Starting to end digital divides
5 October 2005

Ways that you can upgrade and win

During the recent rise in petrol prices in the US, the owners of filling stations in some states faced technological breakdown. Costs were rising above $3 a gallon, but older pumps that displayed charges on a rotating dial were not wired to handle the higher prices. When the pumps were built more than 20 years ago, no one was expecting a gallon of fuel would cost more than $2.99 within the technology’s lifetime.

To fix the problem, filling stations with the older pumps began using a concept called half-gallon pricing. If, for example, the actual price of a gallon was US $3.40, the pump would be set to half – US $1.70 a gallon. It worked, but it was hardly an elegant solution. Unable to cope with changing market conditions, the inflexibility and inadequacies of ageing technology systems can easily cause businesses to stall.

In today’s increasingly competitive and fast moving business environment, many companies understand the crucial role that IT plays in helping them get offerings quickly to market. more...

Cable channel puts viewers in the picture
21 September 2005

When the management team behind Current TV was dreaming up a name for their cable television channel, “Open Source TV” was a strong contender. The channel, launched on August 1, seeks content submissions from its target audience of 18- to 34-year-olds, thus drawing on the basic principles behind open source technologies: customised content and consumer participation.

“We see Current TV as a unique application of open source principles to the creation of television content,” says Joel Hyatt, Current’s chief executive.

Current reaches 20m households in the US via cable companies DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. About one-quarter of content is viewer-created, with the rest generated in-house or solicited from industry professionals. more...

Don’t panic if there is no power supply: It’s in the bag
27 July 2005

From MP3 players and mobile phones to laptops and PDAs, mobile devices promise any time, anywhere connectivity.

But what happens when the power runs out? Remembering to bring along the necessary converters and plugs to keep gadgets running throughout a trip can cause headaches, short circuits and tangles of wires.

Unlike local power supplies, which vary greatly from place to place, there is one source of energy that remains plentiful, reliable and – for at least several hours of every day – constant: the sun. more...

The Next Bus in in 17 Seconds
13 July 2005

Anyone who has ever stood in the rain waiting for a bus will be familiar with the Basic Law of Public Transport: that the number of 15 minute increments a passenger waits at a stop will be roughly equivalent to the number of buses that arrive at that stop simultaneously.

Facing such odds makes sitting in traffic in the comfort of one’s own car rather appealing but, thanks to the spread of real time automated travel scheduling systems, passengers can tell exactly how long they will have to wait until the next bus arrives. more...

Remote tribe in the Wi-Fi loop
29 June 2005

An e-commerce initiative builds closer links between 75m supporters with their favourite teams, reports Chloë Veltman.

Of the 29 federally-recognised Native American reservations in Washington State, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe is one of the most remote. Located in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains two hours north-east of Seattle, the tiny reservation consists of around 75 residents living in 20 homes arranged in a loop, an ideal formation for powwows. Until recently, the only methods of telecommunications were telephone and handheld radio. But now, a high-speed wireless internet service is enabling residents to communicate more easily with the outside world. more...

Starting to end digital divides
3 May 2005

In recent years the education sector has become an increasingly attractive market for the technology industry.

As local and national governments struggle to improve standards under ever tightening budgets, partnerships between education bodies and technology corporations are becoming a key component of policies all over the world.

In the US, for example, where Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies show America to be slipping down the league tables in terms of educational achievement, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is being touted as a productivity improvement tool. more...

Education-to-go is more than an academic matter
23 February 2005

Mobile learning, which has been getting increasingly popular in academic circles, is beginning to find practical applications in the business world.

In the biotech industry, for instance, Genentech’s salesforce has access to critical information on PDAs to keep up with the increasing pace and volume of new product data and industry developments.

And in consumer products, Unilever has deployed a couple of m-learning initiatives over the last two years, including a PDA-based financial modelling tool enabling managers to make business decisions remotely, and the delivery of the company’s code of business principles via video-enabled handheld devices. more...

Enhancing interaction with fans
4 August 2004

An e-commerce initiative builds closer links between 75m supporters with their favourite teams, reports Chloë Veltman.

On the face of it, the National Football League (NFL) makes customer relations looks as natural as kicking a ball. America’s most popular spectator sport, American football, boasts more than 75m fans in the US and inspires great customer loyalty. According to statistics by Nielsen/NetRatings, the internet analysis company, during the football season last year NFL Enterprises was the number one US entertainment advertiser, scoring much higher than competitors such as like The Walt Disney Corporation and Major League Baseball Properties.

