New Media Awards 2005 Weblog

L-Mail.com announced an online Braille letter writing service earlier today. Customers can type their messages online and the company will translate and send a postal letter within 24 hours to any location in the world. L-Mail.com, the online letter printing and posting service, teamed up with Canada-based transcribers The Braille Superstore to create the service.

Peter Harris, Managing Director of QiQ, the company behind L-Mail.com said: “Whether an individual wishes to communicate with a blind friend or a business wishes to stay ahead of accessibility laws we believe this new cost effective service can help".

Craig Faris of The Braille Superstore said: “It’s never been easier for friends or co-workers to communicate with Braille readers. And perhaps best of all, you can use the very same site to send letters to anyone on your list - whether they happen to read regular print or Braille!”

L-Mail recently launched an online system to automate the production of standard letters called the Integration Account, which can also be used to generate Braille letters. Braille encoded letters, depending on location and exchange rate, cost around £5.00 each.

The Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian) are organising a boycott of all Tesco’s stores in response to Tesco’s plans to increase their use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The campaign was launched on Tuesday night during an interview with Caspian’s director and founder Katherine Albrecht BBC’s Newsnight. Caspian is protesting that RFID’s allow Tesco’s to track products once they leave the store, claiming they are an invasion of personal privacy. RFID’s are currently used to security tag items in stores like DVD’s but Tesco plans eventually put them in all of their products. Katherine Albrecht claimed Tesco’s plans “would involve potentially hundreds of thousands more shoppers… it essentially means that more people will be taking home items containing spy chips".

Tesco is planning to completely phase out the use of soon-to-be-obsolete radio barcode technology by the end of this year and aims to replace them with RFID’s.

International summits are not known for ‘public consultation’ but the forth-coming Madrid summit is different. 11 March will see the one-year anniversary of the Madrid bombings, with over a million people expected to march on Atocha railway station in commemoration. For three days prior, Madrid will play host to ‘The International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security’. For the first time, those involved in the summit will be getting clear input from the public, via the web.

As part of the public debates, openDemocracy.net is encouraging the public to hold their own meetings on 11 March with friends and family. They are being encouraged to post the conclusions of these meetings on the safe-democracy.org website, hosted by Club De Madrid and openDemocracy.net. The conclusions of the public debates will be incorperated into the summit report.

The forums are already well underway, and with so many viewpoints being aired, are deeply involving reading.

You no longer have to come to London anymore to explore Tate Britain with the launch of the ‘Explore Tate Britain’ virtual tour. The new Flash tour on Tate Online, allows users from all over the world to tour individual galleries, with the pages accessible in Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Bengali and French.

The tour gives a detailed floor plan of the gallery, letting users click on a specific room. Details of the featured art works or forthcoming exhibitions are also avaliable. The site offers in depth explainations of each of the artworks and artists, making it a valuable educational tool. Visitors can even take a virtual look at the café.

Jemima Rellie, head of digital programmes at Tate, said: “While Explore Tate Britain opens up the gallery and its contents to new audiences around the world, it also enables visitors to the gallery to make better use of their time at Tate Britain by planning their tour in advance. Visitors to Tate Online can save their personal tour, share it with friends and even print it off and bring it with them when they visit the gallery. This will be a fantastic tool for teachers and parents who want to share a pre-determined tour with students and children.”

60,000 head teachers now belong to the world’s biggest education professional’s forum, Talk2Learn. Relaunched yesterday, the site hopes to encourage another 190,000 professionals to sign-up. And here’s why:

The website - provided by the National Council of School Leadership - offers a secure interactive environment for ‘school leaders’ to talk about job issues. Trained facilitators from education backgrounds support discussions within the community, helping users to get the most out of the site by flagging up when particular debates are going on and linking up school leaders with shared interests. The site has a number of features including live chat facilities, shared live whiteboards, voting functions, document sharing and collaboration, email notifications and brainstorming tools.

NCSL’s Director of Online Learning, Tony Richardson said: “Talk2learn has been a huge success story. It’s making a real difference to school leaders by giving them the confidence and knowledge they need to solve tough problems in their schools and experiment with new ways of doing things. Most importantly school leaders no longer need to feel alone in their professional lives – whatever the issue they are facing they now have a massive wealth of expertise and support at the click of a mouse.”

