Archive for February, 2009

Deputy Leader, Cllr Tilsley and Annette King, Digital Birmingham Innovations Manager put the Wii to the test

Kids who spend ages on computer games can develop a nasty palm rash, doctors have found.  The condition has been dubbed PlayStation palmar hidradenitis by medics, who blame hours spent gripping consoles allied to sweaty palms.  Other medics report a tendon condition called Wii-itis among Wii players. More – Gamers at risk from ‘Playstation rash’

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Keeping a theatre full of 15 year olds captivated and engaged for nearly half an hour on the topic of internet safety might be a challenge for the best of speakers, but for Ed Gibson, it appeared to be a breeze – but then as an ex FBI agent, I’m sure he’s been up against worse situations!

As part of Safer Internet Day, I had invited Ed Gibson, Chief Security Adviser at Microsoft to talk to children at Sheldon Heath Community Arts College around internet safety, particularly to highlight the use of social networking sites and dangers of disclosing personal information online. More – SPAM, more spam and much more

How cool is this!  Two very basic videos that tell you everything you need to know about what a wiki is and what RSS is, in plain English - If you don’t know, have a look.

What does the average Joe on the street know about how galaxies are formed? Well, apparently we know more than we think: www.GalaxyZoo.org allows anyone to help researchers at Oxford University identify the shapes of one million galaxies photographed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope.

This is the latest example of how computers and humans can not only co-exist, but can combine their strengths in new and innovative ways to achieve things that neither could achieve alone. More – What do you know about galaxy formation?

When you have no cash in your pocket, or notes in your wallet/purse, you can be stuck. How do you pay for that much needed injection of chocolate, or that magazine with the latest gossip? As chip and pin has replaced manual signing, there will soon be a replacement for cash, well an alternative at least.

More – A smart society is a cashless society?

Great to see some stats this week on how mobile will account for half of broadband users in Europe by 2014.  Telecompaper reports that a recent study conducted by Analysys Mason states there will be 148 million mobile broadband connections in Europe by 2014 which will account for almost half of all broadband connections.  The piece also identifies a shift in users, with far more growth in casual usage.

If you’d been hovering over whether to mobile enable your web pages or not, this looks like a good enough indicator to add to your evidence. Casual usage is usually a good indicator of a channel that’s about to go mainstream.  Use your webstats to identify high hitting pages and look into mobile enabling them. Also look at your content and see which might be best fit with people on the move, or which bits of your info people might want to surf arround. Casual usage simply means people who don’t have a fixed contract for their broadband use.

Twestival , or Twitter Festival, was an idea which originated in London last year.  Then, people who knew each other online through their Twitter communities organised a social event to raise money for local homeless charities.  Yesterday, Twestival events were held around the world to benefit Charity: Water a non-profit organisation funding small scale water projects in developing world countries.

Birmingham Twestival was held at Poppy Red in The Arcadian.  It was a very well attended event which has raised £1519.  It also shows that when people meet online nowadays it has become a lot more natural to then meet up in real life, something that has also been evident in Birmingham with the success of the Social Media Cafe. More – Birmingham Twestival

Should we start worrying about the future economic competitiveness of our country?

It was announced at a recent fibre network meeting in Copenhagen that the UK has so little fibre network ‘fibre to the home’ we don’t even make the league table. Basically this means that UK has less than 1% of its homes and businesses linked to superfast optical networks used to deliver broadband.

The Digital Britain interim report is still out for consultation, in which Lord Carter encourages high speed broadband but there is no real commitment to how the Government will fund the infrastructure.  If you get a free minute, log on and help the lobby, if we can’t get the infrastructure sorted, we risk letting our businesses and citizens become disadvantaged!

Digital Birmingham encourages Birmingham to exploit the benefits of digital technologies.

There does not seem to be anything that has not been affected by the adverse weather conditions over the past few weeks. Whether it be the travel network, education system or technology infrastructure….pardon? Technology can be affected by a bit of snow? Okay, it may be more than a bit but surely in the 21st Century there are contingencies in place to enable everything to continue to run smoothly…….
More – Snow and technology doesn’t mix?