Making the most of technology could boost UK economy by £35 billion

New research highlights critical importance of IT & Telecoms to UK and urgent need to invest in skills

Fully exploiting technology is the single most important step the UK can take to improve productivity across the economy, according to research released today by e-skills UK. The results could generate an additional £35 billion for the UK economy over the next decade, but only if we take urgent action to improve our skills base, drive the business adoption of technology – particularly among smaller firms – and foster technology-related innovation.

The research 'IT & Telecoms Insights 2008' provides a unique view of the key trends, opportunities and challenges facing the UK over the next ten years, and their implications for skills. The findings are being presented to employers and John Denham, MP, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills at an event on 28th January which marks the start of a nationwide consultation on priorities for action.

Karen Price, CEO of e-skills UK said:
"The research evidence is unequivocal: in today's increasingly fast moving global business environment, IT & Telecoms provides the engine of future growth and the key to increasing productivity and competitiveness. Half of Europe's productivity gains in recent years can be attributed to investments in IT. IT & Telecoms already contributes £51.9 billion to the UK economy every year - 5% of the total UK economy – and provides jobs for one in twenty of the UK’s workforce.

"Technology enables UK businesses to secure new markets, improve productivity and performance and attract high value-added business and investment to the UK. To safeguard the long term success of the UK we must maintain the strength of our thriving IT & Telecoms sector and world leading IT-enabled sectors such as financial services and biotechnology. We cannot achieve this without widespread investment in skills."

Paul Coby, CIO, British Airways and Chair of the e-skills UK CIO Board, said:
"We have great intellectual capital in our IT & Telecoms companies. Our universities are among the world leaders in mathematics, computer science, physics and economics. UK companies have IT departments that lead the world in solving business problems by the smart use of technology. Our lead in these areas will disappear fast unless we radically improve our business and technology skills training at all levels."

The research reveals that employment in the IT & Telecoms industry is forecast to grow at up to five times the national average. But the long term strength and success of the sector is threatened by a dramatic decline in the numbers of young people studying technology and a lack of interest in technology-related careers. For example, UK applications to IT-related degrees have fallen by 50% in the last five years.

Nick Read, CEO, Vodafone UK said:
"An important first step is to change the perception young people have of IT & Telecoms degrees and careers. Secondly, we need to transform technology-related education and capture in the curriculum the excitement that students already have for technologies in their daily lives such as mobile phones and the internet. Thirdly, and most importantly of all, in today's rapidly changing environment we must ensure that the UK’s workforce is encouraged and able to develop the world class skills they need at every stage of their career. Our future depends on it."

The IT & Telecoms Insights 2008 research and consultation will underpin employer-led, strategic action plans for the four nations of the UK, to be published later this year.

- Ends –

Further information can be found in the IT &Telecoms Insights report 'Technology Counts', available from e-skills UK at www.e-skills.com/insights08

IT and Telecoms Insights 2008: research findings include:
There are 1.5 million people in the IT & Telecoms workforce. Over the next five years, the UK will require more than 140,000 new IT & Telecoms professionals per year, most of them entering high level roles.

Around half of these will be experienced workers transferring in from other occupations. Around one in five will be direct from education.
IT & Telecoms professionals will increasingly require a broad range of technical, business and communications skills.

More than 77% of the UK's total workforce needs IT skills – including four million business managers and leaders who need to be able to drive IT-enabled change and the 21 million people who use IT in their every day jobs. Over the coming years, they will require IT skills at increasingly advanced levels.

Only 18% of the IT & Telecoms professional workforce is female, down from 22% in 2001.

New system heals web performance blackspots

Source: Techworld

Two companies have allied to give enterprises the ability to pinpoint and eliminate Internet-related application performance bottlenecks.

"Historically, Coradiant has not had access to detailed end-user experience information for content not delivered from the origin, such as cached data delivered by an application and content acceleration services provider, such as Akamai," said Coradiant. "By Akamai and Coradiant collaborating, IT organisations using Coradiant's TrueSight product family will now have visibility into data delivered by Akamai's Application Acceleration services."

Akamai accelerates customer's dynamic Web- and IP-based applications using a number of unique techniques that includes dynamic mapping, route optimisation, advanced communications protocols, and connection technology.

"Today's enterprises require a deep understanding of application health and its effect on real users so that unreliable and slow performance can be remedied," said Willie M. Tejada, vice president for Akamai Application Acceleration in a statement. "Through this partnership, our joint customers can realise the inherent benefits of their online business processes."

The two companies are not announcing pricing at this time, but interested parties are advised to contact their local Akamai and Coradiant sales representatives.Akamai Technologies is located in Massachusetts and is a global service provider for accelerating content and applications online. Recently, it announced that in December, Akamai powered 7 of the top 10 most trafficked social networking sites and 92 percent of US social networking site visits.

California-based Coradiant meanwhile makes equipment to manage and trouble shoot web applications.
The two companies announced they are providing an integrated package designed for businesses which depends on web applications and who uses Akamai's distributing computing platform to deliver content.

In order to do this they have enhanced Coradiant's existing TruSight products, which are normally used by organisations looking to understand the enterprise end-user experience, and to identify and diagnose any application performance problems. Akamai meanwhile contributes its Web Application Accelerator and IP Application Accelerator services, used by enterprises to ensure fast and reliable application delivery.