The NFL website, NFL.com, receives 14m unique visitors per month, a figure only bettered by online sports monolith ESPN.com. Nielsen/NetRatings data also shows ESPN.com to be the top website for American football content, receiving more than 15m unique hits per month.

Attracting millions of fans is one thing, but knowing who they are is another. Despite the popularity of the sport, the NFL, until recently, had little idea about who its fans were and how to use that knowledge to increase brand awareness and develop “sticky” relationships with its patrons. more...

Obituary
Paul Francis Wehrle
26 June 2004

Paediatrician and researcher who gained an international reputation for diagnosing and developing treatments for polio and smallpox

Before Paul Francis Wehrle joined the University of Southern California (USC) department of paediatrics as its chairman in 1961, academic research was a relatively low priority for a staff focused on delivering an average of 40-50 babies per day. Operating on a longstanding apprentice system of doctors, fitting volunteer teaching rounds in between attending to their patients, the department of paediatrics boasted a strong team of clinicians but little impetus for research.

But during his tenure as chairman of USC's department of paediatrics from 1961 to 1988, Wehrle, a paediatrician and expert on infectious and communicable diseases, not only oversaw the running of the busy county hospital, but transformed it into a well respected centre for medical research. more...

TruSecure: Honeypots catch cybercrime in sunshine state
17 March 2004

Late last summer, a small Florida electricity company was about to trigger a denial of service attack of global proportions. A hacker had programmed a virus to bombard eight servers around the world with malicious code, and unbeknownst to the electricity company, one of these servers was sitting in its back room.

Thanks to the co-ordinated efforts of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and TruSecure, a Vermont-based risk management company, the hacker's plans were foiled. TruSecure captured the virus early using its global network of 14 "honeypots" - computers left intentionally vulnerable and monitored for security problems - and traced one of the eight servers to Florida. Receiving an alert from TruSecure, FDLE was able to track down the electricity company and warn them of the impending security breach. more...

Veepers: Messages from animated animals
26 November 2003

If media technology company Pulse 3D gets its way, people will soon be receiving mobile phone calls from their pets and watching David Beckham deliver the daily sports round-up while sitting on the bus.

Early next year, the San Francisco-based company is due to unleash its Mobile Veepers technology in the UK. It is a new kind of wireless application that features talking, moving virtual humans and other characters. more...

Take a walk down memory chip lane
20 October 2003

Old computers have won some new fans, write Chloe Veltman in California

Fifty million personal computers are thrown in landfill sites each year as the high-tech industry persuades businesses and consumers to dump their old systems for the latest technologies.
However, for a growing number of hardcore computer enthusiasts, owning the latest Apple PowerBook or version of Microsoft Office pales in comparison to the pleasure of taking home one of Sir Clive Sinclair's 48k Spectrums. more...

A Quandary for the Non-Profit Sector
15 October 2003

In this tough economic climate, for-profit enterprises are having a hard enough time keeping their software up-to-date. So what of the software situation in the consistently cash-strapped non-profit or charity sector?

Dependent on funding from private donors and foundations and a volunteer workforce, non-profit organisations (NPOs) are facing mounting pressure in a variety of ways, from the drying-up of funding sources to being unable to afford the latest software or obtain technical support on previous versions.more...

Google: Search engine is link to new staff
16 July 2003

Many Silicon Valley-based technology companies have instituted hiring freezes or are laying people off. But even in the midst of a recession, Google, the search engine, continues to expand.

The company employs about 800 staff and has been hiring steadily since its inception in 1998. Last week the Jobs section of the Google website was advertising around 100 positions, for everything from software engineers to real estate project managers. more...

Wireless ways on the wards
Handheld Devices
21 May 2003

Doctors at some European and US hospitals have been walking around the wards with unusually large bulges in their pockets. At the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in the UK, medical staff have tablet PCs tucked in their white coats and are using the wireless-enabled handhelds to access and update patient records.

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctors have abandoned their pagers for mobile phones, dealing with emergency calls on the spot, rather than running to the nearest wall-mounted phone. Meanwhile, nurses at Bradford Hospitals NHS (National Health Service) Trust in northern England are using Pocket PCs to make and track orders while on the move.

A growing number of medical centres are building wireless local area networks (W-Lans) and using handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones, to access, record and share information instantly from anywhere within the network. more...

The internet maybe global, payments are not
21 May 2003

For companies that engage in global e-commerce, maintaining control over numerous websites is no small task. Handling different languages and cultures is one issue, but some experts say it is not the biggest challenge.

