Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

ITU Releases: World Information Society Report 2006

You can download the whole report as a PDF or access it by chapter: World information Society Report 2006

Strong gains have been achieved in digital opportunity around the world, according to a new report from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The World Information Society Report is part of ITU's contribution to the 2006 session of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which is meeting in Geneva from 3rd to 28th.
The Asian economies of the Republic of Korea and Japan continue to lead in digital opportunity, due to their pioneering take-up of broadband and 3G mobile services. Nearly all Internet subscribers in the Republic of Korea are broadband subscribers, whilst Japan is the only market where Internet subscribers are most likely to access Internet over their mobile. Dramatic progress has been achieved by developing countries, however, which made the greatest progress in digital opportunity - notably India, where digital opportunity nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005, and China, which experienced remarkably strong gains in infrastructure. Different countries are following their own paths in telecommunication development, with some countries leveraging their investments in infrastructure more successfully than others.
In response to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) goals, the report tracks the changing dynamics driving the Information Society worldwide, with a new tool - the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) - that evaluates the opportunity, infrastructure and utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for 180 economies worldwide. The Index monitors the mobile communications that promise to bridge the digital divide in many parts of the world, as well as more recent technologies such as broadband and mobile Internet access. The price of broadband continues to fall worldwide, by as much as twenty per cent a year over the last two years according to ITU's analysis, while broadband speeds continue to increase. These trends are not restricted to developed countries, however, with broadband now commercially available in 166 countries worldwide.
As part of the ITU's work in follow-up to the WSIS, the report is addressed to policy-makers and regulators. It shows how this new Index can inform the policy-making process in the critical areas of the digital divide, universal access, gender, and the development of broadband networks. The Report gives practical examples of how the DOI can be used, and highlights projects around the world that are working to meet the commitments made at the WSIS.
The DOI has been developed by a multi-stakeholder partnership (the Digital Opportunity Platform) comprising ITU, UNCTAD and the KADO (Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion) and which is open to other partners. It will be reported annually in order to track progress in reaching the WSIS targets, and building a diverse and inclusive Information Society, by 2015.

Raymond Baxter RIP (1922-2006)

I read in today's Irish Times that Raymond Baxter passed away on 15th September 2006 (he was born on 25th January 1922). As a child I was inspired by his TV appearances, along with James Burke, in particular heading up the first editions of Tomorrow's World (the BBC science programme). Here's a BBC Posting announcing the sad news. See this site for information on Tomorrow's World.

In many ways it was inspirational people like this, as well as my own school teachers, who encouraged me to pursue science initially as a topic for academic study. Hence I still have the two volume edition of the book based on the series (see scanned image at the top of this posting). So it inspired me to do A-Level Physics, along with Irish and English, and I also took a non-examinable Computing course at the same time, as computing was not yet available as an A-Level subject). I went on to study a BA in Computing and English (Keele University, Staffordshire, UK) followed by further postgraduate computing courses in the UK.

Raymond Baxter (Guardian, Obit)

XML Schemas - How Are They Being Used?

Paul Kiel posts on O'Reilly's XML.com Profiling XML Schema analysing what features of XML schemas are actually used in practice, and advising on the schema features to avoid. Very interesting.... Not surprisingly the vast majority of schemas analysed stuck to simplicity, to quote from Paul's conclusions "The clearest message is one of simplicity. The most commonly used constructs involve merely creating reusable types, assembling them into sequences of elements, and augmenting them with enumerations. Many of the more complex features went unused."

Rechargeable USB AA Batteries! Cool.

Paul Watson in the TSSG alerted me to these new USB batteries TrustedReviews - USBCELL: Batteries That Recharge Through USB. That is a really great concept if they can reach the right price point. I've already started noticing that recharging via USB is becoming a de facto standard for all sorts of devices such as GPS receivers, mobile phones, PDAs and many other hand held devices. Making the batteries themselves plug in is a great idea...

Whio Controls the Internet (link to book review)

Looks like an excellent book:

Who controls the Internet? A book review at kierenmccarthy.co.uk

Mediaangler on IPTV

Just subscribed to this blog today and I'm impressed by the good qulaity of the postings.... here's one on how aggregatioin of video content will be key to IPTV Podcasts Lining up for the IPTV Future But It's Still The Corner Shop Bet

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth tries to capture real-time data about the earth and display it visually on a map.... very interesting.

Blogsphere Growth (David Sifry)

David Sifry presents a whole sets of very informative charts plotting the growth of the blogsphere, basically it is now doubling (in terms of the numbers of feeds) every 200 days, and there are about 1.6 million postings per day (18.6 per second) Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, August 2006

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.


• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.


• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.


• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.


• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.


• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.


• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.


• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.


• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.


• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time

Geoff Huston on DNSSEC

An excellent overview of the practicalities of DNSSEC, and a high level critique of some of the important issues ISP Column - September 2006

Vinoski on Enterprise-Class Software

In this posting Easy Street (Middleware Matters) Steve Vinoski of Iona highlights the difference between enterprise-class software (ECS) and software that runs in the enterprise (STRTE) - combining the two to get the title of the post "Easy Street" = (ECS + STRTE). He positions various technologies within this framework - interesting....