Coradiant told Techworld that technical details will be made available at a later date, but in short, whenever the Akamai IPA service performs a client lookup to determine the requesting source IP and delivers the response to the client, specific information is also sent to the customer’s Coradiant TrueSight product. "TrueSight combines locally distributed content with content delivered from Akamai's EdgePlatform, so to provide an organisation a more complete view of the end-user experience," said Coradiant.

"Most analysis of Internet bottlenecks doesn't really measure true end user application performance to the desktop," Coradiant added. "Coradiant end-user experience management products provide leading end-to-end visibility for any data that originates from an organisation's data centre."

The company feel this visibility helps the IT department to better understand service levels delivered to their users, and enables them to quickly troubleshoot and optimise their Web applications.

Create 3D Models from 2D Video

Source: How to and Hacks

Make 3D models to be used in games, simulations, or other video by simply tracing 2D objects within videos.

The University of Adelaide and Oxford Brookes Computer Vision Group have developed a Video Trace prototype application that allows you to trace objects in regular video. Since you are using so from video, you in fact determine the different angles and sights of the subject matter, therefore seeing a bigger and modeled image. This picture may be adjusted from separate areas and remodeled as a 3D object to be used in other applications.

Besides the obvious ability to create 3D objects from only 2D images found in video, this could provide many other advantageous features. Some examples are: players in the Second Life environment can recreate any physical objects from their “first” life to bring to the game, major movie editing for special effects is easier, and also enhanced architectural design.

An amazing hands on video presenting this application is right below.

Can you think of other creative ways this application can be used for?

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Look forward to challenging you to a game!

H2O Networks to extend sewer-based broadband network

Source: Broadband News

H2O Networks is planning to expand its fibre optic network, which is installed in sewers, to take in Bournemouth, Dundee and Northampton, it has been reported.

According to a report from Ispreview, the project would take two years to complete, after which the network could be extended to a further 15 cities.

H2O has been installing fibre optic networks in sewers since 2003 and their approach has been hailed by some as a solution to the expense and difficulty of setting up fibre optic networks in urban areas.

The firm has already signed up broadband provider Ask4 and H2O’s managing director Elfed Thomas has rebuffed claims that while the antiquated sewer networks would be suitable for small scale use they may not be a solution to national scale problems.

Last year the firm was the focus of a report on BBC’s Working Lunch show which saw a camera crew join the H20 team in a sewer system. The BBC report highlighted both the cost and environmental benefits of sewer-based fibre optic networks.

UK homes to get super-fast fibre

Source: BBC News


Laying fibre in sewers saves costly and disruptive road digging
The UK's first "fibre town" could go online in the autumn, delivering speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers' homes.

Fibre firm H2O provides super-fast broadband via the sewers and either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first.

It will compete with more established companies, such as Virgin Media, which is speeding up its cable network.

It follows government concerns that the UK is not embracing next-gen broadband.

Transforming services?

While other countries' plans for next generation broadband - offering speeds of up to 100Mbps - are well advanced, the UK has slipped down the speed league tables.

For consumers, super-fast net connections could create a range of new applications including on-demand high definition (HD) TV, DVD quality film downloads in minutes, online video messaging, CCTV home surveillance and HD gaming services.

Last month BT announced that its own fibre to the home trial at Ebbsfleet in Kent would see the first homes connected by August of this year.

But this will initially be limited to around 600 new houses. The development will eventually have some 10,000 homes connected via fibre with speeds of up to 100Mbps but the project will take until 2020 to complete.

We are talking here about fibre speed; not that dreaded word broadband
Elfed Thomas, H20

Future broadband technologies
While BT has pledged to provide all new housing estates in the UK with fibre connections it has not yet made clear its plans for existing homes.

The current telecommunications system was never designed to carry data and many have called for an urgent fibre upgrade.

BT has argued that with costs of up to £15bn to roll out such a network it needs to be convinced of demand and have assurances from the government that it will be able to recoup its investment.

At the end of last year, Virgin Media announced that it would be upgrading its entire cable network - which covers half of UK homes - to provide speeds of up to 50Mbps (megabits per second) and this is expected to begin towards the end of this year and be completed in 2009.

London-based firm Geo, which also offers fibre via the sewers, serves mainly businesses but also leases its fibre to consumer providers such as Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse.

Broadband caution

Antony Walker, head of the UK's Broadband Stakeholder's Group, cautioned that the H20 scheme could not create a fibred Britain alone.

"There are clearly benefits to using the sewers and this fibre deployment is good news but it is only a small piece of the jigsaw," he said.

The burgeoning fibre market is going to be a tough one for providers, according to Ian Fogg, an analyst with JupiterResearch.

"An optimistic view is that they will need penetration rates of between 15 and 20% of households in a particular area and with so many providers offering services that makes the business case very challenging," he said.

Mr Thomas of H2O is confident that its mega-fast service will have instant appeal for consumers and is pleased to be the first to offer such high speeds.

"We are talking here about fibre speed; not that dreaded word broadband," he said.

The service will be delivered to individual homes via a four-inch box attached to the house.

It will also serve local businesses and council services.

Bournemouth, Northampton and Dundee have been selected because H20 has already installed its fibre service to local council buildings.

