How time flies, time for the edited ICT highlights from the last week or so.
Web 2.0
Lingro is a new collaborative dictionary and translation service that combines open dictionaries on the web with user contributions under a CreativeCommons license.
Need to dynamically generate charts in web pages? The Google Charts API will let you do it.
Mobile 2.0
With mobile phone global sales past the 3 billion mark, Infoworld reports on the hidden environmental costs of mobile phones.
You can make it up. Last year, 5 out of 10 of Japan’s best selling novels were originally composed on mobile phones, and now craze is breaking here with Quillpill.
Mippin is a service delivering web content “perfectly formatted” to your mobile phone
British democracy is alive and well and The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament have launched their own Youtube channel to prove it.
IT over-spend shocker: According to Kablenet, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s telecommunications network and its Future Firecrest infrastructure work have produced a £61m net overrun on the department’s IT projects.
Lost data shocker: Another one from Kablenet. Six laptops containing personal data on 20,000 patients have been stolen from St George’s Hospital in south-west London, the hospital’s parent trust has revealed
Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1 (nearest tube: Holborn)
There is so much happening in the online world - how can we make sure that we are making the most of online opportunities?
This free conference for Cascade members will provide insight and ideas about how to use the Internet strategically. Workshops will explore engaging people online, online campaigning, e-communications and analysing how people respond to your online interventions.
So far, the only details we have are those published by Capacity Builders, which shows a total of 10 grants totalling £2,374,550 (13.6% of the total) awarded to London. Until we get further information from Capacity Builders, its not clear of any if the winning projects will feature elements of ICT.
Sometimes when we’re trying to learn a new technique or a new subject - a video tutorial - watching how an expert does it can be more powerful than web or print ‘how to’ articles.
Video tutorials offer a great way to concisely convey a lot of information that might otherwise take hours of writing and drawing diagrams to make the same point. Tutorials are also a great way for organisations to showcase their expertise or point of view to a wide audience.
YouTube is not the only vehicle for hosting web tutorials - a whole raft of web sites have sprung up in YouTube’s wake and we take a look around at some of the web’s best instructional web sites.
5min describes itself as a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge - a communal Life Videopedia. subjects covered range from tech, arts, fashion to practical DIY. First up, it’s “What Google Really Has On You” from 5min video.
Howcast has a slightly more professional clean-cut look than the rough-cut appeal of 5min. It offers a wider range of material but seems a lot weaker on technology. The best we could do is “Hyper sonic shut-down of Windows” for folks always in a hurry.
ExpertVillage describes itself as “the world’s largest how to video site”. The site is very slick and professional looking and has a large section covering technology and the Internet. Here Drew Noah explains the basics of Google Documents.
Lastly, we couldn’t finish without a blast from Youtube. Check out CommonCraft’s “Social networking in plain English”
In the next installment we’ll look at the mechanics of putting together a video tutorial for the web.
The LIDP:08 describes the ChangeUp vision for London over the next 3 years along with action plans for thematic areas such as ICT, Advice, Olympics, Premises, etc.
The plan for ICT envisages:
2008-11
London Region ICT Champion project to take forward ICT actions identified in the LIDP:08 and the London ICT strategy;
To develop the ‘Circuit Rider’ mobile ICT support project locally;
To increase the professional development of Circuit Riders and help meet demand;
To support the network of London circuit riders and others providing the sector with technical support;
To lobby funders to recognise the total cost of ICT, as a legitimate expense that brings real benefits to VCOs and their stakeholders.
This is an ambitious list that comes without any funding attached from the LRC - the body which manages ChangeUp in London. However, we do have NAVCA’s regional ICT Champion project - funded at a national not regional level by Capacity Builders - which proposes more generic support, such as sign-posting sources of information.
We’re yet to see how the LIDP:08 plays with NAVCA’s regional champion project, so watch this space.
Disclosure: The author is the London Regional ICT Champion - a national support service project funded by Capacity Builders and managed by NAVCA.
Another round-up of ICT news that you couldn’t possibly live without…
Organise that meeting:
Organising meetings can be a real pain. Fortunately, there are several web-based services out there that let you create an event, manage invitations and even take payment. Mobaganda - based on Google App Engine - is the latest. It creates a custom web page for your event, sends out emails and lets you keep track of RSVPs in Google Reader.
Folks are also starting to use the very elegant and simple Doodle to organise meetings. We’ve used Eventbrite to organise meetings, which is also capable of taking ticket payments.
Mobile 2.0:
With spiralling travel costs, it’s no wonder that video conferencing was ranked the third hottest business technology in a 2007 survey. Check out WM Net’s guide here. Video-conferencing need not be expensive - check out Skype’s guide to free video-conference calls.
A great story over at MobileActive about the Community Voice Mail (CVM) program which has provided a lifeline to 40,000 people a year across the U.S.
Web developers take note - mobile web is the new platform you should be designing for. Mobile guru Dan Appelquist blogs about W3C’s new mobile web training courses.
More from MobileActive - read how children in India are learning about sex education through “edutainment” mobile phone games that are designed to provide entertainment and be educational at the same time.
