Microsoft NEW Technology Microsoft Surface

RFID - Technology Video

Video that details the use of RFID technologies in the supply chain and is produced by Metro Group. We have uploaded it for educational purposes in one of our courses and the original version can be found at http://www.future-store.org/servlet/PB/menu/1007090_l2/index.html

Dash Internet GPS device enters pre-order phase

Sunnyvale (CA) – Dash Navigation today said that its GPRS-equipped navigation device is now available for pre-order and is scheduled for a “mid-to-late February” delivery.

Compared to regular GPS devices, the Dash Express is able to maintain a continuous Internet connection via Wi-Fi or cellular GPRS networks.

As a result, the Dash does not draw POI (points of interest) information from a database stored on the device itself, but retrieves data about people, places, products and services from Yahoo’s local search service. This allows the Dash to provide a deeper level of detail, which, for example, also includes gas prices and movie times.

The GPS also displays up-to-the-minute traffic data that is automatically and anonymously exchanged among Dash devices. The manufacturer said that the Dash Express gathers traffic information from the “Dash Driver Network” and combines it with other sources of traffic data to deliver an “accurate picture of what's happening on the routes [the user] is travelling.”

Other features include a capability to send an address from any Internet browser or Microsoft Outlook and to the device in the car, even when the car is already on the road and on its way to a destination.

The Dash Express is priced at $600 and comes with three months of free Internet service. The service is priced at $13 per month thereafter or at $11 per month if it is paid one year in advance or at $10 per month if it is paid two years in advance.

The manufacturer said that the device will aim for a “broader retail distribution in Q2 2008”.

Best gadgets of 2007, and the struggle for dominance in 2008

Source: Computerworld

IDG has put together another video of tech highlights for 2007, this time covering the most sought-after gadgets of the year. The iPhone is a no-brainer, but there are a few other technologies that you may have missed, including Sony's OLED TVs, fitness-oriented Wii accessories, laptops with flash drives, an LG disc player that plays both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, Casio's Exilim digital camera, in-air wi-fi, and the next-gen Zunes:



Check out another video segment that looks forward to the new year. The IDG News Service talks with an analyst about where consumer technologies are headed in 2008, and the big fights in the marketplace -- ranging from the Blu-Ray/HD DVD fight to the battle involving upstart mobile platforms from LG, Nokia, and Google looking to upset the iPhone juggernaut:

What's Exaflood?

Is the Internet ready for the next generation of web video and robust web applications?

Is the Internet ready for the next generation of web video and robust web applications? Fiber to the Home Council presents this educational video.

Key Cisco leader Giancarlo steps down

He was seen as the heir-apparent to Chambers....
Source: IDG News Service
Charles Giancarlo, who was seen as a likely candidate to head Cisco Systems, has resigned from the networking giant after 14 years to "pursue new professional opportunities," Cisco announced Thursday.

Giancarlo has played a number of important roles at Cisco, and became executive vice president and chief development officer in 2005. Leadership of the company's overall engineering, product and technology strategy will be turned over to a Development Council of seven leaders, which was formed earlier this month under Giancarlo's leadership, Cisco said in a statement.

He will leave the company on Dec. 31.

The Development Council will report to Chairman and CEO John Chambers. Formation of the group fits Cisco's recent push for collaboration in place of traditional top-down management. Chambers has said that executive teams within Cisco have helped the company move faster.

It's the second major departure from Cisco in less than a year. In February, Michelangelo Volpi, the head of Cisco's routing and service provider businesses, and also seen as a possible heir to the top spot, resigned to later head up online video company Joost.

Giancarlo, 50, joined Cisco through the acquisition of Kalpana, an early Ethernet switching company. He developed Cisco's acquisition strategy and led several of the company's advanced and emerging technologies, including wireless networking, unified communications, security, video and Telepresence, Cisco said.

"Cisco is very proud to have had Charlie as one of its leaders, and he will always be considered part of Cisco's extended family," Chambers said in a written statement.

Engineering firm saves $1 M annually with network efficiency appliance

Source: Computerworld

With 850 employees working out of 20 offices scattered across five Western states plus Mexico, Psomas is a large civil engineering firm founded in 1946 and named for its founder, George Psomas. It focuses on projects that cover the spectrum of civil engineering, from water/wastewater infrastructure to highway designs to land development engineering. Since 2005 it has saved more than $1 million a year in network costs by implementing the Steelhead network technology to improve the efficiency of its WAN transfers of large CAD files between offices.

As Psomas has grown over the years, it has sufferred increasingly from the simple-seeming problem of getting the right talents on the right projects. Psomas has always believed in work sharing among offices, partly to balance workloads and partly to match the people with the right skills to the right projects. The "home office" for a project usually is the office closest in physical distance from it, but some of the people with special skills that a project requires may live and work hundreds of miles away, in another state or across the U.S./Mexican boundary.

What Psomas found itself doing was transferring large CAD files over the network between offices overnight. These files are huge, and often one CAD file references several others, creating major network loads. This brute force, manual approach also created problems with version management, sometimes resulting in the overwriting of files, requiring engineers to redo work.

"We knew we had a problem," says Chris Pinckney, Psomas's CIO. "But we didn't know there was such a great solution out there until we ran across Riverbed at a conference." They had looked at other potential solutions, but none of them fit the company's needs or fit with its working methods.



Riverbed provides an enterprise-class, appliance-based solution for accelerating the transfer of large files over corporate and public WANs by several times -- on its Web site the company claims up to 100X acceleration increases. The technology is based on Riverhead's Steelhead appliances and Steelhead mobile software. After evaluating the technology, Psomas finished its roll-out of 15 Steelhead appliances to its larger offices in January 2005. It uses the mobile software version for remote employees and within its smaller offices, which do not have the volulme of file transfers to justify an appliance. Since that rollout, the technology has had a definite positive impact, basically solving Psomas' CAD file transfer problem even as its business, and the volume of workshare projects, has grown.

In its initial purchase proposal to senior management, Psomas IT justified the cost on the basis of increased productivity due to increased workshare and decreased need to redo work lost in accidental file over-writes. "And we have seen that," Pinckney says. "But we ended up cost justifying it on bandwidth." These savings come directly from avoiding line upgrades. Monthly data traffic reports typically show a 3X reduction between the files going through the internal LAN and the traffic across the WAN on the other side of the Steelhead appliance. This has allowed it to save a net of more than $1 million a year in direct network costs.

For instance, in October 2007 Psomas saw 2.4 Tbytes of data on its LANs optimized down to 823 GB of WAN traffic by the Steelhead technology, This is an operational figure, not an optimized test, making it all the more impressive. The reductions are so dramatic that they raised questions. However, Pickney says, at the most recent Riverbed users conference, the CIO of another large organization reported that they did independent measurements on both sides of their Steelhead appliances and found the reporting accurate.