The fact that the sewer-based fibre takes advantage of existing ducting means there is no need for expensive and disruptive road digging, making the system faster and cheaper to deliver.

"While deploying traditional fibre over a two-kilometre area would be six to 12 months in the planning. We can do it in four hours," said Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas said the sewers solution was a lot cheaper than the conventional route of digging up roads.

"An average town of 75,000 homes would cost someone deploying traditional fibre between £50m and £70m. We can do it for 20 to 30% of that," said Mr Thomas.

H20 said it is in "advanced talks" with media partners and internet service providers who will offer the service to consumers. The first of these partners is due to be announced next month.

Roll-out in the chosen town will begin in September and take 18 months to complete.

Mr Thomas hopes to add another 14 towns over the next five years.

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Dell Plans to Acquire EqualLogic

Catalyst for Simplifying and Virtualizing IT with Partners Globally
Source: Dell or another article on The Register


Round Rock, Texas, and NASHUA, N.H.

Dell has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire EqualLogic, a leading provider of high-performance iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions uniquely optimized for virtualization. The acquisition will strengthen Dell’s product and channel leadership in simplifying and virtualizing IT for customers globally. iSCSI SAN technology represents the fastest growing part of the storage business.

“Our customers will be dealing with the largest increase in data we have seen in our history over the next few years,” said Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell. “Leading the iSCSI revolution will help Dell accelerate IT simplification and virtualization and will drive the Dell value proposition into more areas of the enterprise storage business,” Mr. Dell said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell will purchase EqualLogic for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of EqualLogic is expected to close late in the fourth quarter of Dell's fiscal year 2008 or early in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. The company expects the acquisition to be dilutive to earnings per share, excluding the amortization of intangibles, by $0.02 to $0.05 in aggregate for Fiscal 2009 and Fiscal 2010. The acquisition has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

After completion of the transaction, Dell plans to grow EqualLogic’s successful channel-partner programs with current and future EqualLogic-branded products, and also plans to incorporate EqualLogic technology into future generations of its Dell PowerVault storage line available through the channel and direct from Dell.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.

About EqualLogic

EqualLogic® makes data storage systems that simplify the way enterprises of all sizes store and protect information. EqualLogic’s award-winning PS Series storage area network (SAN) solutions provide sophisticated management capabilities that reduce the time and money IT staff spend on data storage. Since shipping its first product in June 2003, EqualLogic has added more than 3,200 customers in 30 countries. Based in Nashua, N.H., EqualLogic has sales offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.EqualLogic.com.

Special Note
Statements in this press release that relate to future results and events (including statements about the impact of the acquisition on our expected financial and operating performance) are forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements because of a number of risks and uncertainties, including: general economic, business and industry conditions; our ability to maintain a cost advantage over our competitors; our ability to effectively manage periodic product transitions; our reliance on third-party suppliers for quality product components, including reliance on several single-source or limited-source suppliers; and our ability to attract, retain and motivate key personnel. For a discussion of those and other factors affecting Dell’s business and prospects, see Dell’s periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov or www.dell.com/investor.


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Will Cisco ever catch Riverbed or should they just get out now?

Source: CiscoSubnet

I want to start off with an excerpt from a Gartner paper by Mark Fabbi, it was put out back on March 15, 2007. This paper was written for the Cisco Applications Network Services, an before we go farther the Cisco WAAS is a part of this service. Plus we can look at it as a standalone product.

From a product perspective, Cisco's progress through 2006 has been, at best, mixed and largely disappointing. Cisco is a late entrant to an innovative and dynamic market, and it is "playing catch-up" across all market segments. Despite new product announcements during 2006, Cisco still lags behind the market.

I answer so many questions each week from Cisco customer with regards to the Cisco WAAS, what they are told by their Cisco Sales teams and the Riverbed Steelhead. Being a partner of both products it puts me in a unique position with my customers, it allows to me to what is right for my customer. Many VAR’s do not have this opportunity and are looking just to sell a customer more equipment. I always remember the excerpt above that was put out by Gartner and keep waiting for a change, but I have been disappointed just like customers.

From a VAR stand point I think it is time for Cisco to cut its losses and put the WAAS on the shelf. Right now it is not even in the top two of the product category, Riverbed Technologies and Juniper are one and two. If you are asking why would I say this? Well I have been involved in many bake off’s with customers using every product in this category, when it is an unbiased test Riverbed has never lost. By unbiased I mean that that the VAR just does not drop off equipment to the customer and says go test. You cannot just do that with customers or customers will pick based on culture or who gives them more free stuff than who really is the best.

Case in point, I will give two examples of what has happened to me when I was involved in two evaluations using Cisco, Riverbed (product demo) and Juniper. The first was a state organization that would not allow our engineers to be present when they did the testing; they just wanted the equipment and us out of the way. They said that if we were there we would influence the decision and that they were a state organization, let me say the biggest in the state. Now I have performed many bake offs and with the applications they were using, Riverbed would have no trouble winning.

It came to be that the customer said that Juniper and Cisco both did better than Riverbed, but they would not show us the data. Another bake off was with a very large company in which they were drinking the Cisco Kool-Aid way to much and an engineer sabotaged the evals so that Cisco would win. . If they were so up on putting the wrong product in, you might was well let them and we did. Some people will only put Cisco in and they do not care about anything else. There is an old rule with IT Managers and Directors; you never get fired for putting Cisco in your network even if it does not work. This same company called me one month later wanting help with the WAAS when they could not get it to scale or work like they did in the testing.