Zinadoo Launch Photo

Here's a snap Paul Watson took as the Zinadoo launch party was starting. I'm there in bottom left as you look with Mí­cheál Ó hÉigeartaigh (Head of Department, Computing, Mathematics and Physics, WIT) and Paul Barry (Head of School of Science, WIT). This is the atrium area of the IT Building in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT).

New Language Wars

Tim Bray neatly summarises a provocative posting by Spolsky that has prompted some angry rebuttals.... ongoing · Spolsky Starts a Language War

O'Reilly policy on Web 2.0 name

Tim O'Reilly posted on the new Web 2.0 Expo event O'Reilly Radar > Web 2.0 Trademark Redux and clarified the position with respects to the trademark that they have filed. Fair dues to Tim for being so reasonable despite the big kuffule about this.

Rent elastic computing from Amazon

Amazon seem to be blazing a trail with their flexible computing (Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon EC2) and flexible storage (Simple Storage Service - Amazon S3) products that allow anyone to deploy scalable Internet services easily, see Jon Udell's experiences documented here Amazon.com's rent-a-grid | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-08-30 | By Jon Udell

He notes this may not be the best option if you need a dedicated machine with continuous demand:

As the blogosphere quickly noted, the EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of local disk. And that doesn’t include bandwidth, billed separately at the S3 rate of 20 cents per gigabyte. So for now, if you want to park one box on the Internet and leave it running indefinitely, better deals can be had from dedicated hosting providers. As the service’s name suggests, though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2 is the only game in town.

Other alternatives include 3tera.

Irish Times coverages for Nubiq's Zinadoo launch

A 3CS and TSSG spinout company, Nubiq, is today launching its Zinadoo product for mobile content creation management. This article in today's Irish Times summarises the key points: Irish Times Article - Firm makes mobile websites easy

This is the press relesase from 3CS:

The Centre for Converged Services (3CS) based at the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) will see another spin off company come to fruition in September – Nubiq Ltd. Funded by Enterprise Ireland, the new campus company, which specialises in community mobile solutions, will launch its first product, zinadoo.com around that time.

Zinadoo provides a service that enables end-users to create their own mobile website from their computer. The service provides a full solution to end-users to enable them to take existing website content and create, deploy and manage new mobile services and mobile websites. Users don’t have to write software, develop and manage connections to operator’s networks and gateways, or host, manage and monitor the service.

In addition to mobile website creation, an end user can create their own text services to promote their site, invite people to see it and use it and to build community services. The zinadoo services range from group texting, to text voting and automated text response services, which set it apart from its competitors. It is an easy and effective way for people to express themselves through the creation of websites using their mobile phones.

Since February of this year, sporting clubs such as Gaelic football clubs, golf clubs and more recently the Waterford branch of the Youth Information Services Organisation have taken part in the new mobile services trials. These trials aim to bring mobile services to community groups and SMEs looking for an easier way to keep in touch with friends, family and customers.

Helene Haughney, Chief Executive, Nubiq said: "Until now internet users who create content and services on the web, be it social networking, journaling or using sites for photo distribution, have had no way of doing so for mobile apart from simple blog support.

As a solution to this, we developed zinadoo to be used by individuals, social clubs, high growth SMEs, anyone in fact, to build innovative mobile websites and community services. It allows businesses and communities to communicate using the most effective means available today - the mobile phone."

"So far uptake for this service has been high and the reaction to it from our end users has been very positive. They have found it invaluable for sending out notifications regarding, for example; golf competitions, concerts and match fixtures," Ms. Haughney continued.

Barry Downes, Centre Director, 3CS added: "Using Zinadoo is as easy as listing an item on eBay and as a result it will tap into the latent demand of end-users to use the mobile channel to publish, share information and engage in social networks. It grants users, previously denied by technical and organisational hurdles, access to an easy-to-operate solution, value added services, international communities and limitless business opportunities."

The zinadoo product is being trialled under the EU funded eTen market validation project. Built by the project coordinator – Waterford Institute of Technology, other partners include: AePONA (UK), Aceno (Ireland), Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS (Germany), OTEPlus (Greece) and Telefonica I&D (Spain).

The Centre for Converged Services (www.3CS.info) main area of research is convergent software services for next generation networks such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). 3CS is associated with the Telecommunication Software and Systems Group (TSSG) at WIT and also Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, in Berlin. 3CS has expertise in the areas of IMS services, Internet Information Management and Syndication (RSS/ATOM) systems, architectures and services, mobile multimedia and Web 2.0 services and frameworks. 3CS currently has 12 active research projects, the funding for which has been won through competitive tenders for national and international research funding.

According to Barry Downes "Nubiq is the first of a number campus companies that 3CS is developing based on its research agenda and its collaborative relationships with industry and the research community. I look forward to Nubiq’s success and future technology transfers based on 3CS’s research that will benefit the Irish economy".

For further information please contact:

Hélène Haughney

Tel: 051 302974

www.nubiq.com