This increase in WAN efficiency has allowed subsidiary savings. For instance, Psomas has been able to reduce from seven Exchange servers to three and to centralize most of its mission-critical IT operations in its Irvine, Calif., collocation facility. That facility has required increased trunk lines, but that has been more than made up for by the efficiencies of centralization and reduction in trunk line demands at its other offices.

This approach to ROI, however, is one reason its smallest offices, typically 10-15 employees each, do not have Steelhead appliances. They are not always engaged in workshare projects and so do not have the volume of CAD file transfers that the larger offices generate.

"That is where the Steelhead mobile product comes into our picture," Pinckney says. "It does the same magic the appliances do" and is sufficient for offices where only a few engineers would be collaboratingwith projects in the larger locations at a given time.

Riverbed's capabilities have long-range implications for Psomas as well. "We are seeing a real drop-off in the number of new civil engineers graduating in the United States," Pinckney says. For instance, one of the major California engineering colleges only graduated 50 civil engineers last year. "I have heard experts say that in the future we will be depending more on civil engineers from Asia." At the same time, the demand for civil engineers has increased. They are the master builders of everything from skyscrapers and bridges to water treatment and groundwater facilities. Therefore, an engineering firm like Psomas needs to get maximum efficient use from the engineers it can recruit, and part of that is using the network cloud to connect experts, wherever they may be located, with projects often in geographies far from the location of some of those experts.

Overall, Pinckney says, "When Psomas found Riverbed, it was a hallelujah moment."

ICT Holland can quickly climb up the ladder claims Cisco

In the Netherlands, the Government has advertised its
ambition to turn the country into the European leader in ICT.
The backbone of its strategy is to bring research and
development, business and government together to start new
businesses and developing innovative high technology
products. In addition to the presence of giants such as
Philips, the country can count on a level of Internet
penetration of 70 per cent, i.e. among the highest in Europe.
The Netherlands’ location, and its easy links with the main
centers of activity in Europe already attracted a large number
of international ICT companies (Cisco, Dell, Abaco), who
chose the country as their strategic hub for penetration of the
European market.

Read more....

IF YOU NEED TO PURCHASE HARDWARE PLEASE CONTACT ME BY PHONE +31650730710 OR BY MAIL DESIGNFORIT@LIVE.NL

Coolest Imaging and Social Technology EVER!

This is a video of a presentation from a conference in Monterey where new innovations in computer vision mashed-up social technology produce some AMAZING results. See more at http://www.ted.com

The future by Panasonic.

NTT DoCoMo Mobile Future

HP ProCurve Networking

Amazon hooks up with bands site

Source: Guardian Unlimited.

Web retail giant Amazon is partnering with music community site SellaBand from today to offer aspiring bands and new musicians a high-profile launchpad.

SellaBand will have a dedicated store on Amazon as well as an affiliate sales deal and promotion to the 50 most active reviewers on The Vine, retail website's reviewers' programme.

Albums by SellaBand acts will retail for £8.99 on Amazon in the UK and revenues will be shared equally between the artists, Sellaband and the fans.

Amsterdam-based Sellaband is home to 6,000 new bands and operates as a user-determined record label.

Fans can listen to tracks for free, but support bands by pledging money and once a band reaches $50,000 (£24,830) in investment, Sellaband helps them record an album.

To date, 11 bands have reached the $50,000 threshold and three have released albums.

Sellaband makes its money through advertising, sponsorship and through the interest on money invested in the site's bands, with more than $1.5m (£745m) invested so far.

Johan Vosmeijer, the SellaBand managing director, said the bands have a broad appeal, from heavy metal to jazz and hip hop, and that the site thinks of itself as "the record label of the future".

"The advantage for fans is that they feel part of the activity. There are direct friendships between the bands and their fans, and they even organise their own festivals," he added.

"Record companies are afraid to embrace new technologies and new opportunities because they don't know what to do with the web. SellaBand discovers and nurtures new bands - it's a new economic model."

Partnering with Amazon gives Sellaband's artists a more high--profile platform, and also fits with the user-generated ethos of the retail site, which features extensive reviews and discussion about its products.

Amazon will be offering further incentives for bands as they build their audience and investment, adding credits to a band's account once they reach $30,000 and offering extra promotion for the band once they reach $35,000.

SellaBand works with digital distributor The Orchard, one of the suppliers for the iTunes Store, and, under the new deal, through Amazon.

Vosmeijer, who previously worked as general manager for Sony Music, said the site had 150,000 unique users each month but that its priority was the develop its artists, not "global domination".

He added that SellaBand was aiming to bring another 20 artists up to the $50,000 threshold by the end of 2008, and that the site would be holding a showcase in London in February.

Apple in Talks To Bring the iPhone to Japan

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is meeting with Japan's #http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif1 (DoCoMo) and #3 (Softbank Corp.) mobile operators for the right to carry the iPhone. This is big news because well, Japan is the world's 2nd largest economy and has a culture geared towards gadget-obsession - and of course the iPhone has been for gadget of the year.

Apple has had previous deals in place with SoftBank including the promotion where when you bought a cellphone you got a free iPod Mini, but DoCoMo is now said to be the first choice for such a deal that will no doubt hinge on which gave Apple a better revenue sharing percentage.

Interestingly enough DoCoMo doesn't have an EDGE network, so any iPhone there would have to be 3G - which makes sense anyways since I doubt the Japanese public would take a second look at an iPhone if it only ran at EDGE speeds.

EMCORE to acquire telecom portion of Intel's Optical Platform Division

Santa Clara (CA) and Albuquerque (NM) - EMCORE Corporation and Intel Corporation announced today that EMCORE will acquire the telecom-related assets of Intel's Optical Platform Division. The purchase price will be $85 million, and will include all intellectual property, assets and technology which specifically relate to the following: tunable lasers, tunable transponders, 300-pin transponders and integrable tunable laser assemblies. The transaction must still be finalized, and if all goes smoothly the deal will close in Q1 2008.

EMCORE already has a strong presence in the telecommunications market segments, including a fiber optics product portfolio which spans the semiconductor-based broadband, satellite and solar power markets. EMCORE is planning to expand their presence and drive down costs via this acquistion. EMCORE's CEO, Reuben Richards, seemed particularly excited about Intel's tunable laser technology. He said, "We are excited about this acquisition and the opportunity to continue building upon Intel's leading tunable laser technology, strong product quality and history of customer service and satisfaction..."

EMCORE operates primarily in two distinct product market segments, fiber optics and photvoltaics. Their fiber optics presence allows for video transmission, high-speed voice and data, cable television and fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network technologies. Their photovoltaics division is designed for both terrestrial and satellite solar products, including a GaAs (gallium arsenide) solar cell technology, interconnect technologies, and fully integrated solar panels.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

In the Netherlands almost every celebrity, like Linda de Mol, Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, Catherine Keyl, Rik Felderhof and Youp van t'Hek have their own so called ''Glossy''magazine.