So as you can see, even if you are number one with Gartner you still have a huge mountain to climb when going up against Cisco. Now back to another reason why Cisco needs to drop the WAAS, the new mobile client from Riverbed is leaps and bounds above anything anyone else has in the network space. Cisco is years away to catching up with Riverbed on the WAAS and another three to five on to that just to get a mobile client that could compete with Riverbed.

I have copied the cautions from the 2007 Gartner report on WAN Optimizations Controllers; both of these were with reference to the Cisco WAAS:

* Successful implementation often requires multiple days by on-site Cisco engineers, dueto the solution's complexity. There is no single view of configuration, policy or WANoptimization features that are split across Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) andseveral router-based Internetwork Operating System (IOS) software options.

* Cisco has been slow to understand emerging market needs, resulting in WAAS featurereleases usually following other vendors' innovations. For instance, WAAS lacksadvanced features such as acceleration for HTTPS and Messaging ApplicationProgramming Interface (MAPI), and Cisco does not offer a software WOC client. Each ofthese features is available from other vendors.

Now I know things change and Cisco has fixed some issues, but even in this December 2007 Gartner Report they did not even mention the lack of a mobile client from Cisco. Now just to be fair I am going to show what Gartner put in about Riverbed:

* Less-capable QOS and reporting features than some leading vendors.

* Steelhead lacks UDP support.

Now I have to say that it looks to me like Gartner could not find anything else to write about Riverbed since they have great reports and have no issues with QOS (Quality Of Service)for any customer using a Cisco or Juniper network.

Let’s think about this for a second, what would happen if Riverbed took my ideas of which I have told the CTO and published a Windows Mobile Client, Blackberry Client and then got into the home user market?

This is my unbiased opinion being a partner of both vendors and doing many bake off’s. I hate to say this about any Cisco product or any product one of my vendors have but if you want to bring order to chaos within your network, don’t use the WAAS. Going back to my comment above it is about doing what is right for your customer with any product; give them the best product for the money.

Time to get out Cisco, maybe a Cisco Iphone?

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Cisco Pushes Big Firewall For Big Business Needs

Large and geographically dispersed enterprises seeking to tame their network security face difficulties far bigger and more complex than those confronting smaller firms.

What's the solution? A security offering that's massive enough to handle big enterprise problems.

That's the thinking behind Cisco's new ASA 5580 firewall security appliance, which is the new high-end firewall device from the networking behemoth. In addition to firewall capabilities, the ASA 5580 also provides both IPsec (define) and SSL VPN features.

The pure performance capability of the ASA 5580 stands as a key differentiator for the new product, which sits at the high end of the enterprise spectrum. Cisco claims that the ASA 5580 can handle up to 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput, two million simultaneous connections and 750,000 security policies.

Though the ASA 5580 is a high-performance appliance, raw speed isn't what Cisco expects will give it the edge in the highly competitive firewall security market.

"What's really important about performance is that it's not just about raw speed anymore," Cisco product manger Tom Russell told InternetNews.com.

"You need to look at how many transactions are really occurring ... the depth of security polices that are required [and] latency issues, and then come out with a device that looks at the multiple of what performance issues are," he said.

Reporting is one issue typically encountered by high-performance networks. Russell argued that security has often taken a back seat to business requirements. Plus, at 10-Gigabit Ethernet connection speeds, with thousands of users per second, the logging effort is often a technical challenge.

Now, with the ASA 5580, Cisco is expanding its NetFlow network telemetry technology to handle the device's speeds and scale.

"You can finally enable secure logging in high-performance environments and not overrun the system or collectors to capture the data," Russell said. "You don't lose any visibility of security events and get much more efficient handling."

With greater power, Cisco expects that the ASA 5580 will also help in power reduction efforts, assisting enterprises in their own "green" efforts. For instance, Russell said the ASA 5580 can provide up to 50 virtual firewalls, so an enterprise could consolidate departmental and other internal firewall deployments into a single device.

Though the ASA 5580 is only now being officially announced, Cisco already has at least one taker -- Del Monte Foods.

During Cisco's Webcast announcing the ASA 5580, Dennis Tokarski, Del Monte's telecommunications and network operation manager, explained that his company faced difficulties in extending its network to third-party suppliers and partners.

Until now, access to Del Monte's network was what Tokarski described as a "free-for-all". But with the ASA 5580, he said he now expects to be able to provide secure access limited to just what the partners need.

Tokarski added that Del Monte wound up choosing Cisco after examining the top five firewall vendors.

"We selected the ASA because of its ability to fit into our environment," he said. "We're looking to utilize the SSL VPN that the ASA offers and want to provide users with a better experience to using the network, no matter where they are."

Cisco expects that the ASA 5580 will be widely available in March.

Source: InternetNews

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How to Keep your PC to Yourself

Has anyone used your desktop without your permission? Have you ever returned home to find that your computer is turned on, when you specifically remember turning it off when you left? Would you like to learn a cool little trick to have an invisible switch, so others would not be able to turn your PC on?

