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.