we don't. Another error is that the article, as printed, gives the impression that we are an estate agent, or advertise property online for people wishing to bypass estate agents, neither of which is true. Quite the contrary: we work exclusively for estate agents and charge them to advertise their properties with us.
Michael O'Flynn
Michael@HallmarkProjects.co.uk
Top of the plop
Why does the chart of top 10 games list the name of the publisher?
The piece of information is of no use whatsoever. The name of the developer may be more useful since that is where the talent involved in developing the game lies. Such a listing might give readers a way of judging the likely quality of a title.
Would a similar chart of films attribute the new movie Hannibal to Ridley Scott or MGM?
Robert Knowles-Leak
Leak@triangle-group.com
Throw it away
Isn't it odd that your article by Anita Pincas on the serious business of online education, in your weekly supplement supposedly associated with science, does not mention the possibility of learning about science online?
Business yes, management yes, art yes, even how to iron a shirt, but nothing otherwise except a throwaway reference to 'even polymer engineering'.
Janice Taverne
janice.taverne@lineone.net
Too cynical
In the article about web learning (Online, February 15) Anita Pincas' comment on the way that human beings learn is not only cynical but ill-informed. There is a vast number of home educated children and adults who have proved that human beings are more than capable of independant and autonomous learning when the material is of interest and/or relevance to them. The fact that they choose their own 'curriculum' as children also makes them much more focused and self-directed learners as adults. Eva O'Rorke
EvaandMary@aol.com
Pat on head
Suzi P's "interview" with Patricia Hewitt was more akin to a press release. More pertinent - and dare I say, more interesting - questions might have been how does Hewitt think she or her ministry have helped small e-commerce businesses while they have been in government? By (covertly) increasing taxes? K Duggan
ksduggan@hotmail.com
Virus alert
Melissa, Anna Kornikova and all their Visual Basic Script cousins are surprisingly simple to avoid. Just change the file association of .vbs files to be something that doesn't execute.
The full details are at: www.merrioncomputing.com/OnlineIssue1.htm
Duncan.Jones@AIG.COM
Orange pipped
Given that the typical speed of an office wireless LAN is 11Mbps, it hardly seems appropriate to describe the 1.5Mbps of the Orange "home of the future'"wireless LAN as "high-speed".
Mike Whittaker
mikewhittaker@totalise.co.uk
GSM? DIY
You had someone asking what the letters GSM stood for. I stuck those very three letters into the Yahoo search box.
And the search result? I found six categories, 225 sites and 32 news stories for GSM. And the first link was Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). So why don't you tell these stupid people to find out for themselves?
Keith Scott
kscott1@ntlworld.com