The video by hanzablast below explains how you can install a “safety” switch, so you would only be able to turn on your computer by using a magnet.

This cheap trick shows you how you can install such a method. Now, if any one attempts to use my computer without my consent, the on/off switch would not power up the computer. The computer would stay intact and ready for work, but would simply not turn on. It would only operate if I place a magnet by the power button, as I press it.

Since this hack involves opening the computer and wire cutting, use at your own discretion.

Source: GadgetSoftware



Pc Protection With Hidden Switch - video powered by Metacafe

W3C Publishes HTML 5 Draft

Future of Web Content

W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications.

"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director.

"I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web.

" New features include APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics and ways to embed and control audio and video content.

HTML 5 helps to improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover from errors.

Discover other new features, read the press release, and learn more about the future of HTML. (Permalink)

40gbit Internet Connection, Karlstad Sweden

Source: YouTube




Original Text;

Sigbritt Löthberg i Karlstad har världens snabbaste bredband - 40 Gbit per sekund. Hon är mor till internetlegenden Peter Löthberg, som tillsammans med Karlstads stadsnät har ordnat uppkopplingen för att visa på möjligheterna med fiberteknik.

Sigbritt Löthbergs villa i Karlstad har världens snabbaste bredbandsanslutning. En direkt fiberkoppling till Stockholm ger en hastighet på 40 Gbit per sekund. Vidare till Kalifornien, där sonen och Internetlegenden Peter Löthberg bor, går anslutningen med en hastighet på 20 Gbit per sekund.

Sigbritts uppkoppling motsvarar mer kapacitet än vad som levereras av de andra operatörerna i Karlstad sammanlagt. Att överföra en HD-dvd mellan Stockholm och Sigbritts villa går på två sekunder. Anslutningen snabb nog för att leverera 1500 tv-kanaler i hd-upplösning.

Det är sonen Peter Löthberg som tillsammans med Karlstad stadsnät ligger bakom Sigbritts uppkoppling. Syftet med världsrekordsuppkopplingen i Karlstad är att visa hur mindre orter i Sverige kan få tillgång till blixtsnabbt bredband med hjälp av fiberteknik.

Peter Löthberg var en av drivkrafterna bakom internets intåg i Sverige och benämns ofta som det svenska internets fader. Idag arbetar han på Cisco, och det är även Ciscos teknik som används för Sigbritt Löthbergs uppkoppling.

Att uppkopplingens hastighet är så hög beror bland annat på ny modulationsteknik som gör att signalen kan skickas över avstånd på upp till 2000 km utan mellanliggande transpondrar. Lösningen bygger endast på att ny teknik används i ändarna av anslutningen -- alltså behövs inget nytt nät. Beviset för detta är Sunets fibernät, som används för sträckan mellan Stockholm och Karlstad, bara byggdes för en maxhastighet på 10 Gbit, enligt ett pressmeddelande från Karlstads stadsnät.

-- Jag ville visa att det finns andra vägar att gå än de gammaldags metoder man använt i Värmland i lvrigt, som till exempel koppar och radio, vilka saknar de obegränsade framtidsmöjligheter som fibern har. Att vi har lyckats är bevis för att det lönar sig att samarbeta, säger Peter Lötbherg i en kommentar.

-- Med detta vill vi visa vilka möjligheter man har när man väljer att förse sin fastighet med fiberanslutning. Detta visar ju också att fibern är en framtidssäker invest

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Cisco 10 Gigabit Transceivers

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FttH by FranceTelecom (french)

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Gesture Based Technology in Action

Source: YouTube

Choose a music video, a movie trailer, or a fun game with a wave of your hand!

While most storefronts in shopping malls are trying to lure you inside with bright colored displays, this one gives you more interactivity while you are still outside.

Orange has revealed a wonderful new way to play with content on a screen without the need to make any physical contact or touch. This new technology resembles the User Interface of Minority Report, but in real life. With it, you are able to move objects displayed on the screen with a simple movement (or stroke) of your hands.

The video below shows this new Gesture Based Technology in action not just by the Orange representatives, but also by regular passerby individuals. It presents the simplicity of actions needed to carry out tasks such as flipping through movie titles, music videos, and even making a selection to be played.

Now that the fun is outside the actual store, I wonder what will get people to actually step inside.

YouTube Sucking In More Viewers

"There are no competing destinations to YouTube if you are measuring by volume," said Mike Goodman, a Yankee Group analyst. All together, Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos in November, with 2.9 billion viewed at YouTube. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 419 million videos viewed, followed by Yahoo with 328 million, and Viacom Digital with 304 million.

Step aside, boob tube. Online videos are becoming the primary form of media entertainment for many people. Web surfers spent about an hour more per month watching videos in November compared with January, according to the latest comScore Video Metrix.

Specifically, they watched an average of 3.25 hours, or 195 minutes, of online video during the month, representing a 29 percent gain from 2.52 hours, or 151 minutes, watched in January 2007.

The average online video runs about 2.8 minutes, giving the average viewer time to consume 69 of these productions.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) sites captured the largest online video audience with 76.2 million unique viewers, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 46.3 million and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) sites with 37.3 million.

YouTube Rules

Most of the viewers trekking to Google sites, of course, actually went straight to YouTube , a big tent destination that is home to everything from purloined TV shows to battle scenes shot in Iraq to customer service protests to political messages from candidates.