Now we have our own ''Christmas'' Glossy!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

(Advertorial) Dutch Culture, Topographic and Touristic Website.

Welkom bij uitgeverij Filatop!

Uitgeverij Filatop is gespecialiseerd in topografie, cultuurhistorie en toerisme van alle 7.000 Nederlandse plaatsen, tot aan het allerkleinste buurtschapje. Tevens hebben wij enkele boeken uitgegeven op het gebied van human interest.

Momenteel ruimen wij al onze nog verkrijgbare boeken op tegen sterk verlaagde prijzen! De meeste boeken zijn zeer geschikt om cadeau te doen, dus ideaal met de komende feestdagen in het vooruitzicht! Zie hier.

De belangrijkste activiteit van onze uitgeverij wordt vanaf 2008 het publiceren van cultuurhistorische en toeristische informatie over alle Nederlandse plaatsen op deze site (met reisgidsen en naslagwerken die u daar zelf uit kunt samenstellen). Dat is te beschouwen als de vooralsnog elektronische opvolger van het boek "De topografische gids van Nederland" (zie hier). Nadere informatie hierover vindt u in het menu onder "De Plaatsengids".

Telcos Face Enormous Challenges Building New IP Apps

With their services in decline, carriers struggle with how to build Internet Protocol applications as cost-effectively as the Facebooks of the world.

Source: InformationWeek

The world's telephone companies and their suppliers gathered in Monte Carlo this spring for some high-stakes activity that had nothing to do with baccarat tables or roulette wheels. The focus of their high-level powwow was IPMultimedia Subsystem, or IMS, the technology that most big telcos had once identified as the industry-saving platform for creating more IP applications more quickly, enabling them to finally escape their dependence on a handful of commodity services.

Fifth in a series of articles assessing the future of the Internet. For more, check out internetevolution.com, with its ThinkerNet blog of more than 85 contributors, including Citi senior VP Jeff Fleischman, broadband media expert Ian Blaine, cyberlawyer Parry Aftab, and OrganizedWisdom Health CEO Steven H. Krein, as well as videos, Webinars, news, and "The Wisdom of Clouds," the site's new Web 3.0 interface.
Despite the tony location, the vibe at that Riviera meeting was distinctly downbeat. In half-empty rooms, few seemed eager any longer to present IMS as the cure-all for telco ills. Instead, speakers focused on the many barriers to IMS deployment. The telcos as well as equipment makers, handset vendors, and standards-setters argued openly about who was responsible for the sluggish adoption of IMS. Some suggested that IMS would play a much smaller role than telcos previously had hoped.
Just four weeks after the Monaco affair, in a conference room 6,000 miles away in San Francisco, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was unveiling Facebook Platform, a new version of the company's applications environment that lets people with the most rudimentary software skills create new services for the Facebook site. Those new services include the kinds of mobile and video applications that telcos themselves would dearly like to supply on the go.

These two very different events reveal plenty about the crisis facing telcos as they frantically try to adapt themselves to an emerging all-IP service environment. Telcos are well aware that their current services, especially telephony and Internet access, face a long, slow decline, and that they must launch other services if they are to retain customers and maintain revenue streams. The underlying problem, though, remains unresolved: How will they build those new applications as cost-effectively as those who are already building to platforms such as Facebook?

The answer to that question will not only have a huge impact on the shape of telcos in the coming decade and on the services they provide, but also on their enterprise customers. If telcos get it right, they could become valuable intermediaries, melding the world of Web applications to conventional telco services. But if they get it wrong, they will gradually sink into the ground, offering little more than basic connectivity and leaving the higher-end market to Web entrepreneurs, IT vendors, and systems integrators.






















THE LAST HOLDOUT
Typically, it takes up to a year to create a new telecom service, at a cost that often runs into seven figures. And these applications are still usually built using arcane telco software languages that only a few thousand specialists can work with. Mainstream telecommunications, one frustrated executive suggested in Monaco, is the last holdout for the mainframe computer environment of the 1970s and '80s.

IMS, which emerged first in the wireless sector, sparked new hope among telcos. By clearly separating application development from session control and transport, IMS does a better job than the Intelligent Network model of the early 1990s of letting telcos and third parties create new services more easily. Yet for all its benefits, IMS has been slow to make the transition from standards to deployable products, and many gaps remain. Meanwhile, outside the still-closed world of the telcos, the world of Web software mashups marches on.

Facebook offers a good surrogate for these developments. The company released its updated Facebook Platform in the spring; by early October, 4,600 applications were listed in its Applications Directory; by early December, more than 10,000. Many of them are exactly the kinds of apps that telcos need to deliver. One of the most popular, simply called Video and used daily by more than 1.2 million Facebook members, lets members upload and share personal videos from their PCs or mobile phones. Another, called Mobile, lets members upload photos and notes to Facebook, and receive and reply to Facebook messages. Facebook is, of course, only one of many platforms for developing Web applications.

Do developments like these presage the end of the telco as we know it? Not yet. Telcos have a range of exploitable strengths: brand awareness, unmatchable reach, millions of customers, and long-standing regulatory privileges. Despite the stagnation in core services, most are, at worst, in fair-to-middling financial health. Still protected in many countries by benign regulation, and by the inertia of their customers, they have time to adapt. But adapt they must if they are to be any more than utility providers of bandwidth.


GAUGING TELCO OPINIONS
The telcos are not, as some believe, putting their hands over their ears and hoping the Web will go away. On many key issues, they already are anticipating massive change over the coming years.
Take telephony. Although this service remains the core product for most telcos, few think it has any future as a standalone service. In a recent survey of 126 telco strategists around the world by InformationWeek sister organization Heavy Reading, more than nine out of 10 respondents said telephony would become part of a broader service offering that includes regular and instant messaging, video communications, and other nonvoice services. Only 8% believe telephony would remain an important service in its own right.

This view has some challenging implications for telcos. Not only do they still derive a large proportion of their revenue from telephony (especially on the wireless side), but it's the Web entrants that have been most active in building integrated communications services and portals. If telcos are to compete here, they need a better engine for application development and service enhancement. So it's no surprise that many telcos want IMS mainly to create more integrated communications services that enhance telephony in various ways, reducing their dependence on this commodity service.

Typical in this respect is an IMS service from Mobilkom Austria, a subsidiary of Austria's incumbent telco. The service, called A1 over IP, extends Mobilkom Austria's mobile phone services onto the user's PC, with the same user experience, phone number, identity, services, and bill. The service includes simultaneous ringing; same number shown on outgoing calls; ability to do video and conferencing calls; IM, SMS, and presence; and a single voice mail for circuit-switched and VoIP calls. Yet it's one of only a handful of such services developed worldwide using IMS.