In a similar move, the General Teaching Council has announced plans for an integrated website. It will give over half a million members of the education community access to important information on policy and working standards. The GTC site is due to launch in April 2005.

The Bedford Citizen Service Partnership (CSP) has installed a pilot CITIZONE system in Dunstable library to deliver electronic government services and provide access to public information.

The CSP, made up of Bedfordshire County Council, and Mid Beds and South Beds District Councils, is the first group to meet central government’s 2005 target for combining services.

CITIZONE aims to deliver fast, accurate and accountable public services, provide easy access to information and act as a gateway for other government services. It aims to promote social inclusion and break down ‘barriers’, by mixing technology with face-to-face contact. The scheme will also help the authorities to research needs, measure performance and reduce duplication.

Dunstable library is intended as a test for the CITIZONE terminals, which do not yet have the full set of planned functions. Six support staff will provide assistance and advice to users during the trial.

The CSP is working with BT and Wiltshire-based company DVE to meet the aims of the scheme. BT has installed eleven touch screen desktop terminals and a plasma screen, and offers video conferencing and internet access facilities.

BT has also installed a 24-hour public access point behind a glass window at the front of the library. It employs inductive technology to sense where the window has been touched in front of the terminal.

Councillor Paul Walley of South Beds District Council told PublicTechnology.net: “The Dunstable CITIZONE is the first real opportunity for us to show-off and test our new approach for service delivery.”

It remains to be seen how many ‘customers’ use CITIZONE. Presumably, those who travel and queue to use the service will not have internet access. It is hard to imagine that these same people will be comfortable using touch screen displays, whether or not they employ ‘inductive technology’. If the scheme achieves its lofty aims, it should be applauded. A trial is welcome.

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University Collage London has built a three-dimensional model of 20 square kilometres of London. The model, funded by the Greater London Authority, is designed to help improve transport and planning in the capital. It has been developed to demonstrate how proposals for things like tall buildings and new transport systems can be shown visually to help the planning process. The model will allow the public to view exactly how a proposed development will effect an area and how it will look.

“We needed [a model] where you could put information in, such as crime levels or pollution,” said one of the projects architects, Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith. “Whatever you want, you can put into the model. For instance, the police can view a map with crime hotspots highlighted on it. That can be used to plan the optimum location of police resources across the city.”

Most of the model is made up of simple grey blocks representing the exact shape and scales of buildings, with more costly buildings photo-realistically rendered. Hudson-Smith added that ‘Virtual London’ will soon be publicly accessible on the GLA website, allowing people to visit parts of London online.

The Romanian tabloid newspaper Libertatea has fired a reporter after he made up a story about a couple naming their son ‘Yahoo.’ Reuters and several other news agencies, including this very weblog, picked up the story. The paper’s deputy editor, Simona Ionescu, said: “If it were real, it would have been a good story indeed.” Some things really are too good to be true.

Google looks set to launch a free broadband-based telephone service that allows users to speak via headsets and a home computer, The Times reported this morning. The US search engine will use established software developed by Skype. The London-based programmer’s software has already been downloaded 54 million times.

Telecommunication firms have the most to lose from the technology. BT, who currently connect 70 percent of UK households, has developed its own service but is reluctant to promote it heavily. The technology is a form of voice over internet protocol, VoIP, which exploits available internet capacity meaning calls are almost costless. The expense is in developing software and linking calls to the traditional phone network. Internet calls are currently less reliable and of a poorer sound quality than on traditional lines. These problems could be solved by investing in capacity.

Julian Hewitt, senior partner at Ovum, a telecoms consultancy, said to The Times: “From a telecoms perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw.” Google is ideally positioned to exploit its fifty percent market share of internet searches globally.

Mr Hewitt added that search results could be linked to its Net phone service, which allows customers to call a company by clicking on a link. Netimperative suggest that there are many ways for Google to extract value from this service. These range from charging users by the minute to employing their AdSense model, where companies pay the cost if a customer calls from a Google advert.

The Times was alerted by a job advert on Google’s website seeking a “strategic negotiator” to help the company to provide a “global backbone network.” A telephone service is the logical use of such a high-capacity international infrastructure. The firm could cheaply acquire some of the thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable that have been left dormant since the internet bubble collapsed in 2001.

