London Region ICT Champion

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.

• Techcrunch talks about the next-generation web and the move towards browser storage - this lets users broswe web pages whilst not connected to the Internet - such as MySpace integrating Google Gears and Yahoo! new BrowserPlus product

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.

• Checkout MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative, and “Facebook 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.

• Apple’s iPhone sold out in UK, here.

• Research In Motion’s iPhone killer, the Blackberry Bold is launched in the US, here.

Greener computing:

• Scientists say that carbon dioxide levels are at their highest levels for 650,000 years.

• 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.