The survey also asked telcos which kinds of services they would be providing in 2020, and here the results are equally interesting. The current telco orthodoxy is to provide a broad package of services directly to customers. Yet as the chart on p. 66 shows, only 60% actually endorsed that view over the long term. Most of the rest expect instead that they would be providing bandwidth, basic connectivity, and a range of enabling capabilities that would be used by third-party service providers to enhance their own services.

PARTNER-CENTRIC MODEL
This long-term strategy has far-reaching implications for the way that telecom applications are built. The most obvious is that telcos need to get a lot better at partnering. More than half of the telcos surveyed think better partnering is one of the keys to their success, compared with just 22% who believe success depends on providing unique new services of their own (see chart, left).
Scandinavian incumbent TeliaSonera laid out a partner-centric model in April in which, as Karri Mikkonen, head of strategy, puts it, telcos are transformed from "network operating service providers" to "service connection enablers." TeliaSonera still sees itself providing some basic and enhanced services, but it also sees a big role for third parties using its IMS Service Creation Architecture.

So what is it, exactly, that telcos believe they can profitably provide to those third parties, other than bandwidth? Like many other telcos, TeliaSonera is pinning its hopes on so-called "applications enablers." The basic concept, sometimes called "service brokering," is analogous to the mashup. It envisages telcos letting third parties access their resources or information--for example, whether a telco subscriber is "present" on the network in the IM sense--to add value to the third party's service offering. The third party would then pay the telco for that information.

Other enablers that might be traded in this way include subscriber identity and authentication, subscriber location, subscriber device in use, subscriber profile and preferences, ability to bill subscribers, access to call or session control logic, provisioning and configuration, and quality-of-service tools.

The last of these capabilities is the most controversial. It envisages connecting third parties to the QoS and policy tools that are increasingly being built into telco network routers and access equipment, so as to give special treatment to services that are said to need it. Many Web and Internet service providers, including Google (NSDQ: GOOG), are strongly opposed to this idea, arguing that the principle of "network neutrality" must be maintained, mainly by just providing enough bandwidth. But when we surveyed the telco strategists, they voted overwhelmingly against net neutrality (see chart, left).
Moreover, just what kind of software environment are telcos going to create to ensure that third parties actually take them up on their offer to partner? IMS does allow telco resources such as call control to be exposed to third-party developers, but the tools to do this, such as OSA Parlay, are still usable only by experienced software programmers, and they certainly can't be used by the average tech-savvy end user in the way that Google and Facebook APIs can. An alternative or complementary technique would be to expose telco capabilities at a much higher level using standard software tools, including open source tools based on Ajax software.

This is too large an issue to tackle in a single article, but it's enough to say that there is more than one camp, often inside the same telcos, with conservatives and radicals battling for control.

TIME T0 GET RADICAL
BT, the former British Telecom, is perhaps the best example of a global telco that's seriously exploring the issue. Although BT is still planning a significant IMS deployment, its investment there is increasingly focused on next-generation IPtelephony. Meantime, BT is exploring more radical ways to open its applications environment to third parties.
The most important of these initiatives is Web 21C, which complements its better-known 21CN project. While 21CN focuses on replacing BT's public switched telephone network with an all-IP network, Web 21C focuses on ensuring that the new network is blooming with third-party applications. To this end, BT has created a software development kit that provides third-party access over standard service-oriented architecture and Web services interfaces to functionality that includes voice calling, conference calls, messaging, location, and subscriber profile information. BT has built policy, billing, and security tools into the platform to reassure its own developers that the integrity of the network and operational support systems isn't being compromised.

While still in beta, Web 21C attracted 2,500 developers to sign up for the program--proving that, if nothing else, there's a real interest among developers in collaborating with telcos. Among the applications that have emerged from this program is Caterman, a Web-based catering management system that uses SMS text messaging to supply dynamic PIN codes to users who log on and provides facilities for their customers to place orders via the Internet or SMS.
The response to our survey reveals keen interest in Web software among other telcos besides BT. We asked respondents to rank the importance of different kinds of application- or service-creation platforms for next-generation telcos, and the results are shown in the chart above. Although SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the basis for IMS, comes out on top, both Web services and Web 2.0 rank close behind, while telcos indicate much less interest in other high-level application platforms, such as OSA Parlay.

Still, the average telco will demand a lot of reassurance before making its underlying call and session logic available on a routine basis to mashup mavens. Telco brand values are based on trust and reliability, and no telco will want to see that blown away by the promiscuous deployment of too many ill-conceived applications. Meanwhile, however, applications continue to multiply on the Web.

MOBILE TO THE FORE
And what does all of this mean for enterprise customers?
At the very least, the role of their telco suppliers will change. On the one hand, our survey suggests that most telcos expect to play a more prominent role in enterprise services (see chart, below). This result reflects the widespread belief among telcos that developments in managed services and the emergence of models such as software as a service will only increase their opportunities--especially if they can use new app dev platforms to increase the range and functionality of corporate productivity tools, including communications. On the other hand, telcos don't seem to view enterprises as the real priority. When asked which sector would provide the highest percentage growth over the next five years, 48% of telcos chose consumers and residential customers, and only 10% chose enterprises.

Another question we asked was highly revealing about where telcos see their future value in the enterprise, and where they're likely to place their bets. Asked whether telcos should focus on meeting the needs of mobile enterprise users or on meeting the needs of enterprise users at their desks, 70% chose mobility.

The reason is clear. While telcos have already lost a great deal of territory in fixed enterprise communications to specialist enterprise telcos and Web-based applications and service providers, they have a much stronger hold in the mobile area and have every reason to battle hard to keep control of it. Indeed, when we asked respondents which services are most important to them personally in their work, only 62% identified fixed telephony as "essential" or "very important," against 93% so rating mobile communications.

Therefore, it's in the mobile sector--and through fixed-mobile convergence, a poster child for IMS applications--that telcos will shore up their defenses and seek ways to collaborate with the Web players.
The core question remains: Can the telcos really create an application development environment that's attractive enough to lead the Net-heads to rethink their relationship with the Bell-heads? As this survey shows, telcos are getting the message that they must change the way they build and sell services. In particular, they understand that they must partner more with those companies that are much more successful at creating compelling new ideas on the Web. IMS is a robust, telco-grade architecture that will surely play its part, but in itself it's unlikely to be the application engine that telcos once foresaw. For that, something else is needed.

In a sign of changing times, I participated a few months ago in a closed meeting between a major European telco and its old-school telecom equipment vendor. For once, it was the vendor, still the main provider of telco applications capability, that was pleading the case with its client for a more open, collaborative relationship with "competitors" such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and offering itself as a go-between. When even their old-line suppliers are telling telcos they must change, we can be sure we are living in different times. But it's going to be a long transition for telcos, and it's no sure bet that they will reach the hoped-for destination safely.

