Posts filed under 'Internet'
A consortium of six international companies announced they have executed agreements to build a high–bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans–Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.
The new cable system — named Unity — will address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans–Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.
According to the TeleGeography Global Bandwidth Report, 2007, Trans–Pacific bandwidth demand has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 63.7 percent between 2002 and 2007. It is expected to continue to grow strongly from 2008 to 2013, with total demand for capacity doubling roughly every two years.
“The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online, giving users faster and more reliable connectivity,” said Unity spokesperson Jayne Stowell.
The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs.
This new 10,000 kilometer (km) Trans–Pacific cable will provide connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points of presence. At Chikura, Unity will be seamlessly connected to other cable systems, further enhancing connectivity into Asia.
The Unity consortium selected NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system during a signing ceremony held in Tokyo on February 23, 2008. Construction will begin immediately, with initial capacity targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010.
The new five fiber pair cable system can be expanded up to eight fiber pairs, with each fiber pair capable of carrying up to 960 Gigabits per second (Gbps). By having a high fiber count, Unity is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs.
February 26th, 2008
Google announced today that it will apply to participate in the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.
As part of the nationally mandated transition to digital television, the 700 MHz spectrum auction — which begins January 24, 2008 — will free up spectrum airwaves for more efficient wireless Internet service for consumers. Advocacy by public interest groups and Google earlier this year helped ensure that regardless of which bidders win a key portion of the spectrum up for auction (the so-called “C Block”), they will be required to allow their users to download any software application they want on their mobile device, and to use any mobile devices they would like on that wireless network. The winner must ensure these rights for consumers if the reserve price of $4.6 billion for the C Block is met at auction.
“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”
Schmidt also praised the leadership of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and his fellow commissioners for adopting the new rights for consumers earlier this year.
Google’s formal application to participate in the 700 MHz auction will be filed with the FCC on Monday, December 3, 2007 — the required first step in the auction process. Google’s application does not include any partners.
December 1st, 2007
Postini today announced new content policy management capabilities to its Email Security service, including protection for social security and credit card numbers. At no additional cost, Postini customers now gain greater flexibility and control to manage their communications compliance and security policies.
“Companies of all sizes are seeking to reduce email security and compliance risk” said Scott Petry, founder of Postini and director of product management at Google, “They are seeking to encrypt email communications automatically based on message content, prevent sensitive content from leaving the company via email and have visibility into policy violations. Postini’s innovation in content analysis and disposition simplifies the process of managing communications compliance policies for our customers. We are continuing to deliver on the promise of SaaS (software as a service) as the most cost and time effective way for large and small enterprises to manage their communications.”
Advanced Content Policy Management
With the new release announced today, Postini customers gain access to three significant advancements:
- Lexical data analysis for credit card and social security numbers in email including attachments with automatic policy enforcement dispositions options such as encrypt or block.
- Administrators can create advanced policy rules based on text patterns using regular expression syntax and apply a variety of dispositions including blocking, sending a carbon copy to supervisors, or quarantine.
- With content-based message analysis and reporting, Postini administrators gain intelligence and insight into content entering and leaving the organization. Postini customers can address policy violations with granular, easy to implement policies and address their company specific or regulatory requirements.
Postini’s content policy management framework is available as a part of the Postini standalone service and also as part of Google Apps™ Premier Edition. Content policy management is expected to be extended in the future to additional communication protocols, including Instant Messaging and HTTP.
In addition, Postini also announced significant new functionality for Email Security and Message Archiving services.
Zero hour Detection Capabilities
New early detection capabilities allow suspicious content to be automatically quarantined and re-inspected with updated virus signatures, providing an added security layer of advanced virus protection. New anti-spam capabilities have also been added to detect and block newer, more sophisticated bot-net based attacks immediately. The new advancements to the Postini architecture enable rapid updates to the Postini spam and virus filters for quicker defense against the newest threats.