"Merchants have to deal with a lot of constraints. Translating web pages into local languages is comparatively easy," says Chuck Wade, an internet payments and e-commerce security consultant with Interisle Consulting Group, a Boston-based consultancy.

More problematic are the issues surrounding the management of payment systems across borders. "Every nationality has a variance in its payment systems, such as different legal requirements and accounting practices," says Mr Wade.

With country-specific rules relating to the classification of goods, differences in the end-price of products after local duties, taxes and administrative fees and the differing paperwork associated with shipping goods to different countries, global e-commerce is a complex organism. more...

From portals to vortals to profits
16 April 2003

In the heady, anything goes days of the dotcom boom, a number of start-up companies decided to give the web a voice.

Building a speech-based front-end for the internet and partnering with content distributors such as news services, restaurant guides and business information providers, companies such as HeyAnita, BeVocal and Tellme Networks, all based in California, enabled consumers to do everything from checking stock quotes to obtaining the latest weather report, from the comfort of their telephone receiver.

These voice portals, or "vortals" as they were known, soon ran into trouble. The voice recognition technology they employed sometimes failed to process callers' requests accurately, and their business models were also found wanting.more...

Project Shareware
16 April 2003

Reuse program OTX-West gets computers into Oakland schools and student homes.

"A car is a car. It doesn't matter if you have a Lexus or a Toyota," said Manuel Nieto, gesticulating eagerly in front of the crowd stuffed into a sweaty classroom at Oakland Technical High School one hot, bright Saturday morning in late March. "If you can drive a Toyota, you can drive a Lexus. After all, what's a Lexus? It's just a Toyota with leather seats and a few extras." The 30 assembled Oakland high school students and their parents looked faintly nonplussed. The last thing they'd expected from a three-hour workshop on basic computer skills was a speech about car upholstery. "Well, the same thing goes for computers," Nieto continued, rounding off his analogy. "If you can use Windows 98, you can use XP."

Everybody loves a new toy, and even in the current anemic economy, many computer users think nothing of trading in last year's operating system, flat plasma screen, and ergonomic keyboard for the latest model as fast as Apple can fling it off the production line. But despite the prevalence of this gizmo lust, there are some, like Nieto, who champion the notion that computers can have a life span longer than that of the luna moth. more...

Cheaper, Yes. More Convenient, Yes.
2 April 2003

E-learning for business return on investment

In these tough economic times, e-learning might seem like an obvious expense to drop from an over-stretched corporate budget. Yet many corporate e-learning customers are not only sustaining their e-learning spending levels, but are even increasing their technology-based education budgets.more...

Online Photo Services: Smile, You are on the Internet
5 February 2003

Digital camera manufacturers had a bonanza Christmas, with early sales figures suggesting they were a "hot product." That is good news, too, for internet-based service providers which offer somewhere for digital camera owners to file their snaps.

The penetration of digital cameras has been accelerating fast over the past two years. According to InfoTrends Research Group, a US digital imaging research specialist, worldwide digital camera sales are growing at a predicted annual rate of 24 per cent between 2000 to 2006 and 24m digital cameras were sold last year worldwide. One third of internet households own a digital camera, up from 25 per cent in 2000.
If revenues follow InfoTrends' predictions, internet-based photo service providers such as Shutterfly, Ofoto, ImageStation and Snapfish will also be looking forward to more customers. more...

Drowning In A Sea Of Spam
15 January 2003

"Go from Rags to Riches." "Lose Weight and Look Great." "Having Trouble Satisfying Women?" These are just three of the 150 spam e-mail message headers received by this writer within five days.

Spam (or junk mail) - defined as "unsolicited, automated e-mail, often of a commercial nature" by Dictionary.com - is reaching epidemic proportions as missives touting everything from pornography to cut price car insurance are hitting individual and corporate inboxes with increasing voracity.more...

Dotcommers pull the cork out
28 December 2002

A few Saturdays ago in Silicon Valley, a group of smartly dressed locals sat in a seminar room listening carefully to Vivek Thoppay, a financial adviser from Merrill Lynch, reel off facts about asset allocation and diversified portfolios against a backdrop of PowerPoint slides.

So far, so obvious, at least for most of the audience of business and technology professionals gathered together by WineGlobe.com, a San Mateo-based retailer.

Even the investment-savvy experts reached for their notebooks, though, when a slide flashed up showing that the 1987-1997 growth of the FTSE 100 (199.14 per cent), the S&P 500 (191.25 per cent) and the Nikkei 225 (minus 0.46 per cent) fell far short of the full-bodied 571 per cent appreciation achieved by 10 of the top 1982 vintage Bordeaux wines during the same 10-year period. more...