Startup encourages phone applications

Ribbit offers API to enable developers to unify various methods of communication

Source: IDG News Service




A Mountain View, California, company is launching a platform designed to let developers create telephony applications they can embed in Web pages and existing Web-based services.

Ribbit's back-end technology includes a software switch that essentially connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile phones, landline phones and text messages. On top of that connection is the Ribbit API (application programming interface) that lets developers build applications that unify the wide variety of communication methods.

Developers can build applications that include functions such as recording, sending and receiving voicemail, and making and receiving calls. The applications can be built using Flash, embedded into any Web site, and integrated into existing Web-based services. The platform supports many existing Web-based calling services, such as Skype, GoogleTalk and MSN.

Developers can charge end-users for the applications, and Ribbit can handle the billing for them. There are several ways developers can offer and charge for their products, and in some cases Ribbit will share revenue with developers.

Ribbit showed off one application a developer has created that embeds phone capabilities into Salesforce.com. By keying a code into a mobile phone, users essentially replace their current voicemail with Ribbit for Salesforce. Then users can listen to or see text transcripts of their mobile voicemail messages within Salesforce. They can send the messages to colleagues and tag them for easy sorting later.

Users can also make and receive phone calls through their Salesforce page. Such calls are automatically logged in their Salesforce application.

Ribbit for Salesforce will cost $25 per user per month for end-users. It is currently in a private beta with more than 90 companies, and should be widely available in February, Ribbit said.

Salute America's Heroes, a veterans' association, has built essentially a call center application that lets veterans who work for the group make and receive phone calls while at home through a browser. The capability is integrated into a Web site that also hosts tools they use while making the calls. The capability allows the association to take on the cost of the calls rather than reimbursing workers for the use of their home phones.

Ribbit designed its own softswitch, which runs on Linux blades and has been certified in an Alcatel-Lucent lab to meet the capabilities and reliability that telecommunications providers typically require, said Ted Griggs, CEO and co-founder of Ribbit. Ribbit's network operations center is hosted by a third party in Virginia, and the company is working on opening one on the West Coast to offer geographic redundancies. It can add capacity simply by adding more servers.

Another, more consumer-oriented application is available to try on the Ribbit developers page. The AIR iPhone is essentially a software-based voice over IP phone that looks just like Apple's iPhone. Users can make and receive calls to mobile and fixed-line phones, including from the contact list in the phone, on their computers.

Ribbit hasn't quite yet configured its offering in terms of pricing for such consumer applications, but expects to in the first quarter of next year. In the case of the AIR iPhone, Ribbit would share revenue from end-users with the developer.

Ribbit says that more than 650 developers are working on new applications, although on Friday only two were listed on the developers site. "Dozens" are near release, a few additional applications should be available on Monday, and many more should be available in the early months of next year, Ribbit said.

Ribbit opened its offering to developers in August but plans to officially launch the company, along with details about how its technology and business model work, on Monday.

Technology: Sound Beaming

TIN FOIL HAT ALERT: NWO Technology Beams Voices Directly into your Brain
Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad
An A&E Billboard 'Whispers' a Spooky Message Audible Only in Your Head in Push to Promote Its New 'Paranormal' Program

Source: AdAge

New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination."
No, he's not crazy: Our intrepid reporter Andrew Hampp ventures to SoHo to hear for himself the technology that has New Yorkers 'freaked out' and A&E buzzing.

Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it's another story.

Ms. Wilson, a New York-based stylist, said she expected the voice inside her head to be some type of creative project but could see how others might perceive it differently, particularly on a late-night stroll home. "I might be a little freaked out, and I wouldn't necessarily think it's coming from that billboard," she said.

Less-intrusive approach?
Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics, said the creepy approach is key to drawing attention to A&E's show. But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. "If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."

Holosonics has partnered with a cable network once before, when Court TV implemented the technology to promote its "Mystery Whisperer" in the mystery sections of select bookstores. Mr. Pompei said the company also has tested retail deployments in grocery stores with Procter & Gamble and Kraft for customized audio messaging. So a customer, for example, looking to buy laundry detergent could suddenly hear the sound of gurgling water and thus feel compelled to buy Tide as a result of the sonic experience.

Mr. Pompei contends that the technology will take time for consumers to get used to, much like the lights on digital signage and illuminated billboards did when they were first used. The website Gawker posted an item about the billboard last week with the headline "Schizophrenia is the new ad gimmick," and asked "How soon will it be until in addition to the do-not-call list, we'll have a 'do not beam commercial messages into my head' list?"

"There's going to be a certain population sensitive to it. But once people see what it does and hear for themselves, they'll see it's effective for getting attention," Mr. Pompei said.

More disruptions
A&E's $3 million to $5 million campaign for "Paranormal" includes other more disruptive elements than just the one audio ad in New York. In Los Angeles, a mechanical face creeps out of a billboard as if it's coming toward the viewer, and then recedes. In print, the marketing team persuaded two print players to surrender a full editorial page to their ads, flipping the gossip section in AM New York upside down and turning a page in this week's Parade into a checkerboard of ads for "Paranormal."
AM New York's gossip page got turned upside down as promo.

It's not the network's first foray into supernatural marketing, having launched a successful viral campaign for "Mind Freak" star Criss Angel earlier this year that allowed users to trick their friends into thinking Mr. Angel was reading their mind via YouTube.

"We all know what you need to do for one of these shows is get people talking about them," said Guy Slattery, A&E's exec VP-marketing. "It shouldn't be pure informational advertising. When we were talking about marketing the show, nearly everyone had a connection with a paranormal experience, and that was a surprise to us. So we really tried to base the whole campaign on people's paranormal experiences."

So was it a ghost or just an annoyed resident who stole the speaker from the SoHo billboard twice in one day last week? Horizon Media, which helped place the billboard, had to find a new device that would prevent theft from its rooftop location. Mr. Pompei only takes it as a compliment that someone would go to the trouble of stealing his technology, but hopes consumer acceptance comes with time. "The sound isn't rattling your skull, it's not penetrating you, it's not doing anything nefarious at all. It's just like having a flashlight vs. a light bulb," he said.

Broadband Forecast: 2008 To 2013

Western European Residential Broadband Forecast: 2008 To 2013

Source: Forrester

There is still huge potential for growth in Western European residential broadband adoption, despite a slowdown in the majority of national markets. Forrester sees 44% household penetration at the end of 2007 and forecasts a rise to 71% by the end of 2013. By then, any remaining dial-up services will be marginalized — 98% of online access will be via broadband. New access technologies, including WiMAX and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), will become more prominent, growing from 2% of all broadband households in 2008 to 8% in 2013. However, contentious business cases that undermine the existing industry hype around them will limit their adoption unless governments intervene. Our forecast reveals that European ISPs will sign up 48 million Net connections between 2008 and 2013, but sobering churn figures will offset that opportunity. As the pace of adoption varies across countries, the level of churn in Western Europe will grow from 23% in 2008 to 26% by 2013, increasing retention costs for ISPs.