Advanced Message Archive Management Tools
With new granular Message archive retention and purge controls email administrators gain more flexibility and control to manage mailbox storage management, discovery, and compliance efforts. A new self-serve option for message archive extractions enables Postini administrators to avoid costly data extraction expenses.
Taken together, these improvements enable Postini customers to have more control and flexibility over policy enforcement, email security defenses, and message archiving management. The new content policy management and email security updates are available to Postini customers at no extra charge. The Postini message archiving enhancements are available for Postini archiving customers.
November 13th, 2007
An emerging segment of highly engaged, tech-savvy, and vocal voters is poised to impact the outcome of the 2008 national elections, according to new research from Yahoo!, HCD Research, and Hall and Partners. The study, entitled “The Rise of Citizen 2.0: Radically Rethinking Democracy in the Digital Age,” examines the changing role of the Internet in shaping political activity and discourse. “Citizen 2.0″ represents a slight majority (51 percent) of Americans, who crave information about politics to a greater extent than traditional voters, and are much more likely to use technology to share their political views and opinions. According to the study, presidential candidates should be tapping into the $5.4 billion political advertising market to reach these voters online.
“More candidates are using the Internet to reach voters, but overall, politicians are spending a tiny portion of their budgets online, just as most corporations were doing several years ago,” said Richard Kosinski, vice president of political advertising for Yahoo!. “We don’t think the 2008 election will turn on which candidate has the best blog or wiki. But we are saying that many campaigns are missing the important opportunity to tap into the great enthusiasm that Citizen 2.0 brings to the political process - and it’s easier than ever to do given the innovations in technology, the rise of social media, and the advancements in online advertising.”
Yahoo! will share the findings of this new research study at its first ever political summit in Washington, D.C., before an audience of political influencers including campaign managers, strategists, and academics. The summit will focus in part on key online advertising trends and best practices being leveraged by the candidates today. As the influence of Citizen 2.0 grows, researchers predict that political professionals will shift attention and advertising budget to the online channel.
“More and more political candidates are discovering that the power of the Internet boosts their campaigns’ momentum by connecting them with engaged, committed voters,” said Carol Darr, an expert on new media and politics and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s School of Kennedy Government. “Today’s tech-savvy candidates are expanding their use of the Internet to include strategic online advertising that connects with supporters who are likely to spread the candidates’ messages via online word of mouth, using email, instant messaging, and social media.”
One of the highlights of today’s summit will be a discussion between special guest speakers Karl Rove, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and Max Cleland, former U.S. Senator from Georgia. Touching on themes from the Citizen 2.0 research, Rove and Cleland will discuss and debate how the Internet has fundamentally changed voter behavior, impacting campaigning, news consumption habits, issues amplification, and voter engagement.
Citizen 2.0 - Implications for 2008 Campaigns
In identifying behaviors and characteristics of Citizen 2.0, the new research highlights the unique opportunity for candidates to help feed these voters’ insatiable appetite for political information from a variety of sources. Citizen 2.0 likes connecting, sharing opinions, and discussing political views, and is more likely to volunteer time and contribute money to a candidate. Researchers also found that these voters rely on the Internet as their most trusted, and frequently used resource for gathering information, and communicating about politics:
– 87 percent use news Web sites to gather information and learn about politics
– 82 percent use search engines
– 56 percent use candidate Web sites
– 51 percent use blogs and politically-based Web sites
– 40 percent use online political groups
In a recent example of Citizen 2.0 in action, Mitt Romney supporters created and posted online a total of 129 commercials, as part of a special campaign promotion inviting the public to use photos, videos and audio clips to create a video ad. The commercials were viewed nearly 100,000 times.
Yahoo! has been heavily involved in politics in recent months including working with presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to develop strategic online advertising programs. In addition, Yahoo! has revamped and expanded its elections Web site (http://elections.yahoo.com), and hosted an online MashUp debate in September with the Huffington Post and Slate Magazine.