However, search engine expert Mike Grehan told Netimperitive that Google’s desire for a network specialist may simply be down to the fact that “it has to has to distribute 30 terabytes of data around the globe in order to remain current in their network of data centres. I don’t know about them going into the phone business. But it would make sense to have their own data distribution network.”

The business model has been proved elsewhere; in Japan 10 percent of households use VoIP, including 4.4million Softband subscribers. Its success has hit traditional telecom firms revenue. The VoIP pioneer in the US, Vonage, offers unlimited calls from $24 (less than £13). Companies with high phone bills are increasingly switching to VoIP, especially for international calls.

Jeffrey Citron, chief executive officer and co-founder of Vonage, told The Cox News Service that the technology is now mature; calls are clear, easy and cheap enough for the mass market. Vonage has launched a service in the UK offering hardware to use VoIP over a standard telephone.

Vonage, the private New Jersey start-up, was the first to offer internet-based calling in the US three years ago. It is still the market leader with more than 40 per cent of the 1millon subscriber US market. However, despite predicting growth of 600,000 users this year, the company is an underdog. Cable firms can package the service to existing customers and telecom giants like AT&T are beginning to enter the market.

The big telecom companies “had the technology, but there was no reason to rush it into the marketplace until their business was at risk,” said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecommunications analyst to The Cox News Service. “Now that all of these companies are getting into it, I don’t think Vonage is going to remain in the lead,” he said. “Vonage had its day and it’s going to continue to be successful, but it’s going to be small.”

There is certainly a strong business case for Google to enter the VoIP market. The dominant position of Google’s search engine product means that it is uniquely placed to take advantage of internet telephone service technology. Whether Google enters or not, the world’s telecom and cable giants will make this an extremely competitive market.

An online auction hosted by Cardiff University has netted the Welsh public sector services a £5 million saving. Suppliers from all over Wales bid against each other to supply stationary and office ‘consumables’ for all public sector organisations in Wales. The auction, which lasted two hours, drove down the final price to £4.1 million, a 57 per cent saving from last year.

Greg Pope, MP for Hyndburn, is exchanging the traditional draughty community hall in favour of the comfort of the Commons for his constituency surgery in an online trial. Using the hyndburnlife.co.uk website, constituents can communicate directly with their local MP for one hour on Wednesday 26 January from 6pm. Mr Pope has promised that any questions left unanswered by the end of the surgery will receive answers by 2 February.

Greg Pope said: “As the local representative for Hyndburn I welcome any initiative that encourages the flow of information. I am constantly striving to improve my constituents’ access to information, about their rights and their community, and I welcome any opportunity for them to provide me with feedback.”

Tony Garner, Portal Development Officer for Hyndburn Life and moderator for the online surgery, said: “I am delighted that Greg has agreed to participate in this initiative, it’s a first for Hyndburn Life and I’m confident it will prove to be a useful source of communication all round.”

A Welsh primary school is considering whether to supervise its pupils with electronic tags due to a shortage of teaching assistants.

Under the proposed system, an alarm sounds if any of the 350-pupils leave Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Lonlas Primary School, Swansea, at any point during the day.

The Deputy Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Sara Reid, said: “I understand that schools need to worry about the safety of the children, but we are concerned about the effect this could have on the human rights of children.”

The school’s head teacher, Dyfrig Ellis, has started talks with a Dutch tag manufacturer. He said: “The tagging system does appear extreme, but I believe that it’s an option I have to consider when the safety of pupils is in question.”

The school’s governors are set to discuss the scheme with the local education authority and the wristband manufacturer. The scheme is attractive as it requires a single monitor in a central control room. The school has had trouble finding teaching assistants due to low pay and unfavourable working hours, and is reluctant to increase the teachers’ workload.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said:"It is about local solutions for local problems,” as schools can decide their own policy. The Welsh teaching union Ucac has called for responsibility to be transferred to education authorities.

The tags may cheaply keep the children in the playground, but children suffering bullying or accidents will have less protection than before. Similar concerns could justify the use of tags to limit freedom in other areas of life.

The days of faceless radio will soon be over as Nokia and Virgin have teamed up to produce ‘visual radio’. The technology developed by Nokia and Hewlett Packard will allow Virgin Radio to send images relating to their playlist to mobile phones. The listeners will be able to interact with the station by voting for songs, playing games and buying ringtones and tracks on the “visual interface.”