Top 10 stories of 2007: Age of realignment

Source: InfoWorld

2007 was a big year for IT, and we look back at the biggest stories, from the iPhone to Windows Vista to the growth of consolidation in the software market

This year has been a time of realignment and redefinition as Apple launched its second zeitgeist-defining product of the new century, Dell and Intel battled to regain their former dominance, the software sector consolidated, Google rallied industry heavyweights around a common mobile device platform, and major vendors scrambled to embrace social networking. These, not necessarily in order of importance, are the IDG News Service picks for the top 10 stories of the year:

Software consolidation: The big fish get bigger
While globalization has fueled IT mergers and acquisitions for several years, consolidation in 2007 fundamentally reshaped the software industry. Facing saturated markets and nimble, innovative rivals, SAP, IBM and Oracle have snapped up competitors and partners in order to expand customer lists and acquire expertise and technology in hot areas like business intelligence and software as a service. Some of the bigger deals this year included: SAP's $6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects, IBM's $5 billion deal for Cognos, and Oracle's $3 billion buyout of Hyperion. As usual, Oracle provided the most drama with a $6.7 billion offer for BEA, which was successfully rebuffed -- at least, for now. While innovative entrepreneurs are bound to continue bringing startups to market, it's getting harder for medium-size vendors to refuse deals with the giants.

Dell reinvents itself
For years, Dell remained the world's number-one vendor in the cutthroat PC business by exercising unmatched control over logistics and sticking to its direct-sales model. But by 2006, HP unseated Dell as global PC leader. Dell seemed to lose its way as rivals adopted better supply-chain management techniques, and inquiries into accounting practices forced the company to delay earnings reports. In January, founder Michael Dell took back the CEO reins and the company expanded offerings for the enterprise, increased services for medium-size businesses, and departed from its traditional business model to start selling products in stores. Dell also plans to expand in growth markets globally. Early results are promising: Dell had record revenue growth for the third quarter, fueled by an increase in worldwide notebook sales.

The iPhone: Apple redefines a market, again
Some companies reinvent themselves. Apple, under the guidance of the mercurial Steve Jobs, reinvents markets. After redefining IT in the 1970s with the Apple II and then pushing the envelope in personal computing with the Mac in the 1980s, Apple stalled when its business model ended up giving the company a loyal -- but tiny -- user base. But the company started to ride high in 2001 after launching the iPod, and in 2006 breathed new life into the Mac by moving to Intel-architecture chips. Before the iPhone, there were many multifunction phones. But amid a June launch that had people lined up at stores from Tokyo to San Francisco, Apple proved its design mojo still works. The iPhone combination of cool design, phone functions, Internet connectivity, and multimedia features has raised the bar for any manufacturer of connected handheld devices. Apple's revenue and share price have never looked better.

The rise of the botnets: Software as a service ... for criminals
What do U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, the "Storm Worm," e-card invitations, and the country of Estonia have in common? They've all been associated with botnets -- groups of compromised computers, often numbering thousands or tens of thousands, that are remotely controlled by criminals. The scammers use the so-called "zombie machines" to pitch hot stocks or male-enhancement products, or simply to do damage, as when Estonian government Web sites were crippled in April. Botnets are now getting so sophisticated that they're being offered as SaaS (software as a service) products to scammers. That's what happened in November, when nearly 200 million spam messages supporting Paul for president were sent without permission from the campaign.

OLPC and the era of cheap laptops
The grand -- some might say grandiose -- plan of former MIT Media Lab chief Nick Negroponte to sell as many as 150 million $100 laptops by 2009, getting them to poor children around the world, this year looked more like a pipe dream. Production of the laptops, under the aegis of the One Laptop Per Child project, was delayed, promised government deals fell through, and the price of the XO "hundred-dollar laptops" turned out to be closer to $200. Current plans call for production of only about 300,000 laptops this year. But Negroponte's dream may not be permanently deferred, just co-opted by commercial vendors, which simultaneously face a slowdown in growth in mature markets and increasing pressure to cut prices and power consumption. For example, Intel has sold $200 Classmate laptops in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Libya, and in November, Everex announced it would sell Linux-based PCs with x86 processors for less than $300.

Google's "Gphone" morphs into Android
Google's anticipated "Gphone" announcement in November was both less, and more, than what had been long expected. For almost a year, rumors circulated that the online search giant was going to offer an actual phone. Google and its partners ended up unveiling not a device but a Linux-based open software platform, called Android, upon which mobile phones can be built. The idea is that a common platform will allow developers to build applications that can run on devices from many manufacturers on many networks, reducing complexity for both developers and consumers alike. Skeptics were quick to point out that Android might instead add complexity as developers will have to build applications for it as well as existing platforms. Android-based phones, due out in mid-2008, will face entrenched platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Viacom vs. Google: User-generated content hits speed bump
When media giant Viacom sued Google in March for $1 billion, citing unauthorized uploading of TV and movie clips to Google's YouTube site, it underscored a fundamental problem for user-generated content on the Web: How do sites ensure that submissions meet certain standards or are, in fact, legal? The dilemma is a problem of scale: Viacom charged that as of March, YouTube users uploaded nearly 160,000 video clips for which it owned copyrights and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. One answer to the problem may be systems like Video Identification, which Google unveiled in October. It matches user-uploaded clips with a repository of legitimate videos, allowing the company to flag and remove, if necessary, copyright-infringing material. With the cost of legal wrangling and monitoring systems growing, it is clear that user-generated content is not truly "free" after all.

Facebook controversy: Social networking hits prime time
Facebook's decision in October to sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which had been battling Google for the prize, solidified social networking's central place in technology. The stake values Facebook at $15 billion total even before it has truly figured out how to monetize its traffic. While social networking has been a growing trend for years, Facebook offers interactive features and a development platform that has Google, the social networking site MySpace, and others playing catch-up. But the problem of monetization has been compounded by privacy issues. The ability of Facebook's Beacon ad system to track user actions has whipped up a controversy that won't go away soon.

Barcelona: AMD's Waterloo?
AMD was hoping that the launch of its Barcelona quad-core chips would press a perceived technology advantage it had built up against archrival Intel beginning in 2003, the year the smaller company launched Opteron chips for 64-bit applications. As Intel stumbled, AMD gained market share. But Intel cut prices and launched new 64-bit and quad-core processors. The release of Barcelona, delayed until September, may end up being a counterpunch that was too little, too late. Dragged down by shrinking margins and costs from last year's acquisition of ATI, AMD in October announced its fourth-straight quarter of losses and this month said it has delayed volume shipments of Barcelona to fine-tune the chip.

