A report published by Booz Allen Hamilton with support from the international business school, INSEAD, and funded by the UK Government's Office of the E-Envoy considered: "The world's most effective policies for the e-economy". Whilst UK-oriented, the report provides a useful comparison between nine of the leading economies (the G7 plus Sweden and Australia) and their comparative adoption of electronic communication in their economy as a whole. The 188 page report is available free of charge as a printed copy and also online.
"An increasing number of users of innovative electronic information services want to access services with various devices and platforms, via different networks, at any time and from any place. The aim of this workshop was to exchange knowledge about how electronic publishing projects elicited user requirements and to enhance awareness of new techniques and methods for user needs analysis".
Presentations from the INFORM conference: Mobile Content Services Conference - "Content on the Move" that took place on March 14, 2003 in Utrecht, The Netherlands have been published online. The one-day event gave an overview of what is going on in the content industry with particular emphasis on the development of mobile services. The presentations were aimed at: publishers, content creators, content providers, syndicators, content distributors and researchers.
The speaker presentations are available from the conference web site. As the site is password protected please use the complimentary El.pub login information provided below. Instructions: Go to the box Premium Page Overzicht and select the Mobile Content Services Conference from the drop-down menu (give the username and password below).
ProTon (public research organisations transfer office network) is described as a pan-European network of technology transfer offices linked to universities and public research organisations. Supported by the European Commission's Gate2Growth initiative, the collective aim of both projects is to create an environment for the exchange of good practice in the area of technology transfer. Network numbers currently stand at 42, though the project is hoping that this will double.
Rightscom News Briefing is an electronic newsletter published by Rightscom, a company focused on digital rights management. The newsletter is delivered as an HTML-based email and includes brief abstracts on digital rights management products, services, articles, standards developments, news stories, and press releases. The news clippings are gleaned from a wide variety of published sources, amongst them El.pub. Published daily, and sent free of charge the newsletter is particularly aimed at senior managers in the music, movie and publishing industries as well as to major technology companies. To subscribe visit the Rightscom site or send an email to the address below.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 31, 2003, now online, reports that although: "Internet portals are virtually dead, a portal approach can tame the unruly chaos on internal company networks. Intranet portals overcome many Internet portal limitations, and might be the best hope for productivity and a unified user experience".
The 1st International Conference on Cross-Media Service Delivery (CMSD) scheduled for Santorini, Greece, on May 30-31, 2003. The event is being organised with the support of the European Commission IST Programme within the framework of the CONTESSA (Content Transformation Engine supporting Universal Access) project.
The programme has been published and aims to address a constituency of researchers, technology experts, electronic media publishers, digital content providers, as well as e-business companies, ISPs, network operators, broadcasters, and multimedia equipment and software developers. Furthermore, this conference is targeting activities which will be developed in the FP6 IST second call of proposals on Cross-Media content for Leisure and Entertainment. Participants will have the opportunity to meet with possible future partners and exchange ideas for proposals in this area.
VREfresh reports that Falanx; MEI/Panasonic, Neomagic, Sanshin and Swell Software have joined as Contributing Members of the Khronos Group. Khronos Members recognize that in order to deliver cutting-edge 3D applications; the authoring and deployment of the rich media that represents both sides of the graphics API equation needs to be developed synergistically. Working together; each Member participates in either one or both Khronos Work Groups in the development of OpenGL ES and OpenML; royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a huge range of platforms and devices.
The OpenML 1.0 specification was completed in 2001 and can be used, royalty free, by any adopting company that desires to integrate OpenML functionality into hardware or software products. The next-generation OpenML 1.1 specification will incorporate new features and services to further enhance dynamic media authoring.
Info@UK - is a monthly electronic information service which aims to act as a guide to major UK Information Society developments and news. The bulletin is compiled by the Information Management Research Institute, University of Northumbria on behalf of the British Council and is likely to be of interest to a wider audience.
 the first considers The Liberty Alliance, the project whose aim it is to solve the problem of unifying online identity, in which the author introduces the project and its goals for creating a federated identity framework.
 the second, a development of a previous article on web services security technology, describes how XML Digital Signatures and XML Encryption work, and how they may be applied to SOAP messages in order to construct an XML-aware firewall.
 develop new methods, eg. for the promotion of transnational clusters and/or measures to facilitate the development of the European Research Area.
The total indicative budget for this call is 74 million Euro over four years. The deadline for submitting proposal documents is 2 July 2003.
All available via the links below, and it should be noted that these are marked on the main page as final versions.
Any suggestions you have for content or extensions to the activities please let us know and we will try to help. Any useful information about the programme or related events you find, please send it in and we will publish it. Often national level initiatives or local actions in the IST programme are poorly advertised and we only hear of them by chance.
Search Engine Watch web site has published an introduction to RSS and how to create a simple news feed.
News that a smaller faster version of Mozilla is expected to be released in September based on work being carried out under the Phoenix project.
The European Commission is setting-up a group of experts to identify research priorities for Grid technology research in FP6. The expert group was formed as the result of a meeting held at the Commission on January 29-30, 2003 which considered: "Grid computing for complex problem solving". Further meetings are planned prior to help in the definition of next generation Grid architectures and enabling technologies including: data mining, knowledge discovery, simulation, collaborative working, virtual organisation and security. Grid computing is expected to feature in the FP6 second Call for Proposals.
The European Commission, European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and the three European standards organisations (CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI) have signed a joint set of guidelines for European standardisation activities. The move follows the realisation that a coordinated approach to standardisation is critical to the long-term viability of centralised standardisation activities. The Guidelines are expected to be published, "shortly", in the Official Journal of the European Communities in all official languages.
Vector Eye is a tool for vectorising images, producing logos and graphs. Available in English, French and Spanish it is described as, "a companion product for Illustrator, CorelDraw, Xara, WebDraw, Flash, Xstudio and all vector image-based editors".
The Embedded Linux Consortium is a group attempting to define, and get widespread agreement for, a specification aimed at promoting a single Linux development standard for mobile phones, handhelds and other "embedded" devices.
Apeera, a company which provides application management systems to mobile operators is attempting to develop technology that will enable mobile phone operators to track and manage the downloading of copyrighted material via a mobile handset.
AgentNews is an electronic newsletter based on information published on the AgentWeb site maintained by the UMBC Lab for Advanced Information Technology and COGITO group.