Thanks to its billion-dollar investment in YouTube, Google's share of the online video market is edging past 30 percent and still climbing. In November, its share had increased by 2 percentage points from October, according to the comScore statistics.

The YouTube fan base also appears to be more devoted to the Web site: comScore found that 74.5 million people viewed 2.9 billion videos on YouTube.com -- averaging 39 videos per viewer. This compares with 43.2 million people who viewed 389 million videos on MySpace -- an average of nine videos per viewer.

Rising Tide

"A rising tide lifts all boats," said Mike Goodman, an analyst with the Yankee Group, referring to Google's effect on the online video environment. Unlike search and many of the applications it has developed in house, Google bought its way into this particular industry niche, but has since managed to leverage its investment well.

"There are no competing destinations to YouTube if you are measuring by volume," Goodman told TechNewsWorld. He doesn't anticipate the site losing its appeal even as Google incorporates it into its various advertising initiatives.

All together, Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos in November, with 2.9 billion viewed at YouTube. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 419 million videos viewed (4.4 percent), followed by Yahoo with 328 million (3.5 percent), and Viacom Digital (NYSE: VIAb) with 304 million (2.6 percent).

Steve Jobs criticizes Microsoft on Zune, says Blu-ray won

Source: BetaNews

The Apple CEO was blunt that he believes the Zune is a failure, and that Blu-ray may have won the format war, but has probably lost the HD content battle.
His comments came as part of an interview with CNBC's Jim Goldman on Tuesday. While Jobs is not necessarily known for his subtlety, his statements are about the most direct on either topic so far.

When Goldman told Jobs about Microsoft executive Robbie Bach's comments that he thought the new Zune was a worthy alternative to Apple's iPod, Jobs all but called Bach crazy.

"Was he inebriated? Do you even know anyone who owns a Zune?" he said of the device.

As to Blu-ray, he said that the format had won the war over HD DVD. Yet in the end, he continued, its likely not going to matter with the advent of HD downloads. Jobs' opinion is not all that far-fetched: many analysts have said that the only thing the battle may have yielded is enough time for streaming HD to become a viable option.
Other highlights of the interview.

On China Mobile: "People just make this stuff up." He claims an executive from the carrier has visited Apple only once.










On the MacBook Air: "Intel did a great job in miniaturizing its very fast Core 2 Duo processor. There was lots more to do though ... we probably built 100 models to get to this."
























On the iPhone: "The customer feedback is just off the charts ... I think to make a product that's so beloved, you just know its going to be really successful."

The Secret History of Silicon Valley

How Stanford the CIA/NSA Built the Valley We Know Today

How much does an average Googler know about the history of the place he works in?

Silicon Valley.

Come and test your knowledge. I have seen this talk and I assure you - even seasoned Silicon Valley veterans will find this story interesting. Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Steve Blank will talk about how World War II set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of Silicon Valley, and the role of Frederick Terman and Stanford in working with government agencies (including the CIA and the National Security Agency) to set up companies in this area that sparked the creation of hundreds of other enterprises.













For the 1 hour YouTube video click on ''Speaker: Steve Blank''mentioned below....

Speaker: Steve Blank
Steve Blank spent nearly 30 years as founder and executive of high
tech companies in Silicon Valley, most recently the enterprise software firm E.piphany. He has been involved in or co-founded eight Silicon Valley startups, ranging from semiconductors to video games, and personal computers to supercomputers. He teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Columbia University and Stanford's Graduate School of Engineering.

New Techniques in Underground Fiber Installation

Installing fiber-to-the-home does not have to mean digging up streets and sidewalks. Learn from this video about recent developments in horizontal directional drilling.

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Chelan County's Washington State

Learn how local residents and businesses in this Washington State community are benefiting from a new fiber-to-the-home network.

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FTTH Council's Joe Savage Interviewed on Rocketboom

Rocketboom is a daily, three-minute videoblog covering technology and culture. Joe Savage discusses the basics of fiber-to-the-home in his interview with Rocketboom's Joanne Colan.

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Is Telepresence Worth the Big Bucks?

Source; Ann All

Distance adds management difficulties. Cultural differences play a role, which has led some North American companies to opt for closer outsourcing alternatives like Latin America.





But cultural differences aside, much of communication goes beyond words, and thus is lost in telephone and e-mail discussions. According to two information systems professors cited in this Knowledge@W. P. Carey article, more than 60 percent of communication is nonverbal.

The two academics, Harvey Shrednick and Ajay Vinze, predict more mainstream adoption of video conferencing. In particular, they think companies will want to use ultra-sophisticated — and ultra-expensive — “telepresence” solutions from vendors like Cisco. Vinze says Cisco’s TelePresence Meeting system offers an experience in which “you can see a sweat bead on someone’s forehead.”








(Another system with similar high functionality and cost is HP’s Halo.)










In a March 2007 IT Business Edge interview, Wainhouse Research analyst Ira Weinstein likens the difference between previous iterations of video conferencing and telepresence to “watching TV on a small set as compared to a big screen on the wall with surround sound.”

While simpler video conferencing systems might do for some remote meetings, Weinstein says that telepresence is preferable for more strategic situations.