Vista hoopla fizzles: Death of the big-bang upgrade?
Microsoft launched the consumer version of Vista in January after making it available to businesses last November. Microsoft officials hyped it as the biggest launch in the company's history and now say adoption is on a normal trajectory for new operating systems. In November it said that 88 million copies have been sold. But a range of market-analysis reports show that users, especially corporate professionals, have concerns about stability and compatibility and hesitate to upgrade. Though Bill Gates has said that big marketing events will always accompany major product releases, Vista may yet prove to be the last of the old-school upgrades in a world where users, on their own timetable, download incremental updates.

Dutch Government Adopts Open Source Software Initiative

Source: SlashDot

From the who-doesn't-love-a-good-open-government dept.

christian.einfeldt writes "The Dutch government has set a target date of April 2008 for its agencies to start preferentially using open standards-based software. Organizations in the government will still be able to use proprietary software and formats ... but will have to justify it. A Microsoft Netherlands spokesman claims that Microsoft's Office productivity suite will still be used widely in the Dutch government until April, and that Microsoft Office will comply with the new Dutch rules once Microsoft's so-called "Open Office XML" standard is approved as an international ISO standard in February."

A very real future for virtual worlds

Source: BBC

Many people spend a long time getting their avatar right for Second Life

Second Life has long been seen as the bell-wether for the growing interest in virtual spaces. Here, founder Philip Rosedale talks to the BBC News website about the past and future of the parallel world he is helping to create.

These are interesting times for Second Life. In the four short years it has existed, it has seen media coverage go from hysterical to hectoring. It has been hailed as both a harbinger of the next big thing and a brake on the burgeoning development of virtual worlds.

Speculation about its future has intensified as news emerged that chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka, who helped design and build Second Life, has left the company.

But said Philip Rosedale, one of the founders of Linden Lab which oversees the running of Second Life, the departure will not dent the vision all the original engineers had for their creation.

"Cory is a fantastic guy, he's fantastically capable and we will miss him a lot," said Mr Rosedale.

Philip Rosedale and his Second Life avatar Philip Linden
"Our differences are more about how to run the company and how best we organise ourselves as a company going forward," he said. "We really do not have any differences in strategic direction."

"There's not a shift in direction in the company that I wanted to make or Cory wanted to make that was incompatible," he told the BBC News website.

"We are a core of technologists in our heart," he said. "The first 10 people that joined, there are only two that have left, they are all engineers."

For the near future, Linden Lab is looking at ways of making the technology behind Second Life much more open and easy to use.

Web worlds
"We are still in the early days so the things that are wrong are still wrong," he said, "It is still hard to figure out how to use Second Life and how to find things."

In many respects, he said, online virtual worlds are at the point now that the web reached in the early 1990s.

"We have often had fun in the office finding quotes from the early 90s that map exactly to what they say about Second Life now, " he said, "that it's disorganised, you cannot find anything and there is a lot of crap."

We are at the very early stages of something very big

Despite the scepticism from many quarters he is fervently convinced that virtual worlds are the future of online life.

"Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not," said Mr Rosedale. "They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise."

"Information is presented there in a way that matches our memories and experiences," he said. "Your and my ability to remember the words we use and the information we talk about is much higher if it's presented as a room or space around us."

Equally important, he said, was the visibility or presence that being in a virtual world bestows on its users.

By contrast, he said, when visiting a website people are anonymous and invisible.

Shopping on Amazon might be much easier and enjoyable if you could turn to one of the other 10,000 or so people on the site at the same time as you and ask about what they were buying, get recommendations and swap good or bad experiences.

Many firms are using Second Life to collaborate
Many firms and educators were starting to use Second Life as an online collaboration space that helps them work together like they do in the real world but to which is added the malleability of a wholly digital space.

For virtual worlds to be able to extend this usefulness to the mass of people a lot of work has yet to be done, said Mr Rosedale.

What it might take, he said, was software that would let people browse virtual worlds like they do webpages. Built in to that software would be an identity management system that re-drew yourself to match those different spaces.

"I think it is going to happen, that kind of portability of identity is important but I could not hazard a guess right now about how quickly it will happen," he said.

"But," he said, "with a sufficiently open platform then people will move into it quite rapidly."

It might, he speculated, one day outstrip the web as a means for people to communicate and work together.

"Because virtual worlds like Second Life do not impose language barriers like the web does - that almost certainly means their ultimate utility range is larger," he said. "We are at the very early stages of something very big."

Google Knol - Google's Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages

Move over Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, and Squidoo. Maybe. That's because Google's testing its own service to let people build a repository of knowledge. In fact, knowledge forms the core of the service's name: Google Knol.

T-Mobile International Selects Huawei for Packet Switched Core

T-Mobile International has selected Huawei Technologies to provide Packet Switched Core Networks (PS-CN) across five European countries: Germany, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Huawei said the contract represents an important milestone for the company in Europe.

The contract requires Huawei to replace existing networks with its next-generation PS-CN equipment.

Early in July 2006, Huawei was selected to provide IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network infrastructure and applications for the Magyar Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, for its wire line and mobile business lines in Hungary.

BT Selects Ciena’s CN 3000 Ethernet Access for 21CN

BT has selected Ciena’s CN 3000 Ethernet Access Series as one of its preferred Network Termination Equipment (NTE) platforms for its 21st Century Network (21CN). Ciena is supplying the CN 3000 Series through an OEM agreement with ANDA Networks. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The CN 3000 Series encompasses a range of copper and fiber-based NTE platforms and complementary NTE aggregators fully compliant with Metro Ethernet Forum specifications. It includes both carrier-to-carrier network demarcation devices as well as customer-located Ethernet access devices, designed specifically to allow service providers to extend homogeneous coverage of managed Ethernet services.

The CN 3000 also features Ethernet Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) functionality that is integrated with Ciena’s ON-Center Network and Services Management Suite. These capabilities enable service management, Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and end-to-end SLA verification, while ensuring operational savings, as Ethernet services can be remotely provisioned and monitored without site visits. Additionally, the flexibility of the CN 3000 Series means that devices can be upgraded remotely using software.

The agreement extends BT’s partnership with Ciena, which already supplies optical Ethernet transport and switching solutions for the 21CN transmission domain, by enabling BT to provide Ethernet access in the last mile to support the roll-out of new 21CN services and applications.
http://www.ciena.com

In February 2007, ADVA Optical Networking announced that BT had selected it as a supplier of Ethernet last mile access products for its 21st Century Network (21CN). Specifically, BT’s 21CN will deploy the ADVA FSP 150 as the Network Termination Equipment (NTE) throughout the network. The ADVA FSP 150 portfolio provides Ethernet demarcation, extension and aggregation.

