2009Nov18: South Korea pledges to cut carbon emissions by 30% from “business as usual” by 2020 (Korea Times).
Reference: Korea Times http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/11/113_55654.html
Image Description: Incheon Bridge, South Korea. Photo by Seunghwanshin, 2008Oct4. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seohae1.jpg Image Permission: The copyright holder of this work, hereby releases it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.
Teams arrived at Switch and Data Tuesday to begin integration plans for the company’s planned $689 million acquisition by Equinix. Switch and Data plans to file its proxy statement with the SEC by the end of November to give out more information surrounding the transaction for an overall vote expected to take place in the first quarter of next year. In the meantime, both companies are keeping busy, issuing a series of news announcements this week.
On Monday, enterprise video solution provider Kontiki announced that Equinix had selected their Enterprise Content Delivery Networking (ECDN) solution to deliver video content to every employee’s desktop worldwide. Kontiki was deployed in a matter of weeks and will deliver high-quality video for training and employee communications.
Equinix Adopts Kontiki
“As video becomes more ubiquitous throughout our company, we knew that we’d need a complete video infrastructure in place that could grow with our needs,” said Equinix CIO Brian Lillie. “We adopted Kontiki’s video solution portfolio based on ROI, scalability and ease of use.”
On Tuesday Kontiki also debuted the VideoCenter enterprise employee video portal, being demonstrated this week at Streaming Media West 2009 conference in San Jose. The Kontiki VideoCenter delivers on the promise of “YouTube for the Enterprise” by overcoming the challenges of securing and controlling the communication tool in a way that is consistent with company policies and culture. The Kontiki VideoCenter will be generally available in February 2010.
Equinix (EQIX) announced that FXall will offer connectivity to its foreign exchange platform within the Equinix New York 4 data center inS ecaucus, NJ. FXall is a leading multibank foreign electronic platform. The service will be available to trading companies within the Equinix Financial eXchange, allowing them the benefit of directly exchanging data within the same physical location.
“Beyond benefitting our current financial community customers, FXall’s presence will hopefully attract new customers to our NY4 center and serve as a spring board for future FXall growth initiatives,” John Knuff, director, Business Development at Equinix.
Switch and Data announced Tuesday its Alliance Partners Practice. During a two year incubation the program supported leading channel partners with online tools, partner certifications and dedicated relationship managers designed to meet the unique needs of value added resellers, system integrators, and solution providers. The expansion of this program will enroll additional Authorized Agents looking for new ways to generate reliable revenue. The Alliance Partners Program is made up of a team of professionals with 50 plus years of combined channels sales experience.
The Powermats are pretty cool. They charge without eff’n wires. But they are all plastic and might not look right in some deco. So why not stuff the guts into something a little more pleasing like a block of wood. It seem to work fine and this Instructable will guide you through how to make one. I’m thinking that you’ll probably void your warranty though.
Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:
Alright, all you BlackBerry-modding freaks, grab your screwdrivers and listen up. Our pals over at Colorware have just informed us that you no longer have to send them your beloved BlackBerry Curve 8900 for inking. Oh no. Now they’ll send you the rainbow colored parts and let you do the dirty work. This service, which is already available for the Bold 9000, comes with a price tag of $175. It might seem like a lot, but hey, you can’t put a price tag on steez. Colorware’s website hasn’t been completely updated for the new service, but you can always hit them up now to see what shade of fuchsia looks best on your 89-hundo. Happy modding.
Neowin reports that Microsoft Office Vice President Kurt Delbene confirmed that the company will be unveiling its plans for Windows Mobile 7 at the MIX 2010 conference in March next year.
This date is consistent with recent leaks which set the announcement in Q1 and the release in Q3 2010.
The Office Mobile 2010 beta released today shows a screen shot we have seen before suggesting Windows Mobile 7 still sports the same UI we saw in leaks earlier this year, which, if this is the case, after the very interesting ZuneHD UI, would be somewhat disappointing.
Read more at Neowin here.
Thanks MobilePaddy for the tip.
Nokia has always been solid on its dedication to the Symbian platform, but a report from an N900 event yesterday cast some doubt on Symbian’s future in certain branches of Nokia’s product line, specifically the high-end N-series of smartphones.
I reached out to Nokia to find out exactly what is going on with Maemo and Symbian in the N-series, and received equal parts affirmation and denial.
Nokia’s response was nowhere near as strong as the “outright denial” given to the short-lived rumor of an Android-based Nokia device last July, and instead served to paint a picture that’s not so black and white.