James Cridland of Virgin Radio told the Financial Times, “Radio is a great medium for emotion and immediacy. But if you can make it more permanent - keeping a telephone number on a mobile screen for example - it can be much more powerful.” The technology is due to be first tested in late March by KISS FM in Finland. The service will be launched by Virgin in the UK in the spring and provide 24/7 interactivity.

Spam is one of the annoying effects of the cyber revolution. Anyone with an email account can recieve hundreds of messages a week marketing anything from a Rolex watch to penis enlargers to hardcore porn. Much of this comes from the US, so to combat the inbox invasion the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) is flying out to Washington next month to discuss the problem. Their aim is to encourage the US to put national legislation in place.

Some, however, are sceptical about how effective the meeting will be. Steve Linford of Spamhaus, (a pioneering anti-spam project) said: “Not only are we still talking about these issues but we’re now doing so sat in the middle of an epidemic. This trip is a positive move, but I suspect they will go over there, see a couple of Senators and be told ‘yes, we’ll do something’ and it will end there.”

The UK anti-spam laws are less than effective than the Australian laws for example, and with very little power to prosecute criminals. Hopefully this could lead the way to worldwide anti-spam legislation.

For businesses of all sizes, cyber crime has become a major concern. In response, the Metropolitan Police are holding three Incident Response Seminars in London (for the princely sum of £495) to help businesses deal with computer security.

Each of the daylong seminars will be “aimed at specific audiences” including corporate managers and IT security professionals. The seminars will be based on the recent cyber crime experiences of law enforcement and industry, focusing on issues surrounding incident response; designing, managing and implementing effective response protocols.

Though the sentiment of the seminars is to be applauded the price tag seems to be a little high for some. Richard Starnes, UK president of the Information Systems Security Association said: “It’s an interesting concept but I’m absolutely appalled that the Metropolitan Computer Crime Unit is so underfunded that they have to enter the commercial realm conducting seminars to raise funds. What’s next? The Metropolitan Police commissioner standing outside of Scotland Yard with the Big Issue?”

Indeed.

Government Computing have reported that Wolverhampton City Council will encourage text message voting in this April’s City Youth Election.

Mel Potter, promotion and publicity officer at the Wolverhampton City Council’s Youth Division, said: “Huge numbers of young people already have mobile phones, and we hope that by offering the option of voting by text many more of them will take part.”

The council will use the e-txt system from Dynmark, which operates like Microsoft Outlook. The system sorts texts into a folder for each candidate, which eliminates the need for counting and provides an ongoing tally. “Because we can sort the messages by which number they came from, we can easily identify attempts at multiple voting,” added Ms Potter. It is hoped that that the move will also reduce costs.

If successful the council will extend the scheme to the United Kingdom Youth Parliament elections, which are organised by local authorities with no funding from central government.

Online voting for the Wolverhampton City Youth Council elections were introduced in 2003 to supplement voting by ballot box. The council plans to release the election telephone number for texting votes in the next few weeks. Such efforts are commendable, though it will be interesting to dicover whether they actually increases voter turn out.

A man who complained about receiving spam from a US company is now being sued…by his alleged spammers. According to an article on Silicon.com, the New Hampshire firm Atriks has filed a suit against Jay Stuler, claiming that they lost contracts after the complaints were made. They are also claiming for defamation, accusing Stuler of calling the company’s CEO a “criminal” and branding the company a “notorious spam gang.”

Stuler, who claims he received unsolicited emails from the firm for two years before complaing, says on his website: “They apparently are angry that spamming has become difficult for them and blame me.”

The latest weapon in the war on mobile phone crime has been unveiled. The Immobilise Phone Crime database site allows users to register their unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) serial number on to a secure police database.

The National Mobile Phone Crime Unit at Scotland Yard launched the new register, which will make the tracking of lost or stolen phones a lot quicker. Patrol officers and detectives investigating organised mobile theft will both use it to quickly determine if a phone is stolen.

“This means we can return more lost and stolen phones to their rightful owners and thereby charge more people with offences relating to mobile phones and put more offenders before the courts. I would encourage every mobile phone owner to join the register,” Says Tim Godwin, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

This is a great step forward, but rather than relying on individuals to register their phones it would be much better if phones were placed on the database at point of purchase.

