The University of Central Lancashire has created the new role of 'project champion for digital industries' as it looks to build strategic links between itself and the sector on a regional, national and international level.adding that
Lisa Harding has been recruited to take up the post and direct UCLan's 'University Knowledge Transfer agenda for digital and creative industries'
WIRELESS internet is spreading extremely fast. Today business travellers have over 286,000 hotspots around the world at their disposal, compared with 53,700 five years ago, according to JiWire, a mobile audience media company. Reflecting its early adoption of WiFi, America has most hotspots, although China is adding networks particularly rapidly. Rich countries with the most tech-friendly cultures (such as South Korea) figure prominently. Measured per person, Sweden and Britain offer the best hotspot penetration rates.
The European parliament has agreed to drop an amendment that was aimed at countering so-called “three strikes” laws, legislation that allows law enforcement agencies to shut down internet connections that have been allegedly used for illegal file-sharing .
Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, mash-ups, web 3.0, delicious…. where does it all end? Are all these new technologies really improving our lives? Or are they just a drain on our time and resources, keeping us away from the things that really matter….?
The time is ripe for developments in technology to change society for the better. There are unprecedented opportunities to solve some of society’s most complex challenges through the appropriate use of technology. But we must be careful to focus on substance not fads.
Unless we understand the impact of technologies on society, we may never fully realise their potential.
As global population looks set to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion, food production will need to double at a time where there are real concerns over the availability of energy, land and water as well as the challenge of climate change.
"People have been sticking things on walls for centuries, but there's now a real opportunity to change the business,In 10 years, and probably in five, the outdoor market will feel and look very different from what it does now.
"If you get the economics right, you can make digital work," citing plasma screens in Finland's largest shopping centre, which can change advertising to suit different groups of shoppers passing through at different times of the day.
In response to this growing sector and to gain a better understanding of it, together with identifying who is operating within it locally,
Digital Bury will inform, influence, advocate and promote the best interests of the Digital sector in the short, medium and long-term through events, web platform and active engagement with the companies, individuals and education.
1.4 billion people had Internet access and four billion used mobile phones, but people with mobile wireless devices were “no longer satisfied” with just consuming content created by television networks. They wanted to make their own images and communicate through social networking sites, he said.
We must ensure the iPod, iPhone generation is tuning in, not tuning out,
I’d rather invest in a company that will take advantage of the new opportunities of the internet, not seeing ravages in the future but instead growth and profit. I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.
changes social and economic practices,technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.
are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion.
Sometimes people need reminding of the basic laws of supply and demand. From a limited availability of journalism to more than you can ever read, any attempt to ’sell content’ must come up against this basic problem.
The evolution of the internet has produced a generation of students with "a preference for quick answers" and a "casual" approach to the evaluation and attribution of information,
expressed "strong reservations" about students' ability to critically evaluate information from the web.and another said that
"Universities are not controlling information any more. What they should be doing is supporting students in becoming much more critical thinkers."
consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level,"therefore it is quite feasible that
He writes: "I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular." Physical books, he says, "are toast," and that's "a good thing."
When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.
book chains are falling victim to the same disease that killed the independent bookstore. High-margin sales—big best-sellers that come in the back of the store in a shipping box and leave through the front with a customer in the space of a few hours or days—have migrated to other outlets.
The collapse of bookstores almost ensures that the Kindle will thrive.
As one news executive said, "We need to take staff to Web 2.0 and beyond – to make learning more nimble and flexible." This executive, after putting staff through training pilots, realized that multimedia literacy and a basic understanding of what it meant to work in a Web environment was what people needed – before they could go about learning the hardware.
The preference consumers have shown for digitized music and iPods doesn’t seem to translate to books. The usefulness of the iPod derives from its ability to shuffle songs that many people enjoy as background, more or less passively. On the subway I hear about a dozen songs each morning, and it pleases me that they are randomly selected from a list of several thousand. But I wouldn’t want my reading material served up that way. Generally I’m reading one thing at a time, and I benefit from the finality of that decision, when I leave home with one book. Books have the great built-in advantage of preventing me from surfing away elsewhere when the reading becomes arduous or requires an effort of concentration.
The 'modern technology is hurting our brain' argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It's based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.
the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.
he writes
Whilst we've done a lot of work with our writers over the past couple of years, helping them to transform themselves into digital journalists, so far we haven't talked very much about the future for the people who work on our production desks.
is to help today's magazine production staff to make the transition to these new online roles.