NC’s Inlet Technologies ships in $3M round

RALEIGH, NC—Inlet Technologies, a company developing video and multimedia compression technologies, has closed on $3 million in new venture funding according to WRAL’s LocalTechWire, which cites a regulatory filing.

Inlet’s Spinnaker technology supports live, TV quality streaming for Flash, VC-1 and Silverlight formats simultaneously, allowing its users to reach more than 99 percent of PCs. The company’s products also support IPTV and other services.

In an earlier interview, Inlet CEO told TechJournal South, “The art and excitement of this is to get it compressed so it travels well and still looks good.”

Once, that meant delivering content over standard broadcast channels or cable to a single device. Today it means sending the video content to a multiplicity of devices over many networks to screen sizes ranging from cell phones to PCs and TVs. “That requires dramatic changes in how the video is prepared,” says Page.

Page says increased delivery of video over broadband Internet to computers will be the next major commercial success in the field. “Advertising models are paying for it,” he says. “And online viewing supports the traditional model. Viewing of “Lost” increased 11 percent once they put episodes online rather than seeing a decline.”

Inlet has raised a total of $13.5 million since its founding four years ago.

Investors include include Core Capital, Technology Venture Partners, Telecommunications Development Fund and North Carolina-based Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC), which operates WRAL.

The companies customers include HDNet, formed by dot com billionaire Mark Cuban to deliver high definition television.

Microsoft unveils hands-on vision of the future

Source: CNN

Software giant Microsoft unveiled some of its future technology at its fourth annual Innovation Day in Brussels.

And from virtual family organizers to tabletop touch-screens, their vision of the future sees technology move from the traditional desktop computer to become seamlessly integrated in all aspects of our lives.

One key area that's set to change, says Microsoft, is user interface. MD of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, Andrew Herbert told CNN, "Sitting at a keyboard with a screen in front of us is an old-fashioned view of computing. Technology is going to be around us, it's going to be much easier to use."

Developments in touch-screen technology have resulted in large screens that can be used by multiple people, creating table-top tools for collaboration at work. And along with touch-screens, voice recognition will make our interaction with computers much more natural.

Herbert told CNN, "Interactive surfaces are making it easier for people to use computers with gesture and touch. It will make it easy for people to collaborate together. Speech will be an important part of that, too."

"We'll think less of one person, one computer," he continued. "It'll be people working together in an environment with lots of computers that you can interact with."

Touch-screens will also play a role in the home, according to the Microsoft-funded "Living Tomorrow" project. They showed off a large electronic touch-screen family organizer integrated into the wall of a fridge, which included shopping lists and menus compiled from product bar codes, a family calendar and virtual sticky notes.

"It's a way for a family to stay in touch, even though Mum's away on a business trip, Dad's at the office and the kids are doing different things," said Herbert. "It's the idea of social computing holding families together."

That technology is in development and still prohibitively expensive for widespread use, but Microsoft expects the cost of the component parts -- LCDs, cameras and sensors -- to fall significantly in the coming years.

Health is another area for technological advancement. For the consumer, that means wireless devices that monitor key body functions, such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature. The Living Well project showcased an electric toothbrush that could take these measurements and then display them on an LCD bathroom mirror, all while a person was brushing their teeth.

President of Microsoft International, Jean-Philippe Courtois told CNN, "Technology is going to play a crucial role for health in terms of sensing some of the key health parameters of the human body."

These devices can send data to doctors so they can monitor their elderly patients remotely, alert them to potential health issues early and step in if medical attention is needed. "They can take proactive action," Courtois continued, "and call those older people saying, 'Please take this medicine,' or even send someone on site."

This could prove a timely panacea for countries facing the fiscal challenge of caring for an ageing population. "It will save a lot of money for the social security system and the health system in many countries," Courtois said.

We've all heard that the future of computing is mobile, and Andrew Herbert reiterated that, telling CNN, "I see the mobile phone becoming more important than the personal computer in the future." Now, television is becoming portable too. That's according to Slingmedia's Slingbox, an on-market streaming device that liberates TV shows from our living rooms. Slingbox, already popular in the U.S., lets people watch any program they receive on their home TV remotely, on their mobile phone or laptop computer -- an activity known as "placeshifting."

In the realm of law enforcement, Imasoft's CrimeSceneNet lets police recreate three-dimensional models of real crime scenes from maps and photographs and annotate them with forensic findings and other evidence, helping law enforcement agencies collaborate with each other as a crime investigation progresses.

And as more children connect with each other via the Internet, monitoring their online activities becomes increasingly important to their parents. Microsoft-sponsored research revealed that, while 71 percent of parents are concerned about the content of video games, 60 percent say they are sufficiently informed to control their child's access to video games.

However, only half of parents surveyed said they felt in control of the amount of time their kids spent playing computer games. With that in mind, and hoping to set themselves apart as the family-friendly option in an increasingly competitive console market, Microsoft announced the launch of the Family Timer for the Xbox, so parents can control just how much time their offspring spend gaming.

Family Timer "will enable parents for the first time to set the appropriate amount of gaming and entertainment time on the Xbox 360 -- on a daily or weekly basis," said Chris Lewis, Vice President, Microsoft EMEA.

"It's a fantastic time to be a kid in the digital age, but it's also time for all of us to come together as responsible parents and business leaders to ensure our children are safe as well as challenged and entertained," he continued.

So welcome to Microsoft's future, where Mom stays in touch with the family via electronic notes on the fridge, Dad placeshifts so he never misses his favorite TV show and Grandpa keeps an eye on his health via his toothbrush.

But you'll still have to deal with the kids' tantrums when Family Timer switches off their Xbox...

Fiber To The Home Reaches 2 Million

Source: Mike Sachoff

Around 2.1 million U.S. households, or close to 2 percent, have fiber optic connections to the Internet, according to a study sponsored by the Fiber-to-the-Home Council and Telecommunications Industry Association and conducted by RVA Market Research.

That is an increase from 1 million households with fiber optic Internet connections in September 2006.

"Clearly, American consumers want what only fiber can deliver, and that is a pipe big enough to handle the high-bandwidth Internet and video applications of the future," said Joe Savage, president of the FTTH Council.

About 1 million U.S. households receive video over fiber-to-the-home, an increase of 160 percent over the past six months.

"While annual growth in the number of connections has doubled for the past two years, we expect to see a further increase in the growth rate as more high-bandwidth applications come to market and as more major service providers begin offering fiber to the home," said Michael Render of RVA Market

IF YOU NEED TO PURCHASE HARDWARE FOR FTTH PROJECTS PLEASE CONTACT ME BY PHONE +31650730710 OR BY MAIL DESIGNFORIT@LIVE.NL