Call centre technology: Voice recognition could be sound investment
18 September 2002

The Grand National has always been one of the busiest days of the year for Britain's bookmakers, but this year, relief was at hand. For the first time in the history of the big race, two bookies, Tote and Littlewoods, used a voice recognition system allowing customers to place bets over the phone without needing to speak to a live agent. more...

An industry goes back to its roots and branches
4 September 2002

As legend has it, the employees of Virtual Bank, headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida, turned up at the office one day to find a line of customers waiting outside the front door. The crowds were hoping to make deposits, transfer funds, withdraw cash and perform any number of other activities associated with everyday banking.

But it did not take long for the lingering consumers to realise they were out of luck: disappointed to learn that they would not be able to perform transactions at the corporate headquarters - and only physical location - of the "pure-play" internet-based bank, the nonplussed customers were forced to head back to their desktop computers. more...

Customers lured by cheaper calls
17 July 2002

Traditionally, gaining access to any communications network requires paying a monthly subscription to a service provider. But this does not suit everyone. For those who travel a lot, make international phone calls, do not use credit cards or surf the web only occasionally, paying more than $20 a month for internet access or $2 for a 30-second international phone call is a problem.

Leading ISPs and telcos might still dominate the communications market, but pre-paid internet and internet-based phone (VoIP) services are becoming a popular alternative. more...

Profile: E Ink
19 June 2002

Seeking a new type of reading experience

E-book reading devices have not been greeted with great enthusiasm since their appearance in stores several years ago. Even though the latest wave of e-book hardware products provides a much better reading experience than former incarnations, which were expensive, bulky and power-hungry, most e-book hardware products on the market have not inspired readers to build bonfires with their hard- and paper-backed books. more...

Moreover Technologies
3 July 2002

Gathering news from over 3,000 web-based sources

Machines are efficient things, but when it comes to achieving high levels of accuracy, human intervention is often required.

At Moreover Technologies, a San Francisco, London and New York-based information management solutions provider, technology and manpower are both used to deliver the latest news and information to Global 2000 clients with the degree of speed and accuracy on which the company's reputation has grown. more...

Fresh attempts to lure online grocery buyers
5 June 2002

Consumers in the San Francisco Bay Area may be among the most tech-savvy shoppers around, yet online grocery shopping has a history of misadventure in the region.

The widely publicised demise of pure-play online vendors Webvan.com and Kozmo.com as well as the retreat of companies such as Peapod from the area, more or less put to rest the notion of trying to get people to buy Lysol and lettuce online. more...

When selecting a web host, it pays to do your homework
15 April 2002

When San Francisco-based graphic designer Alexander Allan was looking for a web host for his website last December, he didn't just pick the company with the biggest banner ad on his computer screen. more...

Profile: pair Networks - managing growth is a big challenge
15 April 2002

Question: What do you do when you can't find a suitable web host to support your website? Answer: You set one up yourself. At least that's what pinball wizard Kevin Martin did when he couldn't find a web hosting company that provided the right kind of service for his pinball portal. more...

Global Trading Web Association: Global e-trading "alive and kicking"
13 March 2002

It's been a long time since the words "B2B e-commerce" caused a stir in business and technology circles. But if the latest statistics released by the Global Trading Web Association (GTWA) are an indication, B2B e-commerce is alive and well. more...

LaboRATory dealings
14 February 2002

Researchers can now order rats over the web

Medical scientists struggling to track down rare kinds of rat for their research will soon be able to shop for a wide range of them as easily as if they were buying a book over the Internet. more...

Organising the net to network
4 February 2002

The closure of hundreds of dotcom start-ups over the past 18 months has led to a widespread loss of faith in the validity of the web as a profitable medium.

But in its early days, the idea of making money from the internet was not taken very seriously. Primarily a network for academics and military personnel, it was about communication and education, rather than selling dog food or travel insurance online. more...

Hope lives on in Silicon Valley
24 January 2002

In the glory days of the digital economy, a popular in-joke made the rounds of Silicon Valley's hi-tech community. "You know you live in Silicon Valley when you make $100,000 a year yet still can't find a place to live," it began. "You know you live in Silicon Valley when your commute time is 45 minutes and you live only eight miles away from work," and so on. The jokes don't circulate anymore. more...

Content A Tough Sell In Europe
23 January 2002

When it comes to paying for content online, Europeans are proving to be tough customers. Aside from the lucrative world of online porn, Euro consumers simply won't give up the notion of the Web as the biggest free lunch of all time.

