« March 2, 2008 | Main | March 4, 2008 »
A Coke, Collaboration and a Smile
Coke employees will now be collaborating using Microsoft's communications and collaboration suite which integrates software and web services.This must have been a large dollar deal because even Bill Gates had some comments to share about this Coke purchase:
"Coca-Cola Enterprises operates in an environment where better collaboration and communication can deliver a real strategic advantage. By providing the flexibility to manage software over the Web or from servers managed on-site, Microsoft Online will help Coca-Cola Enterprises drive greater efficiencies and enable employees to connect to each other more effectively than ever before."
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Virginia Court: Spam is not Protected Speech
Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.Jeremy Jaynes, a North Carolina, resident made Spamhaus' top 10 list of spammers, Jaynes was arrested in 2003, before the CAN SPAM act was passed by Congress. Jaynes was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed the conviction. This past Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld that conviction, but the vote was a narrow 4-3.
Over 50,000 spam e-mails were presented by the prosecution but Jaynes is thought to have sent millions per day in the summer of 2003.
The defense said that the Virginia Computer Crimes Act Violates the U.S. Constitution and specifically the right to free anonymous speech. The court said that your free speech is not protected when you are scamming the public.
The court case was a close one as there was concern about the wording of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act where it refers to unsolicited bulk electronic mail which is thought to be overbroad.
Jayne's original sentence of nine years was upheld and here is a great article for more.
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TMCnet Services
In an effort to allow TMCnet readers easy access to the breadth of TMCnet services such as the personalized MyTMCnet and TMCnet Mobile, TMCnet has launched a new TMCnet Services page which will allow you to instantly access the specific services you need access to.
As always, it is our pleasure to provide our growing communications and technology global online community with news, opinion and analysis that helps you you stay up to date and make better purchasing and partnering decisions.
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Why are Finnish Students so Smart?
Interestingly, high school students in Finland get about half an hour of homework nightly and don't have sports teams or proms to distract them.
Finnish students placed at the top of 15-year olds taking tests in 57 countries whil U.S. students finished in the middle of the pack or around C level.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
The article is definitely worth a read if you worry about U.S. competitiveness in the future.Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.
Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show "Beverly Hills, 90210."In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.
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AT&T U-verse Improves
Today I was perusing a press release from AT&T touting the new HD channels they will be offering in Fairfield County, Connecticut as part of their U-verse offering. This release was of special interest since this county is where TMC headquarters are located.
What struck me in the release however is not the new HD channels which for the record are WPIX HD (CW-NYC), WTXX HD (CW-Hartford/New Haven), WNET HD (PBS), WWOR HD (My Network-NYC), and WCTX HD (My Network-Hartford/New Haven) but instead one paragraph of the release that would have seemed unheard of ten years ago.
Specifically:
AT&T is the only national provider to offer a 100 percent Internet Protocol-based television (IPTV) service, making AT&T U-verse TV one of the most advanced television offerings available anywhere. AT&T is deploying next-generation video services, including AT&T U-verse TV, as part of its mission to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else.
It is this reference to 100% Internet protocol that got me because when the first issue of Internet Telephony Magazine was launched back in 1998, service providers immediately shot down the whole concept of IP telephony and said it was bad... They stated a whole list of reasons why it didn't make sense. A number of prestigious analysts and major hardware vendors did the same in fact.
It is funny that IP has now become the weapon of the underdog in some senses.
in other words, when large telcos were competing with IP communications, it was bad... Now that they are using it to compete with cable companies, it is good and better than cable in fact.
But history aside, it is great to see that IP communications is enabling competition, where there was none. The concern of course is now that consumers have high-speed broadband, will they buy their TV service from phone or cable cable companies in ten years or will it be Google and Apple supplying television service? I would have to think that service providers are going to lose a lot of business to "broadband TV" companies that don't have the same infrastructure costs they do.
This has obvious ramifications for service providers who are spending fortunes to roll out IPTV networks today. We will see how this battle shapes up over this time period but if you have to bet on a winner in the race to build the TV network of the future, one imagines the company with the biggest advertising network has a serious advantage. Of course today, this company is Google and part of the reason for the Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft is to increase the size of their advertiser network.
Again, this will be fun to watch and as always, increased competition is good for consumers.
See also:
FCC: Worry about TVoIP not Cable
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