Convergence Conversation

Last night's Convergence Conversation was revealing in what it did not reveal. With experts from PA Consulting, Vizioncore, Memset, various analyst houses and the legal profession (including our esteemed hosts Bird & Bird), you'd think we'd have enough brainpower and complimentary skills to paint the finest picture of Cloud to help Cloud-newbies get in on the action.

But what is Cloud?

Some participants didn't think we needed to define it. Personally, I'm not sure how a group can discuss any thing without a common agreement on what the thing is, so, as I was in the chair, we attempted a definition off the bat. More...

This was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.

Deloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker, their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. More...

I've just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian's article "Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal".

Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy), and Miniweb is into "next generation TV" with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.

Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then. More...

The unstoppable Charles Arthur has posted a map of BT's intended locations for their FTTC trial.

Click here to find out if it includes a cabinet near your home or work place.

When is a webpage secure?

A webpage is secure when the URL starts "https://" rather than "http://", and there is usually a lock symbol displayed somewhere on your browser – not on the webpage but on the browser itself.

 

These signs indicate that everything sent from your browser to the Web server and everything sent from the Web server to your browser is encrypted so that, if the data was intercepted, it would be meaningless to the interceptor.

Occasionally, a webpage can be secure without either of the visual indications described above.  This is when a secure webpage is served within (a frame of) another webpage. More...

Speaking recently, albeit briefly, at the Intellect meeting of Group Chairs, my topic was UK digital infrastructure and its criticality in respect to our economy, our society and our environment; and how net neutrality is an essential characteristic of this infrastructure in these respects.

Back in the 1960s, some scientists and engineers were just putting the groundwork in place for the basic protocols underpinning the Internet as we know it today... TCP/IP.

These people had no foresight of Internet enabled innovations and services such as Wikipedia, Skype, Facebook, iPlayer, instant messenger, email, Twitter, etc. More...

Open source is a force on the server and a force on the desktop. The vast majority of Web servers, for example, run an open source operating system, server, database and programming language, known as the LAMP bundle. And on the desktop, we have things like the Ubuntu (Linux) operating system, Firefox browser, Open Office, Java, Jabber instant messenger, VLC media player and thousands more.

Open source is far more prevalent than most people know, and that's if they understand what open source is in the first place. The VLC media player has, for example, been downloaded over 200 million times. More...

There's nothing quite like a good tech battle.

Having worked with Mozilla for five years now, I'm ecstatic to see browser innovation reignited to everyone's benefit, Web user and developer alike. There's no longer a "browser war", just good web standards compliant innovation all round.  But the battle had to be waged to get us to where we are today.

But not all battles end in a heterogenous marketplace. Witness Blu Ray versus HD-DVD. Saying that, it's not clear that in the age of ubiquitous always-on broad Internet connectivity that any physical format will win out this particular battle. More...

As you might have seen, on 5th March 2009, Nominet is sponsoring the convergence conversation on universal messaging. One part of this subject area that I am particularly interested in is ENUM.

ENUM is a new registry service that combines telephone numbers and the Domain Name System to simplify the way VoIP calls work. It removes the need for a connection to the telephone network and enables more calls to be made for free.

Ahead of the event I thought I’d post a brief introduction to ENUM and the ways in which it could be of benefit to UK business.

What is ENUM and how does it work?

The core principle of ENUM is to translate a telephone number into a domain name. More...

Just when you thought the promise of deliverying Internet conectivity over powerline had been relegated to the archive folder of "nearly but not quite" innovations, IBM announces a $9.6m deal with International Broadband Electric Communications Inc.

IBM will provide and install the equipment, with the whole initiative coming in over two years at up to $70m. The deal focuses on providing connectivity to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States.

It must be big news as it's been Slashdotted. More info here. More...