The NHS is set to miss the deadline for implementing its flagship Choose and Book electronic hospital appointment selection system, according to a National Audit Office report expected tomorrow.

The watchdog is anticipated to report that some NHS trusts will not be able to offer patients and GPs a choice of date and hospital by December 2005. It will also criticise the speed with which the network of support systems is being implemented. A leaked letter from Margaret Edwards, director of access at the Department of Health, to health authority chiefs also predicts that some areas will not have fully integrated systems.

The system is a core part of the multibillion-pound national programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT). Last week the minister responsible for the NPfIT, John Hutton, and the director general of NHS IT, Richard Granger, spoke publicly about the system’s benefits. Meanwhile, NHS IT directors complained to Computer Weekly that they were expected to implement expensive and unwieldy interim software to meet John Reid’s commitment. The health secretary is expected to robustly defend the policy of providing choice when the NAO report is published.

Modern medicine with all its foibles is under the microscope with the government’s Yellow Card Scheme. For the first time patients, parents and carers are being encouraged to directly report ‘suspected adverse effects’ from drugs to the MHRA The results will be compiled on their website for patients, researchers and medical practitioners.

Health Minister Lord Warner said: “The Yellow Card System is recognised to be one of the best spontaneous reporting schemes for adverse drug reactions in the world.

“The data generated through the scheme can be used to further research and improve drug safety in the UK - patients can see the information used to make decisions about medicines safety and researchers can use this important resource to aid research.”

Patients can report side effects via the Yellow Card Scheme website or paper-based Patient Yellow Card report forms. Patient Yellow Card forms have been made available in 4,000 GP surgeries in the UK. If you would like a Patient Yellow Card form, please contact the MHRA on 020 7084 2000.

Directgov was meant to be a one-stop shop for all your government enquiries; it even describes itself as “the place to turn for the widest range of government information and services“. Sadly, it’s never delivered on that promise, mainly because it’s awkward to use, difficult to find information, and no-one knows about it.

Enter Directionlessgov.com. Directionlessgov.com cost a fraction of Directgov’s multi-million pound pricetag, and, despite overrunning its original schedule by a good 50%, was developed in a mere ninety-four minutes. In brief tests it seemed both faster and simpler to use than Directgov, and it certainly came up with the goods.

Large companies have always had the pick of government contracts but smaller compaines will soon be getting bigger slices of the pie. Soon businesses nation-wide will have access to local and central government contracts, thanks to an new web service. The Small Business Service and the Office of Government Commerce jointly announced the new scheme that will allow smaller companies to find and bid for government contracts.

99% of companies in the UK are considered small or medium (SME’s), and it is hoped the national portal will allow them access to numerous government tenders. Small Business and Enterprise Minister Nigel Griffiths said: “I want to make sure that small firms of all types have access to a slice of the public sector procurement cake. By developing a national portal to bring together buyers and sellers we can cut the time and effort that small firms spend hunting for contracts while increasing the options available to public sector buyers, helping to ensure better value for money for the taxpayer.”

The TV license dodge is a student tradition, like pot noodle and baked beans for breakfast. After all, it’s much better to save the money for the mobile phone bill. Now students may have to save for the dreaded licence anyway, if the government gets it’s way.

The UK licensing authority announced that it is planning to follow Germany’s lead in charging owners of phones that can receive live TV broadcasts. The German government will be extending their license fee from April to cover mobiles and PC’s with built in TV cards. Both licenses are aimed at young people who own no TV set but who do own mobile phones and broadband capable PC’s.

O2 and NTL are set to trial TV transmissions to mobiles in the UK this year and it is predicted that the markets will really hot up if they prove a success. Internet TV is booming, with more and more programs and channels available online. Including the ‘Millennium gig’ in aid of the victims of the recent Tsunami, due to be broadcast live across the web on the BBC.

In three weeks Iraq should hold it’s much awaited democratic elections. Across the world, the web is being enlisted to let expatriat communities in 14 different countries know they can have their say too. The ‘Out-of-Country Voting Program’ has been organised by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) using the web, radio, TV, posters and leaflets to ‘get the vote out’.