This is the kind of thing that a typical enterprise would deploy in eight or 10 strategic locations. … Imagine a geographically dispersed development team charged with finding the next round of ideas and solutions for companies, such as a drug company or a car manufacturer. These guys don’t get together very often, and every extra day it takes to come up with a solution is another day to market. They go into telepresence rooms, interact, meet for hours and hours, and virtually interact face to face and still go home to their families at night.

Rob Enderle blogs that video conferencing — whether it’s telepresence or simpler systems — won’t be successful if employees resist it or if organizations using such systems aren’t given the credit for travel savings. He writes:

If you don’t have the authority or executive backing to require that the system be used instead of travel, or if you can’t get credit for the savings, but will be charged for the hardware and upkeep, then you probably won’t be happy with the result.

Nonetheless, Enderle adds, for organizations committed to making it work, the ROI can be “amazing.” In addition to direct savings on transportation and accommodation expenses, he says, companies gain productivity that is typically lost during transit. Video conferencing means “no missed connections, lost luggage, airborne in-plane viruses or long lines to the terminals.”

Another point working in video conferencing’s favor, notes Shrednick of W.P. Carey, is a generation weaned on YouTube. He says:

(Young people have) gotten more used to visualization and video than my generation. That’s how they do business: they want to see people.

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BT to Launch 100 Mbps FTTH Greenfield in Kent

BT’s local access network business announced a greenfield FTTH deployment scheduled for this August in Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent.

The deployment will encompass Land Securities’ 1,000 acre new build project with approximately 10,000 new homes planned.











BT plans to offer data speeds of up to 100 Mbps, enabling multiple HDTV channels to be watched simultaneously, HDTV gaming, and near instant music downloads.













Openreach will offer all its products on a wholesale basis to all UK communication providers allowing for competition at a retail level.

BT already provides some 120,000 businesses across the country with fiber connections.

BT said it is also committed to increasing broadband speeds over copper, introducing services of up to 24 Mbps from Spring 2008.

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Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)

Vulnerability in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution

Check it here!

Oracle To Buy BEA Systems In $8.5 Billion Deal

Source: DOW JONES NEWSWIRES




Oracle Corp. (ORCL) will buy BEA Systems Inc. (BEAS) for $8.5 billion three months after BEA slapped away an Oracle takeover offer as too low.

Oracle would pay $19.38 for each BEA share, a 24% premium to Tuesday's close price of $15.58.

Shares of Oracle fell in premarket trading to $21.10 after closing Tuesday at $21.31. BEA shares had yet to trade in premarket activity.

Oracle made an unsolicited $6.7 billion, or $17 a share, takeover proposal in October, but the company let it expire weeks later after BEA said the bid was unacceptable. At the same time, BEA added it was looking to start negotiations with interested parties willing to pay at least $21 a share.

"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison. "Middleware" is a general term for any programming that serves to mediate between two separate and often already existing programs.

BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang called the deal the culmination of a " diligent and thoughtful process" to maximize stockholder value. The company's largest shareholder, billionaire Carl Icahn, had called for an auction to sell the business-management-software firm.

BEA is one of the few independent, medium-sized software companies left in Silicon Valley as the technology industry consolidates. Oracle has for years eyed BEA as an acquisition target.

BEA has been battling Oracle, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and others in the market for middleware. BEA, with a product called WebLogic, pioneered one category of middleware called application servers that are used to build Web services.

Oracle expects the buyout to boost earnings by 1 cent to 2 cents a share, excluding items, in the first year after the deal closes. That is scheduled to happen by midyear.

Is Cisco worth the premium?

Source: Cisconet

Nortel loves to shout from the roof tops whenever it sees arch rival Cisco falter, and this week Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies at Nortel, writing in his Hyperconnected Enterprise blog is citing a recent Gartner Dataquest report that found that Cisco's share by ports of the Ethernet switching market fell to 37%.

He mulls that the results mean that two-thirds of enterprises are saving money or finding better performance elsewhere, and that given Cisco's share by revenue is 73%, "customers are paying way too much to Cisco."

He adds:

Cisco is not going to lower their prices any time soon since they could lose 15% of their revenue base if their revenue share tracked their port share! In fact, as a mature technology, one would expect Ethernet prices to come down over the years …. my friends at Gartner tell me this is generally true but NOT for Cisco.


He concludes that: "If Cisco is only a 400 pound guerilla, then don’t feed him as if he were a 700 pound one!"

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Sun to acquire MySQL for $1 billion

Source: IDG News Service

Sun will pay $1 billion for Swedish software company MySQL, whose open-source database is used for some of the most widely visited Web sites in the world.

Sun said the deal will augment its position in the enterprise IT market, including the $15 billion database market.

MySQL's product line will help Sun give further support to the open-source Web application platform known as LAMP, the acronym for the Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database and the PHP/Perl programming languages.

Sun will pay $800 million in cash and $200 million in options.

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Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says

Employees age 18 to 31 have high expectations that many IT employers simply can't meet.

Source: Network World

Young IT employees pose a challenge to many managers who say the Millennial generation holds employers up to unrealistic expectations and makes unreasonable demands for their services.

Millennials -- employees between the ages of 18 and 31 -- represent the top challenge for IT managers, according to survey results released Thursday from Atlantic Associates, an IT staffing company.