November 9th, 2007
Google and IBM today announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of internet-scale applications in the future.Â
The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. With their combined resources, the companies hope to lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore this emerging model of computing.Â
The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.
“Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today’s developing computational challenges,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems.” Â
Fundamental changes in computer architecture and increases in network capacity are encouraging software developers to take new approaches to computer-science problem solving. For web software such as search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly, computational tasks often need to be broken into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across many servers simultaneously. Parallel programming techniques are also used for complex scientific analysis such as gene sequencing and climate modeling.
“This project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer, IBM. “We’re aiming to train tomorrow’s programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day.”
For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).
At the University of Washington, students were able to harness the power of distributed computing to produce complicated programs such as software that scans voluminous Wikipedia edits to identify spam and organizes global news articles by geographic location.
“In 2006, when I helped Christophe Bisciglia, a former UW student now a senior engineer at Google, to develop the program, our goal was to understand the challenges that universities face in teaching important new concepts such as large scale computing and develop methods to address this issue,” said Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. “A year later, we’ve seen how our students have mastered many of the techniques that are critical for large scale-internet computing, benefiting our department and students.”
“Carnegie Mellon applauds Google and IBM for helping to provide the resources that will help professors better prepare our students for the challenges presented by highly parallel computing,” said Randal Bryant, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. “We are quite pleased to be among the first universities participating in this program this fall.”
To simplify the development of massively parallel programs Google and IBM have created the following resources:
- A cluster of processors running an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure (MapReduce and GFS from Apache’s Hadoop project)
- A Creative Commons licensed university curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington focusing on massively parallel computing techniques available at: http://code.google.com/edu/content/parallel.html
- Open source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open source development platform. The plugin is currently available at: http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
- Management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning of the cluster by IBM using IBM Tivoli systems management software
- A website to encourage collaboration among universities in the program. This will be built on Web 2.0 technologies from IBM’s Innovation Factory.
October 8th, 2007
Mobile broadband pioneer Sprint announced it is working with Google to bring WiMAX mobile Internet customers search, interactive communications and social networking tools though a new mobile portal. The collaboration between Sprint and Google will help spur new mobility and location-assisted services as Sprint untethers Internet access for consumers, businesses and government customers.
Sprint is developing a nationwide advanced wireless broadband network that is being designed to mobilize the Internet, bring wireless innovation to devices and deliver new mobile multimedia applications to customers. The pact with Google is a milestone in Sprint’s mobile Internet strategy, and it builds upon current WiMAX ecosystem infrastructure and device agreements to establish an Internet destination for user-generated content and multimedia offerings.
“Google and Sprint will optimize the Internet experience for the digital lifestyle,” said Barry West, president, 4G Mobile Broadband for Sprint. “This collaboration brings what will be the best mobile Internet network together with the leading Internet search company. It allows us to capitalize on the powerful mobility and Internet trends, and create wireless services and applications that take advantage of each company’s history of product development innovation.”
Sprint network bandwidth, location detection and presence capabilities will be matched with Google’s popular communications suite - Google Appsâ„¢ - that combines the Gmailâ„¢, Google Calendarâ„¢ and Google Talkâ„¢ services. Customers will be able to experience a new form of interactive communications, high speed Internet browsing, local and location-centric services, and multimedia services including music, video, TV and on-demand products.
“Google shares Sprint’s vision for enhancing the consumer’s mobile lifestyle and is focused on greater access to information through a variety of channels,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager Google Enterprise. “We look forward to working with Sprint to bring to market a rich and compelling broadband experience for WiMAX customers.”
Sprint will provide open standard APIs (application programming interfaces) to Sprint’s go-to-market partners and the Internet developer community to create customized products for browsable devices, facilitating the delivery of personalized and interactive services to consumer, business, public safety and government customers. These services will be available in a variety of WiMAX embedded devices, including connection cards, stand-alone modems, laptop computers and consumer electronic devices such as personal media players, mobile Internet devices, gaming devices and phones. Eventually, the WiMAX service will be available in vehicles for navigation information, news and entertainment.