It is estimated that there are around 250,000 Iraqi’s living in the UK, 150,000 of which are of voting age, although there will be no exact data until voting registration is complete. Voting registration is taking place in London, Manchester and Glasgow from Monday 17 January to Sunday 23 January 2005. The vote itself will take place between Friday 28 January and Sunday 30 January between 08:00 and 17:00 GMT. More details can be found on the OCV website.

Iraqi citizens will also be able to vote in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iran, Jordan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the UAE, Britain and the US.

Peter Erben, IOM Iraq OCV Director said: “This is an historic Out-of-Country Election and we are looking forward to a high registration and voter turnout.”

Fingers crossed, that they have more success with over-seas voting than in the recent US elections.

Weird names don’t come any weirder than Yahoo Dragoman. Mr and Mrs Dragoman, a Romanian couple, have named their son ‘Yahoo’ (thankfully minus the exclaimation mark) after they met online and married after a 3 month affair. They decided to name their son Lucian Yahoo in tribute to the internet and his mothers father.

Modern policing is much like modern everything else, slow and hidden in a mountain of paperwork. Now, however, officers of the Lancashire Constabulary have become guinea pigs for the latest technology for the bobby on the go. 250 police officers and 30 support staff will be testing the new O2 Xda II pocket computers, following a previous six-month test involving only 30 officers. The device is aimed to let officers run backgrounds checks on suspects, receive briefings, access the Lancashire missing person’s database and complete some reports and activity logs. If the Lancashire trial is successful it is hoped that the system could be extended to another 1,500 members of the national police force.

Stuart Fillingham, Head of Lancashire Constabulary ICT, said: “It is envisaged that this will help officers to be more effective and visible to the communities by having to spend less time in the police station.” In a ‘pre-trial’ test, the time taken to register a missing person dropped from two hours to twenty minutes. The time saving system should allow more time for officers to be ‘on the beat’ and everyone will be glad to see the back of all that paperwork.

First it was hands free, now it’s keypad free. Samsung Electronics in South Korea have developed the first mobile phone with ‘motion-recognition’ capabilities. Using a ‘six-axis sensor’ to interpret human gestures, the phone lets users draw symbols and numbers in the air, which the phone will then dial, and a shake will end the call. The imaginatively named SCH-S310 is due to be released in South Korea in March.

Those among us who view their mobile as an extension of themselves will be delighted that they can interact with their phone on a whole new level. On the other hand, the notion of standing around in public and trying to draw numbers and symbols in mid air for your phone may not exactly appeal.

Ever wondered exactly why gangrene is green or how a lobotomy works? No, we haven’t either, but if the wonderful world of medicine is your cup of tea, the NHS has got you covered.

The 10 January saw the launch of the new ‘single search environment’ on the National Library for Health website. The search amalgamates the national and local resources of 500 NHS libraries across England. Dr Muir Gray, Secretary to the National Knowledge Service and Co-Director of the National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) said: “There are over 80,000 articles on bronchitis alone in just one source: PubMed, Doctors and librarians need to be able to power search such electronic resources alongside traditional sources to find the articles that are relevant to them… to deliver critical information to clinicians quickly.”

The software (handily open for public access) searches websites, full journals and ‘physical resources’, making information access even quicker for time-starved medics, concerned parents and hypochondriacs everywhere. The search results are easy to navigate, divided into ‘Guidance’, ‘Evidence’, ‘Clinical databases’, ‘Journals and Books’ and ‘For Patients’ so there is a little something for everyone. The NHL website is hoped to be able to provide an integrated resource of up to the minute information for all NHS staff. Anything to cut waiting times.

The days of missing urgent voicemail messages may soon be gone for good. Researches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing new software called Emotive Alert, which measures the speech patterns of a caller to determine their emotional state. The programme works by measuring the volume, pitch and speech rate in the first 10 seconds of a message and then sending a text message with an emoticon to let you know weather the message is happy, sad, urgent or formal. The idea is to use the system in phone exchanges and ‘smart answer phone’.

Stephen Furner, a researcher in human-computer interaction for BT says; “At the moment, communicating with machines is like an autistic experience. In the future, machines will know more about our emotions and respond in accordance with them.” In that vain, an Edinburgh-based company, Affective Media, will soon be selling software for cars that detect drowsiness and frustration in a driver’s voice when they ask the in-car navigation system for directions, and try to wake the driver up or calm them down. On the other hand, your car telling you to ‘chill out’ may prove not to be very soothing.