According to a new study of Internet payment habits, 47 percent of European Web users would not even consider paying for Internet content. Which probably explains why almost all European Web content is free. Businesses have yet to find an acceptable way of charging for it. more...

Supply Chain Collaboration Case Study: Sun Microsystems
5 December 2001

Technology companies do not come much more sprawling than Sun Microsystems. With offices in 170 countries, 43,700 employees, and $9bn of materials sourced from third-party suppliers each year, the California-based network computing behemoth would soon lose its status as the number one maker of Unix-based servers if its supply chain systems were not as slick as chief executive Scott McNealy's sales pitch. more...

Old IT still has its charms
5 November 2001

When it comes to glamour in the data storage sector, tape finds it hard to compete. But a spate of new products and intensifying competition are helping the sector to shake off its dull image. more...

Quest to mine the far corners of the web
5 November 2001

Search engines have come a long way since they first trawled the web's relatively compact dimensions back in the mid-1990s. From digging up pages of largely irrelevant information in only one language (English) and format (HTML), the search engines of today are not only far more likely to yield accurate results, but will mine images and multi-lingual message boards, audio files and databases in the process of yielding them. more...

Interview: Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital
3 October 2001

SURVEY - FT-IT: Confidence amid the risks: INTERVIEW: MICHAEL MORITZ: US-based Sequoia Capital takes pride in its hands-on approach to nurturing start-ups.

Welsh-born Michael Moritz pre-empted his career as one of the technology industry's most successful venture capitalists when, as a young reporter at Time Magazine, he made the unprecedented suggestion that the magazine's annual Man of The Year Award for 1982 should go neither to man nor woman, but to the computer. more...

Nanotech future for soldiers
21 September 2001

The soldier of the future will prowl around a tropical danger-zone as noiselessly as a butterfly landing on a leaf, if the expectations of researchers at the US Army Soldier System Center are realised. more...

Right royal Google
19 April 2001

Larry Page, a 28-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan, is half of the brains behind Google, the internet search engine which is the Manchester United of its sector. more...

How dotcom fever taught Stanford a lesson
5 April 2001

Picture the scene. The sun is shining and a bunch of students are loafing around in bikinis or shorts, throwing Frisbees and drinking cans of beer. more...

PDA-mad America gets itself into some odd positions
29 January 2001

Sex is the most popular search term on the World Wide Web, so it is no surprise that Palmasutra, a compressed, illustrated version of the Kamasutra (featuring 25 sexual positions), has become one of the most prized downloads to the Palm PDA in America since its release in September. more...

You have to market to them in their own language
1 March 2001

In a brightly-lit seminar room at San Jose's pristine Entrepreneur Centre, 10 Californian artists are learning how to sell their work on the worldwide web. more...

Plastic flexes its muscles as dream of free content fades
15 March 2001

As valuable content becomes more widely available on the internet, the question of how to charge for it has become a pressing issue, as other sources of funding are disappearing fast. more...

Beating cyber crime
1 March 2001

February 1998 was a particularly stressful month for Michael Vatis. The Harvard Law School graduate and legal golden boy, whose curriculum vitae boasts such weighty job titles as Associate Deputy Attorney General and Deputy Director of the Executive Office for National Security, had nearly reached his mid-30s when he was confronted with what looked like one of the world's first instances of information warfare. more...

E-tailers cry out, 'long live the high street'
8 February 2001

Last year, dotcom companies loved to boast that they were "pure plays" which meant that they only operated on the net. Businesses could be run so much cheaper online, they would crow. more...

From laid back to laid off
1 January 2001

THE chatroom of a web site that monitors the death throes of dying dotcom companies has been frantically busy recently. "I think I'm being laid off tomorrow. Rumours are flying. I have a meeting in the morning for which I have not been given an agenda. What do I do to prepare?" reads one recent addition to the site's 26,000 message board postings. "Don't bathe, look sloppy and carry a gun," one person suggests. "Make an appointment with a lawyer before you sign anything," says another more helpfully. "Oh for God's sake, this is the chance of a lifetime," chimes a third. "Eat lots of beans and cabbage tonight, wash it down with beer, and when they start the lay-off talk, commence the gas!". more...

Teenage winners and losers in the class war
14 December 2000

IT is business as usual at Gunderson High School in San Jose, just outside San Franciso. As the students in Felicia Webb's Wednesday morning technology class stroll into the classroom, untangling their Walkmans from their backpacks, she has already launched into a warm-up quiz. What is horizontal cabling? What is IEEE 802.3 + 802.5? What are the two most used TIA/EIA specifications? She immediately starts writing on the blackboard, swiftly taking answers from the class. more...