One day after Azzuri launched its Azzurri Communications today launches Instant Retailer, an innovative new service that uses the 3G mobile network to deliver on-demand voice, data, fax and Internet connectivity wherever and whenever it is required, Martin McColl Ltd, claimed as the country’s largest chain of convenience and newsagent stores, has entered into a 5-year fully managed service agreement with East Kilbride based Azzurri and will adopt Azzurri’s Retail Application Network (RAN) across its 1300 stores including 160 stores throughout Scotland.
Raytheon Company demonstrated the potential to employ a UK adaptation of the US-deployed Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) to provide a more accurate, timely understanding of an adversary and their actions. The demonstration took place during the 2008 Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration in Portsmouth, U.K. The Raytheon team used key technologies, including DCGS and the DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB), to integrate existing applications, data bases and shared services from diverse intelligence suppliers and users providing UK forces with network-enabled solutions.
A construction surge in transoceanic cable is under way. The new cables will connect the world more closely than ever, add far more bandwidth, and provide enough redundancy for data signals to survive accidents and outages. At present, the transoceanic information system has enough capacity, but that could soon change, and the system has some physical vulnerabilities. In January, an anchor tore two cables linking Europe and Egypt, causing massive outages.
Virtual Learning Angus from Angus College in collaboration with Robert Gordon University involves using the very latest online technology to help deliver virtual tuition in management, computing, administration, care and engineering. It is being funded by one of the biggest awards yet from the European Social Fund which will provide £214,000 to support £725,000 worth of new educational programmes split in two projects.
Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organisation The Information Card Foundation, that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users and create a single industrywide approach to managing identity online that promises to reduce drastically use passwords and create a system that is less vulnerable to fraud.
BT E-Health Insider Awards is a competition dedicated to highlighting and rewarding the hard work and bright ideas of information and communications technology professionals in UK healthcare. The sponsors include Cisco, NHS, EMS, EMIS Fujitsu, McKesson, Microsoft, Quicksilva and IMS Health. There is no entry fee. but submissions for the BT e-Health Insider Awards 2008 must be received no later than 4 July 2008.
Although initially ongoing problems and blame were blamed on customers’ routers or computers at the Shetland villages of Vidlin and Uyeasound, BT has now held its had up to the fact that business and home internet users experiencing difficulties with their broadband connection were due to a fault within the BT network. As a result residents were left without broadband for almost 30 hours on Wednesday and Thursday , reaching a maximum speed of 0.5Mbps (512Kbps) but unfortunately it took almost 24 hours for the service provider to admit it was a their problem their.
Busy time for Finland's VTT Technical Research Centre as it signs with Philips Applied Technologies to establish an Innohub in the most central city of Finland, Espoo. Both partners have an equal role in the cooperation, and Well Life Center Living Lab provides the premises for InnoHub operations. Almost simultaneously, VTT announces GEMOM (Genetic Message Oriented Secure Middleware) with its nine European research and industrial partners to develop a new self-healing resilient telecommunications messaging platform for secure messaging by 2010.
Teliris, provider of immersive telepresence solutions, offer the first-ever multi-touch surface computing based collaboration solution and interactive virtual flip chart and whiteboard for telepresence, designed specifically for immersive collaboration business use. The Teliris InterACT TouchTable and Teliris InterACT TouchWall allows for documents, video, audio, presentations and a wide range of other content to be instantaneously shared and manipulated across any number of locations, naturally and easily, as if participants are in the same room.
Dundee’s sewers will soon be used to deliver next generation ultra high speed connectivity and broadband to every home, business and organisation in the city. H2O Networks Ltd, the pioneer of Fibrecity, siad it will be putting fibre optic cable which is capable of speeds in excess of 100 Mbps into the city’s sewer pipes.
Northbay on Barra is to be provided with broadband access through an extension of the Connected Communities (ConCom) network, already providing 930 households with the service across the Outer Hebrides. At the request of Northbay residents, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) evaluated the merits of procuring an ADSL upgrade for the local telephone exchange, compared to installing an extension of the ConCom wireless network.
The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint, reports the New York Tiimes. Now companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up, Some of the biggest names, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and IBM, are banding together to fight information overload, forming a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicise it and devise ways to help workers cope with the digital flood.
Opera Software has released the latest version of its browser. Opera 9.5 (Peregrine) with a number of improvements, including increased speed, cross-device cooperation, support for open Web standards, and new features. Opera makes an interesting push with Mini for moblie phones. For Firefox, the beta version of 3 is emphatically concerned with browsing security. Explorer 8 is still round the mountain.
Last month Nordea and Bolero International agreed to allow Nordea to offer multi-bank trade finance automation to complement its existing service offerings. Nordea is already live on the Bolero multi-bank service with a large Finnish based global customer and is now extending this service to a number of others. Nothing overtly IT or high technology in that. Keep reading...
Big-cat investigators have come up with a plan which might capture the legendary Beast of Buchan – on camera. An investigative group, Big Cats in Britain (BCIB), wants to develop a Big Brother-style scheme to try to shoot footage of the elusive creatures on strategically placed cameras. A spokesman for the organisation said: “The webcam will mean that people will be able to go big cat spotting on their own home computer."
Consumers want relevance, convenience, security and incentives is the finding in the latest report from the Strategy Analytics Wireless Media Laboratory, "12 Rules for Consumer Acceptance of Mobile Advertising," which evaluates ten alternate models for mobile advertising with our panel of mobile consumers.
Verizon Wireless acquires Alltel. Not just any old acquisitions this, as some hidden financial and strategy (or lack of strategy) implications reveal. The coverage of the Verizon takeover of Alltel is well laid out by over 30 news publications and websites on Google. What is fascinating is the different interests on the communications story and its insight into the complex finance and interlinking of communications generally, which inevitably affects the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Upwards of 70,800 people live live in 42 broadband balck spot areas in rural Scotland. A Freedom of Information (FoI) response to the Press and Journal shows with 23 pieces of correspondence disclosed in the FoI that the officials behind the programme were told about about the problems of accessing a Rural Development Programme operated in main as a web-based scheme. One key part, is only accessible online. It was dubbed as 'a recognised strategy' to make it difficult for small operators to bid for funding being easier to administer a smaller number of large bids from farming businesses. Ironically of the critical 32 Rural Priorities, Priority 25 is Public Access Priorities and the SDRP is hailed as the first time a rural funding package has sought to deliver a Greener Scotland and to promote a Wealthier and Fairer rural Scotland
Jedburgh should be turned into the gateway to Scotland and the town could become Scotland's digital gateway, leading the way in internet access technology. Campaigners in the town have been calling for action from Holyrood and Scottish Borders Council (SBC) to combat what they see as severe economic, physical and social decline.
We've travelled a thousand miles by air, road, and rail - and by Billy Mackenzie's boat across the loch from Arnisdale, writes BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones on his blog. We have been entertained in homes, student rooms and offices, and hooked ourselves up to broadband everywhere from a Scottish hillside, to a speeding train.. So what have we learned from our broadband journey this week? First, that there really is a digital divide between town and country, with rural broadband users typically getting a slower connection.