Industry News

Gordon Brown unveiled his plans for Britain’s digital future yesterday with the goal to make Britain the leader in the digital economy by 2020. Brown split his plan into three phases:

First to digitalise – to make Britain the leading superfast broadband digital power creating 100 per cent access to every home;

Second to personalise – seizing the opportunities for voice and choice in our public services by opening up data and using the power of digital technology to transform the way citizens interact with government;

Third to economise – in the Pre-Budget Report we set out our determination to find £11 billion of savings by driving up operational efficiency, much of it enabled by the increased transparency and reduced costs made available by new technology.

Brown talked about superfast broadband for every household;  250,000 new jobs in the digital and creative industry , a transparent government giving the people of Britain input into politics, the launch of ‘mygov’ – an open source website using linked data (semantic web) so citizens can pay taxes and book hospital appointments all from one place, and Sir Tim Berners Lee heading up a new Institute of Web Science. more…

The old dinosaur of IE6 has taken another step closer to its final demise.

On Friday Google announced that from 1st of March 2010 it will no longer support IE6 and from that date, users of older browsers (IE6 included) may find that key functionality in Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer work properly. Other parts of Google will also stop working as changes are made without the excessive amount of effort required to make web 2.0 sites work in a web 0.5 browser.

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On Wednesday Apple introduced the iPad – a 9.7 inch multi-touch device that bridges the gap between computers and smart phones.  They have priced it very aggressively  with the basic 16gb Wi-Fi model starting at $499 and the 64GB 3G model topping out at $829.

As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in all our lives we need to be able to interact with it more efficiently.  Computers are okay when you’re at your desk, but there’s so many times when you need to access the web where turning on your computer is too time consuming and your smart phone interface is too fiddly to use (yes even on the iPhone).

What is the semantic web?

The web we know today is designed for humans. We can efficiently navigate between 1000s of databases and accomplish tasks that would have been really time consuming only a few years ago, but these databases are not designed for machines so we often find ourselves have to struggle to interact with many systems to achieve what are, in principle, simple tasks.

Let’s look at an example. more…

After the reports last week that Chinese hackers exploited the vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer; we have been reminded again of the importance of developing according to web standards rather than to support a single, specific web browser.

The hackers were able to exploit security vulnerabilities in the 10-year-old browser and operating system  combination of IE6 on Windows XP.

This was a zero-day exploit, which means it was a new-found vulnerability that the vendor (in this case Microsoft) and antivirus / security companies were unaware of. Meaning there was no security fix for this issue.

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The recent comments made by Tory MP Greg Hands surrounding the new NHS 60th anniversary logo, which cost £12,000 to create, has resulted in uproar in the design industry and has raised issues within the public sector (PS).

The original comments by Hands, were originally published by the Times on the 26th December 2009 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6968036.ece)

I understand the design industries reaction to the comments made by Hands, his comment of; more…

Finally the music industry can sit back and stop moaning about file sharing. The days of downloading music are coming to an end. Not because of Lord Mandelson’s digital economy bill but thanks to excellent streaming services. Last.fm and Spotify are now first choice options for listeners and music lovers. Mandelson has already received a lot of negative comments from many digital experts. Most significantly from BT and Talk Talk, two of the biggest ISPs who are supposed to be on board. He really has turned up to the party a little late, how many people will still be downloading music files in 2011?

Who wants to download anymore? Ask yourself the question, when did you last download a music file? For me it was at the start of the year. Then I purchased my new machine which meant I was faced with managing the thousands of MP3s scattered across two computers, three external hard drives and a handful of memory sticks as well as the box of smashed up CDs. more…

Who was expecting the 12th May to cause such a stir in the world of search? Well it was the second Searchology event hosted by Google and if the first event (when Google announced universal search) was anything to go by, we should have been prepared for some serious progress announcements from the search giant.

Timing could not have been more appropriate as Twitter is surrounded with speculation of challenging Google’s search share with its own search functionality.
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Well Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 last Thursday, 19th March 2009. To some this may be the end of the browser wars as IE8 does indeed come with vastly increased standards support. Microsoft, to its credit, took notice of developers who spoke up about the way the browser would by default serve up pages in its IE7 mode. To get it to render in the IE8 standards mode, the developer would have to ‘opt-in’. Thankfully Microsoft did change this, so the default behaviour is IE8 standards mode. more…

It’s estimated that the internet has around 1.5 billion users. It’s an impressive sounding statistic. Until you learn that, in December, the number of connections to mobile devices worldwide reached four billion, a figure that represents 60% of the world’s population.

Similar figures are borne out in the UK. An Ofcom report in November found that there are 26 broadband connections for every 100 people, compared to 121 mobile phones per 100 people. These are significant numbers for anyone who runs a website or blog. As mobile devices become more sophisticated and offer far better web browsing experiences, it becomes increasingly likely that users will be accessing web sites and applications from behind a mobile, not just a desktop or laptop computer.

Apple took the concept of mobile web browsing mainstream when it launched the touch-screen iPhone in the US in June 2007 (a belated UK release followed in November 2007). In the same way that it’s hard to conceive of pre-iPod MP3 players (they were chunky and user unfriendly, as a rule), mobile manufacturers were forced to respond to Apple’s sleek device.
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Microsoft recently announced that a ‘lightweight’ web version of Office, which will include programmes such as Word and Excel, is currently in the works. It’s a significant move by the software giant. In 2007, Office generated around $19 billion for the company, almost a third of its total revenue. But it’s just the latest example of a paradigm shift towards cloud computing.

Software and files are traditionally stored on a user’s own desktop or a local server. Cloud computing, also known as software as a service (SaaS), instead stores resources remotely and delivers them over the internet. Data and services can then be accessed from any computer, irrespective of location or even operating system. All you need is a web connection.

As Microsoft’s announcement demonstrates, the cloud will play an ever-increasing role in how we use computers. Dell even tried more…