Sprint is working with WiMAX ecosystem partners and others to incorporate WiMAX technology in a range of computing, portable multi-media, interactive and other consumer electronic devices. The company plans WiMAX test service in the Chicago, Baltimore and Washington DC areas by year-end 2007. Commercial service is expected to be available in a number of markets starting April 2008 and cover 100 million people by year-end 2008 in conjunction with a planned partnership with Clearwire.
These efforts are expected to allow Sprint customers to experience a nationwide mobile broadband network that is designed to offer faster speeds, lower cost, greater convenience and enhanced multimedia quality. The Sprint WiMAX mobile broadband network will use the company’s extensive 2.5GHz spectrum holdings.
July 27th, 2007
The THESEUS consortium is delighted with the EU Commission’s decision to approve public funding of the THESEUS research programme by the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, or BMWi for short). The programme is set to run for 5 years and will receive some € 90 million of public money from the BMWi. The portion set aside for research and development will be divided equally between the fields of science and industry. A further € 90 million will come from participants from the industrial and research sectors, so that a total of around € 180 million will be invested in a considerable number of forward-looking research projects.
In the course of the next few weeks and months, 30 different companies, research establishments and universities will be embarking on a wide variety of exciting research products aimed at developing user-oriented basic technology applications and technical standards for a new internet-based knowledge-sharing infrastructure. Consortium members from the industrial sector will develop prototypes of the new technologies and test them in 7 application scenarios. The purpose of the tests is to find short-term ways of converting the technological advances into innovative tools, commercially-viable services and potentially profitable business models for the World Wide Web.
The THESEUS consortium is coordinated by empolis GmbH, a subsidiary of arvato AG. Siemens, SAP, empolis, Lycos Europe, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Deutsche Thomson oHG, intelligent views, m2any, Moresophy, Ontoprise, Festo, the German Mechanical Engineering Federation VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen und Anlagenbau) and the Institute for Broadcasting Technology IRT are just some of the members of the Consortium, whose work is distinguished by its promotion of close collaboration between industry’s research and development departments and research bodies from the public sector; among these are, for example, internationally recognised experts from the DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), the FZI (Research Center for Information Technologies), Munich’s LMU (Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität) and TU (Technische Universität), the TU Darmstadt, the Technical University (TH) of Karlsruhe, the TU Dresden and the University of Erlangen. Nine member institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are also involved.
The research programme focuses closely on forms of semantic technology that are capable of recognising and classifying the content and meaning of information (words, pictures or sounds). With the aid of this technology, smart computer programmes are able to understand and replicate the context in which data is used and processed. By applying rules and classification principles, computers can also draw logical conclusions from content, and subsequently recognise and construct links between various items of information from diverse sources. In future, internet users will be able to apply the standards and basic technologies (“semantic toolboxesâ€) developed by THESEUS when they want to create or process content, rules and classification systems themselves, or to process, collect and link content from different media along “smart†lines. In combination with semantic methods of this kind, the Web 2.0 we know today - with its principles of transparent, open, interactive social networking - will become the internet of tomorrow.
Some of the basic technologies being developed by the research partners are functions for the automatic creation of metadata for audio, video, 3D and picture files, and mechanisms for the semantic processing of multimedia documents and their associated services. Research is also being carried out on the development of tools for the management of ontologies, and of new machine learning algorithms and dialogue processing systems that can assess an individual situation and then take this assessment into consideration. At the same time, work on innovative user interfaces is in progress, as well as on new DRM procedures intended to provide better protection for the holders of intellectual property and marketing rights to multimedia content.
July 25th, 2007
comScore today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In June 2007, Google Sites maintained its spot atop the rankings with 49.5 percent of the U.S. search market. Yahoo! Sites captured second place with 25.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (13.2 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).
- Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.
- Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million). Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.
- Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.
July 17th, 2007
Previous Posts