Nokia North America’s Director of Communications Laurie Armstrong told Betanews today, “Any speculation on our 2012 roadmap — including operating systems and product branding — are completely speculation.”
But Armstrong went on to say that Maemo will have its own place.
“As we have stated earlier, Nokia has multiple platforms to serve different purposes and address different markets,” she continued. “Globally, Symbian is more successful than ever in bringing smartphones to the masses. Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you’d typically find inside a desktop computer. It delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address.”
As the first decade of the second millennium comes to a close, it is tempting to reminisce about where we were during the last few months of 1999. The excitement of entering a *new century and seeing a year end in 00 caused concern for IT departments the world over because many computer programs would not be able to recognize the year 2000 from 1900, the so called Y2K bug. The speculation of Y2K’s coming wrath ranged from paperwork headaches to Armageddon. You may recall reports of people forming militias and stockpiling canned food in shelters in advance of Y2K ’s threat. This actually happened! Well, the global community passed that test with only mild nuisances. Maybe the issue was overhyped, or maybe the $300 Billion spent to mitigate the threat was the best money ever invested. We’ll never know. Here is a good 1 pager on all things Y2K. http://en.allexperts.com/e/y/ye/year_2000_problem.htm
Healthcare’s Y2K is known as ICD-10. It won’t spook people to start many militia movements and, it won’t cost $300 Billion to fix. Rand projects a bill of $425 million to $1.15 billion, with $5-$40 million in lost productivity per year. Blue Cross found the conversion to run from $5.5-$13.5 billion, with $150-$380 million per year in lost productivity. Though the cost estimates vary greatly – this is a definite revenue opportunity for health insurance data companies large and small.
So what the heck is ICD-10 already?
I’m glad you asked. ICD-10 is an international protocol that calls for more detailed coding in healthcare treatment, i.e. labeling diseases, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, external causes of injury or diseases, as classified by the World Health Organization. With 155,000 different codes, ICD-10 is more than 10 X detailed than the current standard, ICD-9. The deadline for meeting the mandate is October 2013. The American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) lobbied to push it back –the HHS had originally called for a 2010 date. On the surface, it may seem like a stimulus project to create more jobs. Not true. Its purported goal is to make it easier to discover relationships between patient, diseases and treatments. In fact, the U.S. lags other countries in its adoption.
Humana’s (NYSE:HUM) CIO Bruce Goodman, in a Q&A with Wall Street Journal writer Ben Worthen, explains, “You have got to go through all the systems where those kinds of codes are carried and expand those fields and bring in those new code sets. A lot of it can be automated. But it means remediating millions of millions of lines of code across lots of systems—systems hospitals use, we use, doctors’ offices use.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574511171834716390.html
Another beneficiary of ICD-10 will be financial systems used by hospitals to manage revenue and information flows to payers, like Humana. Expect **Trintech (NASDAQ: TTPA), through its healthcare division, Concuity to benefit from this as they already process huge amounts of financial and patient data for large hospital systems like Cleveland Clinic and Providence Health Networks. Chicago based Concuity currently provides payer contract compliance solutions, financial modelling and patient financial responsibility solutions in all payer all care settings.
Lest you think the healthcare industry has plenty of time to focus on the 2013, consider that there are 17 pages of ICD-10 related jobs listed on today’s Monster.com (NYSE:MWW) Job Board. http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?brd=1&q=ICD-10&cy=us&lid=316&re=130. Greater exposure to IDC-10 hiring may be had with a small cap that specializes in technical staffing. Tampa’s Kforce (Nasdaq: KFRC) health information management segment provides coding, project management, transcription and data analysis staffing. You may want to follow its IDC-10 related placement going forward.
The biggest concern with handling this mass data migration is privacy. Fines for patient privacy breeches begin at $50,000 per violation and with this in mid, you may want to take a closer look at Dallas-based Zix Corporation (Nasdaq: ZIXI.) The Company’s Email Encryption Service enables healthcare organizations to protect sensitive personal health information sent via email. Zix Corp email encryption is used by the leading private insurers and one out of every 7 hospitals in the U.S. The company delivered a 17% YOY revenue increase in the third quarter, which was at the high end of its guidance.
If you do some basic Internet research of ICD-10, it won’t be long before you come across health IT firm QuadraMed (Nasdaq: QDHC) of Reston, VA is all over it. It intends to be the source of all things ICD-10, and the Company launched a suave marketing push called the ICD-10 Countdown Program last month. This package includes coding simulator software, educational tools and services to guide healthcare providers through the ICD-10 conversion. The American Health Information Management Association has signed to use its simulation software to train 4,000 future coders nationwide. Not a bad product entry point to say the least.