Web 2.0 and Social Networking:
Read how our old friend Jason King has been busy building a Google Custom Search Engine for Dublin’s Ana Liffey Drug Project. The custom designed search engine helps people find reliable information on the web about addiction-related issues.
Head over to Techcrunch to catch an interview with Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg at the D6 conference.
Google Earth hits the web browser. Website developers are now able to embed 3D maps, powered by a special Google Earth Browser Plugin that end users must install. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox users on Windows.
And finally:
You can catch podcasts of the Regional Champs. Julie Harris does that wonderful husky-voiced thing, Paul Ruskin gives his top tips for using ICT, and yours truly coughs up quote on telephony.
The Flickr photo sharing service has teamed up with TechSoup/CTX Programme to offer premium “Pro” accounts to individuals within eligible organisations.
By requesting a package of two or five Pro accounts Flickr is a new way for organisations to tell their story with their own photographs.
Learn more about how to place a request for a package of Pro accounts, made available to the nonprofit community thanks to a generous donation from Flickr.
Flickr Masterclass
An old friends of ours, Steve Bridger, will be giving a Flickr masterclass on 20th June 2008 in London. Free places are availablefirst 20 qualifying organisations that place a donation request
Rural areas of the UK are better connected to broadband than their urban neighbours, a new Ofcom report published here today reveals. England only summary here and full PDF (916kb) here.
Here are the edited highlights:
Rural vs Urban
Across the UK as a whole, 59% of households in rural areas now have broadband compared to 57% of urban areas.
In Northern Ireland its 54% of households in rural areas with broadband and 52% in urban areas.
In Scotland, 59% of rural households have broadband compared to 52% of urban households.
The biggest difference is in Wales where 51% of rural households have broadband, in contrast to 43% of urban households.
Broadband take-up
Overall, broadband is in 57% of households across the UK - up from 45% in twelve months - and take-up has also increased steadily in the nations and regions.
England saw the highest growth, up 13% to 58%.
Sunderland is the UK’s most connected city with 66%
In London and Edinburgh 62%, Newcastle 55%, Liverpool 40% of households have broadband
The East of England region has the highest proportion of broadband households at 68%.
East Midlands is at the lower end of the scale with only 37% of households having broadband.
Mobile-only homes on the rise
At 12%, more UK households than ever before now rely solely on a mobile phone.
Some 12% of homes in England are mobile-only, an increase of 3%.
In the UK’s cities, Greater Manchester has the highest levels of mobile-only homes at 28%, followed by Londonderry/Derry at 27%. Elsewhere, the mobile-only proportion of homes is Birmingham (22%), Yorkshire and Humber (18%), Greater Manchester (28%), and Liverpool (21%).
However, in London the proportion relying on mobile telephony is lower than average (7%).
Wales saw the highest growth of mobile-only homes up 9% with around a fifth of all homes (20%) mobile-only.
In Northern Ireland, around one in ten households (11 %) are mobile-only, up 1% per cent in 12 months.
Scotland was the only nation where the number of mobile-only homes fell slightly from 14 % to 12%.
Mobile 2.0
People in England are using their mobile in different ways other than to make calls.
Some 21% use it to access the internet, rising to 32% in London. Birmingham is highest with a third of people using mobile internet. People living in rural parts of Devon and Cornwall are least likely to go online via their mobile at just 7%.
Watching television or video on a mobile phone is also becoming more popular with 4% of adults in England now viewing content this way. The figure rises to 10% of adults in Liverpool and 15% in Birmingham.
A trendy young media company, West Country solicitors, space-age computer bus, Lake District Society for the Blind, Channel 4, Central Government - all are getting involved in Silver Surfers’ Day 2008, May 23rd
Seven years on, and Silver Surfers’ Day is turning into an annual blaze of activity as an increasingly diverse range of organisations are ‘catching on’ to the importance of doing their bit for older people who may otherwise not become media literate. More here.
Blame it on the early May Bank Holiday, but we’re back after a break with another round-up of ICT news for you to check out.
Web 2.0 and social networking:
Last week it was Facebook and MySpace, this week it’s Google with Friend Connect. Google reckons 99% of web sites are not socially networked and Friend Connect enables any website owner to add a snippet of code to their site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. More on Friend Connect here.
Interested in creating your own social networking applications? Check out Google’s Open Social
Legal:
Don’t leave your laptop in the pub - the Government has made “reckless data loss” a civil offence, it says here.
Mobile working:
Check your tariff - according to Channel 4’s Dispatches, the cost of texting for UK punters is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Nasa’s Hubble telescope. See here.
Vodaphone is extending its high speed mobile broadband network to Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Reading by the Autumn, it says here.
Time to start using IT in a more environmentally friendly way - check out IBM’s Green Hub.
Hardware:
Good news - Microsoft is cutting the cost of putting Windows XP on low cost laptops, here.
Software:
Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2008 for Mac, designed to add stability, security, and performance enhancements to the suite of office applications. More at Macworld.
More good news - Mars may be poised to resurrect the Marathon chocolate bar 18 years after it was Americanised to Snickers.
The ICT Champion’s mission is to support not-for-profit organisations to understand and use technology to better achieve their goal of delivering high quality services for all.
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