In practise, the Emotive Alert system could well run into some other problems. Tailored spam calls could artificially be altered to bump them to the top of your priority list or misinterpreted emotions could mean you miss important calls. The software would obviously be extremely useful in an emergency services call centre to prioritise calls. However, it may find difficulty when dealing with callers with autism, those who have trouble expressing emotions, or from that rare breed of person able to remain calm in any crisis. Sometimes there really is no replacement for human interaction.

Yesterday’s Times reports on a £20m scheme to create Europe’s largest active broadband community - in Shoreditch. The Shoreditch Wired Network will bring high-speed internet along with digital television and phone lines to a huge community that would otherwise have remained on the wrong side of the digital divide. The scheme has been developed by the Shoreditch New Deal Trust in partnership with IBM.

IBM are providing set-top boxes to every household allowing previously offline households to connect to the internet through their television. This connection will also allow householders to access a wide range of local community resources, including online NVQ courses, local classifieds, GP bookings, and community discussion forums. In addition to these services, the scheme is also promoting the group buying of utilities. By allowing residents to buy utility services in bulk as a group, they will receive a sizeable discount and thus a modest gain in their disposable income. That rise in disposable income could be enough to cover the £3.50 per week (approx.) of the network subscription fee. It’s not only residents that will benefit; businesses will be able to access a wide range of network services and business support, including the ability to check CCTV security systems online.

Shoreditch is home to over 1,000+ Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs), a third of which are in “knowledge economy sectors” such as design, IT and new media. Unfortunately, the area also is one of the most deprived areas in Europe - 40% of residents are “economically inactive” (ie. not making any income through work). The Wired Network aims to improve this situation. The online courses and support it will bring should help residents gain the skills they need to become part of the local knowledge economy that is situated on their door step.

The Shoreditch Wired Network is a strikingly well-rounded project, because it provides not only connectivity, but also hardware, services, and benefits to both businesses and individuals. As a result, it could turn out to be one of the most successful community broadband projects yet. The brief for the Network states that it “is self-financing and scalable outside of Shoreditch, across London and beyond". If the Shoreditch scheme is as successful as it promises, we could see similar projects across the country in the not-too-distant future.

The University of Southampton has recently made all its academic and scientific research output freely available online. The University’s ePrints service is a searchable archive of peer-reviewed research papers by scholars and scientists. Southampton has been using the ePrints system on an experimental basis since 2002. Now, its “Information Repository” will become “an integral part of the research infrastructure of the institution.”

The material available on ePrints would customarily be published in scholarly journals. The best research is published in the most prestigious journals - who often also hold copyright on it - and so only through subscription to these journals, or through the purchase of individual articles, can other academics obtain this information. This may sound surprisingly restrictive, but it’s necessary to appreciate the importance of guaranteeing the quality of the research. When an article is submitted for publication, it goes through what is known as a “peer-review": experts in the field read through the paper to confirm its accuracy and judge its significance. Peer-review, essentially, is a form of quality control. That quality comes at a price, though, and it’s a price that not all libraries (and even fewer individuals) can afford to pay.

Open Access, as the name suggests, aims to reverse that, by making academic papers easily available online. However, there are several issues that could be detrimental to the initative. Because research papers are to be submitted online for insertion into ePrints, it seems possible that peer-review could be avoided, and that could be detrimental to the overall quality of the archive. This is certainly not the intention of the ePrints system, though. The FAQ for the ePrints software even specifically states that “it is not directed at freeing the literature from peer review". Alongside such difficulties are the copyright issues that emerge when an already-published article is republished in another place. No doubt Southampton have already come up with solutions to these problems; they are, after all, hosting workshops for others interested in developing “large-scale Open Access projects".

On Friday we reported on Open Source in Venezuela; today Open Access in Southampton. Both projects have their fair share of obstacles to overcome, but could spearhead radically different attitudes to digital rights and the cost of information. 2005 could be the year in which digital divides will be replaced by open doors.