Are any of these companies acquisition targets? Time will tell, but Blackstone (NYSE:BX) controlled Intelenet, a Mumbai-based healthcare records processing firm just made a $30 M acquisition to gaine xposure to the U.S. market for ICD-10 conversion. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/ites/Intelenet-likely-to-buy-US-firm-in-30-million-deal/articleshow/5258781.cms
So, how do you plan to spend October 1, 2013? This is ICD-10 deadline day, after all. Don’t say you were not given a head’s up.
* Technically the new century began the first day of 2001, but that number does not pack the same cache. Blame Madison Avenue.
** Client of the publisher of this blog.
Telecom gear vendor ZTE will step up its game in the crowded smartphone space next year with an Android-based handset, and Google is rumored to be working on its own device. But as the smartphone market continues to heat up, manufacturers are learning the hard way that the key to success in mobile phones lies in the software — not the hardware.
Handset manufacturers are increasingly being elbowed out of the way as carriers embrace developers of operating systems and the apps that run on top of them. Motorola, for instance, is an afterthought in Verizon’s big-budget campaign in support of its Droid initiative, and HTC’s brand is nowhere to be found in T-Mobile’s recent commercial pushing the MyTouch 3G. Meanwhile, Nokia continues to fare poorly in the U.S. due largely to its unwillingness to capitulate to American carriers, and smaller manufacturers like Sony Ericsson are becoming irrelevant as they lose market share.
Two phone makers are bucking the trend, though, and they’re doing it by churning out handsets based on their own operating systems. Apple’s iPhone has become an iconic device thanks largely to its intuitive user interface and knockout browser, while Research In Motion continues to gain traction — and mind share — with its BlackBerry, an enterprise-focused handset with software that stresses functionality over fun. Both Apple and RIM are backing their hardware with ad campaigns that put the manufacturer — not the carrier — in front of consumers.
HTC is fighting back with its impressive “You” television commercials, which tout the phone’s Sense user interface and promotes the device’s personalization features. That’s a strategy that will pay dividends as manufacturers become marginalized in mobile, and as software increasingly becomes a key differentiator in the minds of consumers.
There’s some sort of video game developer conference going on in Motreal this week (titled, to use its full name, the Montreal International Game Summit), and an interesting charge was just levied there. The CEO of A2M (the company that developed Wet), Rémi Racine, said that some game publishers will go out of their way to deceive the ESRB in order to get a lower rating for their games. You know how Hollywood tries hard to make sure the summer blockbusters are rated no higher than PG-13 in order to ensure a large audience? Same thing with video games, apparently. Why release an M-rated game, and know that your limiting your potential audience, when you can eek out with a T rating?
Of course, this is the opinion of one man, and not to be taken as the gospel truth. But what he said makes sense, at least on the surface:
As a developer who has worked with a lot of different publishers, we’re aware of many that have tried to cheat the rating. They say to the ERSB that it’s a Teen rating rather than an Mature to try and sell more; you can do this just by sending them a video that doesn’t show the most violent stuff and then you’ll get the rating that you want rather than the rating you should get.
Again, we have no way of knowing if this guy is speaking truthfully, but it doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Of course, then you run into all sorts of issues that I can just picture some grand-standing politician exploiting i.e. the ESRB has failed us, so we need tighter regulations.
Guess what, Sprint Hero users? The update that you have all been so patiently waiting for has finally arrived. No, we’re not talking about anything as big Android 2.0, but a bug killing maintenance release. Available OTA and coming in at 3748377 bytes, firmware 1.56.651.2 fixes that pesky SMS issues which caused significant battery drain as well as enables the device to play friendly with DST. So far we’re not noticing any other changes (we wish there were an official change log we could take a peek at), but if you spot anything, be sure to let us know. We love hearing from you.
Thanks, Mark!
Earlier this year, we noted that Apple and AT&T had been sued for patent infringement concerning Shazam, the popular service for identifying music. At the time, we noted how this was a clear demonstration of the difference between just the idea and the actual innovation. Shazam has been around for ages, and despite having a good idea (ability to identify music just by hearing it), it struggled for many, many years until the iPhone came along, and there was a platform on which its concept made sense. During that time Shazam kept trying out new things and improving its service. The basic concept behind Shazam (identifying music) isn’t that interesting. It was all the work that Shazam kept doing over the years to find the right mix of things that consumers wanted that made it worthwhile.
