By David Sims
The Universal Service Fund’s a hungry beast, as of September it had doled out $4.7
billion to rural and other underfunded carriers. It gets its money now from long-distance,
wireless, pay-phone and telephone services kicking in a tithe of their revenues
which, of course, come directly from Joe Consumer’s wallet as an extra fee on
the bills.
The question is what contributions, if any, VoIP providers should be making. Vonage charges a “regulatory recovery fee” of $1.50 on each customer phone number to contribute to the fund, but there isn’t any industry-wide policy on VoIP contributions.
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With Visto Mobile, Vodafone K.K. can offer two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts
and calendars to select phones. Mobile users can check e-mail, make
appointments or update contact lists away from their desks.
Politeness is a big characteristic of Japanese society, and Shinkichi Kawakami,
Executive Officer, Enterprise Business Unit Director, Vodafone K.K. was
appropriately polite when he said “I am entirely convinced that Vodafone Office
Mail is the perfect service to enable Japanese workers to be just as productive
outside the office as they would be sitting directly in front of their office
PC.”
The Visto platform enables two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts and calendar updates to devices across “all operating systems,” company officials say, including Symbian, Palm, Microsoft Windows Mobile, J2ME MIDP 2.0, IMAP4 and SyncML.
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SchoolWeb 2.4 is designed to create a “user friendly, Internet learning environment for teachers and students,” company officials say. Combining online courseware with a virtual Internet library, SchoolWeb says it provides “all the tools required to create a high-quality learning environment for students and teachers in the digital age,” according to company officials who probably don’t talk like that in real life.
The SchoolWeb Learning Management System allows users to create or view lesson plans for distribution to students. This is combined with SchoolWeb’s Learning Object Repository, which stores “all relevant information” in a searchable electronic library.
Put together, these two tools help the user build and store a reusable asset
base of online courses and reference material, for access by students and
teachers, at home or at school. SchoolWeb is marketed as increasing both
teacher productivity and student access to educational information, and sounds
like a real boon to homeschoolers as well.
For schools – or homeschoolers – in rural or remote locations, SchoolWeb network server systems provide high-speed internet service to locations that have limited access to broadband.
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·The average number of IMs sent per user per day will increase from 37 IMs in 2005, to 94 IMs in 2009.
·The percentage of consumer-only users of public IM will decrease from 70% in 2005, to 4% in 2009 due to the increasing presence of IM in the corporate space.
·European e-mail traffic is set to rise from 26 billion messages per day in 2005, to 49 billion messages per day in 2009, growing at an average yearly growth rate of 17%.
·Europe’s total policy management installed base is expected to grow from 16 million users in 2005, to 130 million users in 2009.
·Europe’s e-mail archiving installed base is expected to increase from 7 million users in 2005, to 90 million users by 2009.
·Revenues for the total compliance & e-mail
archiving market in
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Rambus has also joined the RDL Alliance, a program formed and chaired by
Denali. The goal of the alliance is to promote the standardized usage of RDL in
the development and delivery of IP products used in system-on-chip designs.
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