The Register reports today on a plan to move Venezuela’s government IT systems - from central government to the municipal level - to Open Source software. It’s a big move, and one that will take some time - up to two years in some cases. Intriguingly, an almost identical proposal was made in 2002, but never came to fruition - perhaps in part because of a letter from the Initiative for Software Choice, a coaltion of companies including Microsoft and Intel, warning the Venezuelan government of the problems Open Source could bring.

Open Source software is free to use and distribute, and so represents a huge saving for a small nation such as Venezuela. Venezuelanalysis.com, in this report, quotes former minister of Planning and Development, Felipe Perez Marti, as saying that the Vnezuelan government spent $7.5m on software licensing fees in 2004 - money that would be saved after a move to Open Source. And a move to Open Source benefits the internal economy, too. Instead of paying foreign companies such as Microsoft license fees, Venezuelan software firms and developers will instead be paid to develop software for government offices. There’s already an Open Source software industry in Venezuela, and the country even has its own Academy of Open Source Software, in Merida.

Open Source has many advantages, but large-scale migration to it, especially for governments, is a tricky proposal. Much commercial software, especially more specialised or esoteric products, have no Open Source equivalents, and so replacements have to be written from scratch. Re-training staff can also prove costly.

Could Open Source be a valid prospect for UK government? Perhaps. The Office of Government Commerce published a report last October into the viability of Open Source software for government. The report was positive; whilst not by any means recommending blanket deployment (as in Venezuela), the report suggested that in certain situations and environments, Open Source may be better or cheaper than commerical products. Several government bodies are already using Open Source software very successfully, on both workstations and servers. Where Open Source falls down is fitting into the eGov Interoperability Framework (eGIF), which is obviously crucial for any UK e-government project. Venezuela, with its comparatively simpler government IT systems, may just pull off the move to Open Source.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, SMS (text) messages emerged as an efficient and powerful communication tool. One of the primary advantages of SMS is that messages can often get through even when the signal is too weak to make a voice call, often making them the most accessible means of communication for those affected. Now, as focus shifts towards preventing (or at least limiting) such catastrophes in future, people are beginning to examine the possibility of a centralised text messaging system. The system would take the form of a central server, whereby a message sent to the server would be immediately redistributed (via either email or SMS) to relevant individual agencies.

Now, Taran Rampersand, a Trinidadian, and Dan Lane, a British text messaging guru, are creating such a system, which they call the Alert Retrieval Cache. The potential benefits are obvious. Mr Rampersand said: “Imagine if an aid worker in the field spotted a need for water purification tablets, and had a central place to send a text message to that effect. He can message the server, so the server can send out an e-mail message and human or machine moderators can e-mail aid agencies and get it out in the field. Or, send it at the same time to other people who are using SMS in the region, and they might have an excess of it, and be able to shift supplies to the right places.”

The idea for the system stemmed from the devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan in the Caribbean and US last September. It seems unfortunate that it takes disasters of such magnitude to force people into taking these issues seriously.

Videogaming and blindness do not tend to form an obvious association. Any attempts to make videogames accessible to the visually impaired have previously focused on ways in which standard games can be ‘read’ by the blind. But now, some producers have begun to create audio games - games based predominantly on aural rather than visual stimuli. There are currently around 200 titles, of which about 50 are commercial (the others are freeware or shareware).

Naturally, games based on sonic environments require a different approach on the part of developers. Certain elements are vital, according to Kelly Sapergia, who reviews audio games for the Canadian radio station ACB: “They need to have really distinctive sounds so that you can easily tell where you are,” he said. “This can be achieved using different ambient music and having the footsteps change depending on whether you’re on grass or mud.” One of the companies working in this field is Bavisoft, who make software exclusively for the blind and visually impaired. Bavisoft utilises sound engineers, musicians and vocal talent as well as programmers in order to create a fully interactive sound-based experience. There is hope that these games will also start appealing to sighted gamers.

However, the market is currently tiny, even among the visually impaired. It is estimated that around 3,000 audio games were sold in 2004 – a figure dwarfed by the millions of sales of conventional games. Richard van Tol, who jointly runs Audiogames.net, feels that the problem is public awareness: “Loads of blind people have computers, but not many of them know about audio games.” This is a shame, as these games are an example of a truly innovative approach to accessibility - it would be of greater benefit to the visually impaired if more companies employed similarly original techniques rather than relying on the same tired methods.