But, of course, patent holders continue to insist that it’s the original idea only that’s important.
So, once again, Shazam’s service is involved in a patent lawsuit, this time from Digimarc, who has sued Shazam directly, claiming infringement. Now, Digimarc claims that Shazam is infringing on its patents, even though Digimarc does not offer a similar service at all. In fact, Digimarc is in an entirely different business: it’s really a DRM company who wants to try to stop people from sharing or appreciating content, by locking it down. More recently, Digimarc has been focused on patenting its watermarking concept (despite plenty of prior art), and going the lawsuit route.
So, we have the tales of two companies who have been around for quite some time. One is focused on providing unique and compelling solutions that make consumers’ lives better. And the other is focused on locking things down and talking about its intellectual property. Guess which one’s getting sued by the other? So, please, explain again how patents encourage innovation? Once more, it looks like patents are being used to prevent actual innovating by those who prefer to lock up ideas.
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2009Nov18: Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, pledges to reduce his country’s carbon emissions by 25% by 2020 (COP15 Copenhagen).
Reference: COP15 Copenhagen http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2633
Image Description: Apartment building on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaja, Moscow. This image is copyrighted by Dmitry Azovtsev. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kotelincheskaya_Naberezhnaja_Moscow.hires.jpg Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
Technology market research company Gartner Inc. has released a report which predicts what the top ten mobile applications will be in 2012 based on current activity in the smartphone field, including such factors as consumer and industry interest, potential revenue, and existing business models.
Based upon this information, Gartner predicts the number one “killer app” that everyone will have on their mobile device will be one that is currently uncommon in the United States, but available elsewhere in the world: Money Transfer.
More important than mobile communication or entertainment applications, Gartner predicts that SMS-based money transfer is the next big thing for smartphones. It already exists in a number of other markets, but Gartner says the regulatory kinks need to be worked out before it can truly flourish.
“Because of the fast growth of mobile money transfer, regulators in many markets are piling in to investigate the impact on consumer costs, security, fraud and money laundering,” Gartner’s announcement today said. “On the operational side, market conditions vary, as do the local resources of service providers, so providers need different market strategies when entering a new territory.”
The rest of Gartner’s list, in descending order, included: Location-based services, mobile search, mobile browsing, mobile health monitoring, mobile payment, near field communication services, mobile advertising, mobile instant messaging, and mobile music.
Items six and seven on Gartner’s list (mobile payment and near-field communication services) are issues related to one another and to the transfer of money. These two application classes have been closely linked since NTT DoCoMo debuted near-field “Wallet Phones” in 2004, which turn a user’s phone into a sort of Speedpass dongle which can be “charged” with money or credits, and passed in front of a reader for instant transactions.
Gartner says the main difficulty in propagating any of these money-related technologies comes in uniting the mobile carriers with the banks.
“The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores and cross-industry services are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers,” Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner said. “Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power.”
Office Mobile 2010 was fairly recently released as a beta on the Marketplace for Mobile. I’ve used it a bit, and as far as I can tell, it’s much the same. There are a few welcome changes, but the major new thing is SharePoint. Unfortunately, my school as SharePoint locked down so it’s not much use to me at the moment.
Word is probably the least changed of the lot, with very minor things like gesture support (flick scrolling etc present) and slightly better rendering of fonts and different font styles. The file above renders as just plain text without any change of colour for the “Smart Mate” title (it’s using the standard Office 2010 Desktop setup) under Office 2007 Mobile, and I’ve deliberately turned off the text reflowing that is set on by default.
The main difference between 2010 and 2007 for Excel is the enlarged area at the top of the screen for entering a cell, and editing the data in that cell. It’s certainly a welcome change, but it’s hardly radical.
The warning dialogues on closing have also been updated, which makes it more finger friendly, though this could well be the OS build (23506) rather than anything else.
PowerPoint has perhaps the most changes of the three, with much more fluid animations, faster load times, and gesture support for changing slide.
When you load PowerPoint, you’re greeted with a full file browser to find the presentation you want, rather than the crude and limited open file dialogue you get with Word and Excel. If you load a presentation in portrait, you also get told it’ll display better in landscape, and you get offered landscape mode instantly. After that, it simply shows the presentation you chose with no fuss.
Once the slideshow has loaded (which seemed much snappier) you can either swipe left->right to advance slides or animations (or right->left to go back) or tap on the slide to show the menu bars. This is a welcome change from the fiddly little arrows we used to have, and far more intuitive.
One of the softkeys is an option to zoom in on a slide, which gives you an interface similar to that of Pictures and Videos with a box you can drag round the screen.
