As featured on TM Forum’s the Insider Blog Something strange is happening in countries leading the way with national broadband network (NBN) rollouts – very few customers seem interested in taking up the service. Shocking statistics coming out of Singapore indicate that despite more than 83% of buildings being fiber-enabled there is only an 8% take-up rate. In parts of Australia where the NBN has been fired up it’s even less at 1%. Even the most diehard skeptics would not have forecast such pathetic numbers and it will certainly raise eyebrows in countries considering similar capital-intensive projects. So why do the public and businesses seem so lethargic at jumping onto then high-speed highway to paradise? According to Frost & Sullivan VP for ICT, Andrew Milroy, ... Continue reading →
04:45 AM May 21, 2012 I am glad SingTel clarified that it took full responsibility for the irritating disruptions during mioTV's live telecasts the previous week of the final-day matches of the English Premier League. Screens froze, were pixellated or simply went blank, especially during crucial and riveting moments of the matches involving the two Manchester clubs - Manchester City vs Queens Park Rangers and Manchester United vs Sunderland. SingTel's explanation last Monday, when it apologised to viewers, was: Too many viewers were switching between the two channels showing the games. "The switching volumes were five times higher than the previous peaks. This surge caused our system to slow and led to viewing problems for some customers," Mr Yuen Kuan Moon, the SingTel consumer group's ... Continue reading →
T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet. lisaquinn565.wordpress A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the ... Continue reading →
Google Docs has a lot going for it as an office or writing tool, and we imagine the Research sidebar, which appears to have recently launched on the suite, will help bolster its popularity. After selecting Tools > Research or using a shortcut, Docs will bring up a sidebar, letting you either type in a term or right-click one in the document to research it. It's a bit more than a glorified search bar, though. Snippets of the web results can be added to the document itself, images can be dragged and dropped, and the tool will automatically generate citations to credit whatever you've used. You can even limit the image search to Creative Commons-licensed free results. In the short term, this will probably lead ... Continue reading →
Last fall, “Kardokh,” a 25-year-old dissident and computer expert in the Syrian capital of Damascus, met with British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister. (Kardokh is his online pseudonym, used at his request.) McAllister, who’s made award-winning films in conflict zones like Yemen and Iraq, explained that he was shooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about underground activists in Syria, and asked if Kardokh would help him. At the time, the situation in Syria was deteriorating rapidly, as protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime turned violent following a vicious crackdown by security forces. The Syrian government had drastically curtailed visits by foreign journalists, but McAllister had managed to get in undercover. Kardokh was grateful for a chance to tell his story. “Any journalist who ... Continue reading →
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