Atlantic Associates polled more than 100 Massachusetts executives on the challenges they face and more than 50% of respondents described those teen and 20-something employees as the "toughest generation to manage." Generation Xers (ages 32 to 42 years old) placed second with 17% of respondents saying they pose a management challenge.

Jack Harrington, co-founder and principal of the staffing firm, says the problem between employers and the younger generation just entering the workforce can be traced back to the employees' upbringing or an easier way of life for children in the United States today.

"The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee's expectation," he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.

"Millennials are coming in with high expectations and are disillusioned about the reality of a work place. They feel they should be rewarded and start at the top, when we all know you have to work your way up. They have been raised to be rewarded often and when you get into the workforce those rules change a bit," Harrington says.

But Millennials' ideas also have a positive influence on work environments. For instance, they expect their employer to be socially responsible and take part in community or philanthropic ventures, which is a good thing, Harrington says.

"To reach a good working balance, Millennials will have to change their ideas somewhat, but the work environment will also change to appeal to these very in-demand employees," he says.

With baby boomers retiring, fewer IT graduates and low unemployment rates in high-tech fields, the executives polled reported that hiring and retaining qualified candidates is the primary staffing challenge they face this year. Twenty-three percent of respondents said retaining existing staff is the top concern, while 22% said they struggle to find new qualified candidates.

"There is a shrinking talent pool of qualified IT professionals and some managers are talking about the graying of their current staff. They want to get young workers in here before those older staff members retire so they can retain that knowledge," Harrington says.

Many are saying pay will increase with demand. Some 45% of survey respondents said they expect salaries to increase in 2008 for non-certified IT staff. Employers are willing to train staff as well. About one-third said staff training in new technologies was their No. 1 priority, while 68% ranked training in their top three priorities for 2008. Training is just one way IT managers are looking to keep staff, Harrington says.

"The executives we talked to are looking at bonuses and incentives packages, co-op plans with colleges and universities, and working hard to get the right candidate in place and keep them," he adds. "There are more try-before-you-buy options for potential employees and employers, which could help balance out those expectations for young workers."

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Steve Jobs Key Note

Read the complete Engadget Key Note from Today here....

Or read the WIRED article on it.

8 Hot Technologies for 2008...

The European Commission has opened two new antitrust investigations of Microsoft's activities.

The first case is in response to a complaint from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a Brussels-based trade group of which Opera Software is a member, and concerns the interoperability of Windows with other software, the Commission said Monday.

The second investigation is looking into Microsoft's tactic of bundling software products with its Windows operating system. This follows a complaint to the Commission by Opera, a Norwegian browser developer.

Both issues featured in the Commission's landmark March 2004 antitrust decision against Microsoft, which the company unsuccessfully challenged in court.

WAN optimization: Money for nothing, clicks for free

Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization : Market Trends

Optimization technology can slash the cost of WAN bandwidth and improve app performance

Source: Network World

WAN optimization technology is a way to save money — take that to the bank. For instance, custom machinery manufacturer Curt G. Joa in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., avoided the cost of adding a server to its German office by installing WAN-acceleration gear from Silver Peak.

Joa engineers in Germany needed to access engineering applications, but the applications performed so slowly over the WAN that it could take an hour just to open a Novell directory.

The initial plan was to install a server in the German office for $100,000 including time, hardware and licenses. Instead, the company spent $17,000 on a Silver Peak NX appliance that solved the problem by speeding application performance over the WAN.

In another example, Riverbed gear that cost $20,000 reduced the need for bandwidth between a Millard Lumber site in Omaha and a second site in Lincoln, Neb., from three T-1s to one, saving $3,000 per month. That’s a payoff within seven months.

In addition, WAN-optimization devices improve transaction times between sites by as much as 90% or more, reducing user frustration and in some cases making it possible for applications to perform at all over long distances.

Despite their impressive results, these devices often are overlooked, mainly because potential users worry they might remove chunks of data, block visibility of traffic through firewalls, or fail and stall out networks altogether, says Eric Siegel, an analyst with the Burton Group.

These concerns are groundless, Siegel says. “They should do it now. You can really save money on these things. And there’s soft benefits like happier customers and more cooperation,” he says.

In the grand scheme of things, a paltry amount of WAN optimization gear has been sold, says Mattias Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics. This year, vendors will sell about $300 million worth worldwide.

Even so, the optimization gear is catching on. Sales this year have increased 27% compared with last year, and Machowinski projects double-digit increases in each of the next three years.

These devices help save money in two ways. First, they reduce the need for WAN bandwidth, which translates into buying smaller WAN pipes or staving off the need to add more.

Second, they enable businesses to consolidate servers in data centers, saving money by reducing the number of servers in corporate networks that need to be purchased, installed, maintained and repaired.

Optimization appliances use a variety of means — compression, caching, boosting TCP efficiency, protocol optimization, imposing QoS — to reduce the amount of traffic that crosses WAN circuits, compress the traffic that is sent and make sure it does so efficiently to avoid congestion.

Vendors — Cisco, Citrix, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Juniper, Packeteer, Riverbed and others — use varying blends of WAN-optimizing technology, so one vendor’s gear might do a better job on a particular traffic mix than another’s. Consequently, the single most important thing customers can do is test gear made by more than one vendor on live networks.

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