If sliding around the screen isn’t your thing, there’s always the ability to browse the slides in a list, and I guess this was in 2007, though I barely used it…
PowerPoint also supports a “presentation clicker” which I shall investigate further.
SharePoint is the only really “new” thing, but since I can’t access my schools SharePoint server, there’s not much I can do, until I pester the IT department.
In conclusion, if SharePoint matters to you a lot, by all means upgrade, but for most, I can’t really see the advantage unless you particularly like the new icons, or have a device that can make use of TVOut for the PowerPoint features.
The download is available from the US Marketplace, or use Microsoft tag (gettag.mobi).
Customers at Sony Style stores nationwide can now shop wireless voice and data services from AT&T, plus authorized Sony Ericsson mobile phones. Combining the complete Sony Style experience with mobile phone service for the first time, shoppers will now be able to choose and activate wireless voice and data services from AT&T when purchasing a Sony Ericsson C905a or W518a mobile phone at any of the 44 Sony Style stores nationwide.
The initial selection includes the Sony Ericsson C905a offering an 8.1 MP camera with advanced camera features and aGPS with geo-tagging capabilities, and the Sony Ericsson W518a with fun music features and an integrated Facebook application. Just in time for the holidays, when shoppers purchase one of the offered Sony Ericsson mobile phones with an eligible two-year AT&T wireless service agreement, they will also receive three free accessories, compliments of Sony Style.
Customers can take advantage of this agreement at any Sony Style store across the nation beginning Nov. 19, 2009; activation is not currently available online. To find the closest Sony Style store, please visit www.sonystyle.com.
A National Research Council committee is conducting a study on how well greenhouse gas emissions can be measured for treaty monitoring and verification. The committee’s analysis suggests that NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which failed on launch in February 2009, would have provided proof of concept for spaceborne technologies to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, as well as baseline emissions data. This letter focuses on the capabilities of an OCO and currently deployed satellites that measure atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and their potential role in monitoring and verifying a greenhouse gas treaty.
This volume reports on discussions among multiple stakeholders about ways they might help transform health care in the United States. The U.S. healthcare system consists of a complex network of decentralized and loosely associated organizations, services, relationships, and participants. Each of the healthcare system’s component sectors–patients, healthcare professionals, healthcare delivery organizations, healthcare product developers, clinical investigators and evaluators, regulators, insurers, employers and employees, and individuals involved in information technology–conducts activities that support a common goal: to improve patient health and wellbeing. Implicit in this goal is the commitment of each stakeholder group to contribute to the evidence base for health care, that is, to assist with the development and application of information about the efficacy, safety, effectiveness, value, and appropriateness of the health care delivered.
The government’s first Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programs were created in 1991 to eliminate the former Soviet Union’s nuclear, chemical, and other weapons and prevent their proliferation. The programs have accomplished a great deal: deactivating thousands of nuclear warheads, neutralizing chemical weapons, converting weapons facilities for peaceful use, and redirecting the work of former weapons scientists and engineers, among other efforts. Originally designed to deal with immediate post-Cold War challenges, the programs must be expanded to other regions and fundamentally redesigned as an active tool of foreign policy that can address contemporary threats from groups that are that are agile, networked, and adaptable. As requested by Congress, Global Security Engagement proposes how this goal can best be achieved.
To meet the magnitude of new security challenges, particularly at the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, Global Security Engagement recommends a new, more flexible, and responsive model that will draw on a broader range of partners than current programs have. The White House, working across the Executive Branch and with Congress, must lead this effort.
Energy touches our lives in countless ways and its costs are felt when we fill up at the gas pump, pay our home heating bills, and keep businesses both large and small running. There are long-term costs as well: to the environment, as natural resources are depleted and pollution contributes to global climate change, and to national security and independence, as many of the world’s current energy sources are increasingly concentrated in geopolitically unstable regions. The country’s challenge is to develop an energy portfolio that addresses these concerns while still providing sufficient, affordable energy reserves for the nation.
The United States has enormous resources to put behind solutions to this energy challenge; the dilemma is to identify which solutions are the right ones. Before deciding which energy technologies to develop, and on what timeline, we need to understand them better.
America’s Energy Future analyzes the potential of a wide range of technologies for generation, distribution, and conservation of energy. This book considers technologies to increase energy efficiency, coal-fired power generation, nuclear power, renewable energy, oil and natural gas, and alternative transportation fuels. It assesses the associated impacts and projected costs of implementing each technology and categorizes them into three time frames for implementation.
