If we are to believe the “slip ups” from Cabinet members about the date of the General Election, the 6th May 2010 is only three months away. Although many people will try, no-one can estimate who will be the country’s next Prime Minister and government party.
However, as time gets closer to the date in May, the three main parties are starting to release snippets of their manifestos to encourage would-be voters. The Conservative Party are no different…..
More - Digital Manifesto
France & Germany line up to bash Internet Explorer
Here’s a link to the article that might be of interest to you!
Last Tuesday I helped to launch Birmingham’s e-Safety Strategy on behalf of Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board. My presentation, which is below, talked about the different work that Digital Birmingham has done around the Home Access agenda and then covered Social Networking Sites as a new technology being used by young people that professionals don’t always have a full understanding of.
So I spoke about the Aston Pride project to provide computers in the homes of primary and secondary school children and also the Computers for Pupils grant which has been used by the city to launch 40-50 Birmingham e-Learning Foundation schemes in Secondary Schools across the city. The latter means that more money is coming back in to the system to help provide kit to more kids. More - e-Safety Strategy Launch event
This morning the Community Broadband Network came to Birmingham today with its roadshow to highlight the need for the UK to get to grips with the next generation of broadband access. We’re talking about a network where 100 megabits per second is the norm with the potential to deliver 1 gigabits per second (which will be the universal service obligation in South Korea by 2012 - yes, that’s what they’ll get as a minimum).
So I suspect delegates there may not have greeted with much enthusiasm the news in the Budget that the government has confirmed its commitment to just 2 megabits per second access for all. However, that’s not to say it’s ignoring the issue of next generation networks. Alastair Darling also announced funding for Yorkshire’s Digital Region project and there may be something in the £750m strategic investment fund for digital industries to get stuck into. More - Budget confirms broadband commitment
Birmingham Photospace is a bunch of people volunteering their time because they want to establish a space for photography in the city. Earlier in the year they organised the Anything but Selfridges competition to find an image that “best represents the Birmingham we live and work in”. So long as it wasn’t of Selfridges.
On Saturday just gone they held their first public event, a Flashswap at the Vaad Gallery in the Custard Factory down in Digbeth. The premise of the event was that you brought some prints along that you were happy to swap and “hung” them in the gallery (there was Blu-Tak provided). In the early evening we went back and viewed the exhibition, then on the word we all went and placed a sticker against the prints that we wanted to take home with us. More - Flashswap event
The next generation of superfast broadband was given approval by Ofcom on Tuesday … the new £1.5 billion fibre-optic network will be 25 times faster than today’s speeds. Songs will take just two seconds to download and DVD-quality films less than two minutes in the 100 megabit per second system.
“There are no regulatory barriers in the way of investment in super-fast broadband, we want to promote investment but also ensure that there is fair and effective competition for the future.” stated Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards.
So, here at Digital Birmigham we are making the assumption that BT will no longer be subject to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) as they were under the ADSL roll out, which will no doubt be a huge impetus for its implementation.
BT is investing £1.5bn in a fibre optic network that will deliver download speeds of 100mbps to UK broadband users. The move follows increasing competition, particularly from Virgin Media, which plans to introduce a 50mbps broadband service in September.
BT aims to put 10 million homes on the fibre network by 2012. To control costs, the network will be built in two parts. One million new-build homes will receive the fibre network directly. For the remaining nine million residents BT plans to replace the copper cabling that connects kerbside cabinets in streets to the local BT exchange with fibre optic cabling.
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.
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.
It’s a year since the government published its Creative Britain report, the culmination of a long process of consultation with the creative industries. The publication was seen as a positive cross-departmental initiative that re-stated the government’s commitment to what is a significant part of the economy. A year on we get Digital Britain and in general, everyone seems a bit grumpy about it. So what did ‘Creative’ have that ‘Digital’ doesn’t?
Digital Birmingham is a Birmingham City Council initiative and part of a city wide strategic partnership of more than 30 public, private and voluntary organisations
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