"EMI has signed a deal with YouTube that will allow its users to access videos by EMI artists. It means all four of the world's major music firms are now YouTube partners. The terms of the agreement should eventually allow users to incorporate recordings by EMI artists into their own projects. The deal follows a string of lawsuits by companies who accuse YouTube of allowing its users to pirate their copyrighted works. The biggest threat comes from entertainment giant Viacom Media which is suing YouTube for $1bn (£505m)."

Via the BBC

"Social music site Last.fm has been bought by US media giant CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m), the largest-ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition.
The online network was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users.
It allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips.Last.fm founding member Martin Stiksel said it was an "exciting opportunity" "

Link and info via the BBC

"Jaiku's main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence. For us, presence is about everyday things as they happen - what you're up to, how you're feeling, where you're going. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing presence updates with them on the Web and mobile."

Jaiku

"Good advice from the Gartner Group at their Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends this week.They gave 4 core messages for Leading Edge IT Change. Message #1 includes network mapping and network weaving.

Gartner said that Social Network Interaction is where leading-edge
companies will make their mark and wield their influence. It advised
CIOs and IT leaders to:

* Expose your trickiest business and technology challenges to open forums and learn how to identify real contributors.
* Solicit and respond to customers' input, feedback and new service ideas through communities of customers.
* Use social network analysis software to map out how information and ideas flow among your people across regions, continents and business entities. "

Via Vadis Krebs' blog Network Weaving

What a wiki is.

Explained in  simple plain English!

Thanks to Commoncraft.

[youtube MFdXTNykolo nolink]

John Breslin was interviewed by the Multime group in DCU for this documentary on Bebo recently. Enjoy the video (in two parts) above and below.

[youtube IG68OsczI08 nolink]

"Internet auction site eBay has bought StumbleUpon, a website that recommends other websites, for $75m (£38m). The deal means eBay will get access to almost 2.5 million registered users, who recommend sites to each other. Users get search results that are based on their profiles, which the site says gives them more relevant results than a regular search engine. EBay had $3.5bn in cash last month and has been on an acquisition spree buying firms such as Shopping.com and StubHub. StumbleUpon was founded in 2001 by three Canadian software engineers in Calgary.

It is free for users and generates revenue through advertising."

Via the BBC

Picture courtesy of Feedmecoolshit

"Google has launched a tool designed to make it easier for computer users to use online applications offline. One of the key limitations of web services such as e-mail, word processing and calendars, is that they require a net connection to function. Gears allows access to online data and applications inside the web browser when offline. The tool was launched at Google's global developer day, with 5,000 coders attending seminars worldwide. Google Gears is an open source plug-in for browsers, which the firm hopes will lead to the creation of new web standards."

Via the BBC

"Reboot 9.0 is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us...
2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.
Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers."

Reboot

"Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of New South Wales and a doctoral degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University and will be based out of Yahoo's New York City offices."

Via CNET

"Microsoft Corp.' s US$6-billion deal to buy Internet- marketing firm aQuantive Inc. puts the company in a position to play a bigger role in the nascent online video market and piles more pressure on competitors to make acquisitions of their own.

AQuantive will likely have fetched the largest price in a wave of online-ad consolidation, but as many as eight more deals could come down the pike for smaller, niche ad plays, with a range of US$300-million to US$500-million, industry executives and experts said yesterday.

The deal caps a frenzy of online advertising acquisitions sparked when Google Inc. agreed to buy DoubleClick Inc. for US$3.1-billion last month, followed by smaller purchases by Yahoo Inc. and marketing services company WPP Group."

A quantive deal sets up web video war

aQuantive

"ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine with information on over 34 million people and 3 million companies. ZoomInfo's semantic search engine continually crawls the Business Web - the millions of company websites, news feeds and other online sources - and identifies information on people, companies, products, services and industries. ZoomInfo then organizes this information into fresh, comprehensive, objective and easy-to-read profiles.

ZoomInfo is one of the most sophisticated automatic content generation systems in the world, with five patents and two patents pending. ZoomInfo's data is extracted and compiled by computer by combining proprietary Natural Language Extraction, Artificial Intelligence algorithms and Information Integration logic. "

Zoominfo

"Google this week began delivering the "universal search" - a breakthrough, it believes, in how people find information online - with the merging of videos, news, books, maps and images into the results of the average query.

This latest refinement sounds simple, but it isn't. According to the Californian technology powerhouse, it is a result of two years' work by more than 100 engineers and involved a major revamp of the company's software platform.

Yet this week's tinkering with Google's search code is a reminder from the company that it needs to keep running quickly to stay ahead of a pack of competitors. Among the pretenders is the Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales, who has set out plans for a collaborative, "democratic" search engine. He wants to build on the principles of his online encyclopaedia with a venture allowing users to vote and contribute towards the best responses for any given search query."

Via Read/Write Web

"Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. Riza and Melek told me that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis - search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant. 

One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia still has some human post-editing going on - so it isn't 100% computer powered at this point.

Hakia has two main technologies:

1) QDEX Infrastructure (which stands for Query Detection and Extraction)  - this does the heavy lifting of analyzing search queries at a sentence level.

2) SemanticRank Algorithm - this is essentially the science they use, made up of ontological semantics that relate concepts to each other."

"Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune along with Loic Le Meur gave a very interesting presentation at TechTalk Menorca on the future culture of blogging, social software and nomadic independents which they’re labeling The Moving Circus."

You can watch it here.

Via Coworking

"A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices.

The Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project aims to create the open source platform for initial release in October 2007.

The operating system will be developed by members of the Ubuntu community, along with staff from chip giant Intel.

Its development was prompted by the growth of power hungry portable devices that place new demands on software"

Via the BBC

"Dutch super director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls) has  been using Second Life for auditions. According to a comment on site 3pointD, the helmer is inviting folks to show off their virtual acting chops by replaying a scene from his picture Black Book."

"The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway will be contributing a significant part to the upcoming Semantic Technologies Conference in Silicon Valley, where it will present on various semantic technologies developed exclusively at the university. Earlier this month DERI set a world record in advancing the semantic, or intelligent, web by processing seven billion search query statements in fractions of a second.

Sebastian Kruk, a DERI researcher who specialises in e-learning research, will be demonstrating JeromeDL, an intelligent digital library that enables web users to contribute to as well as read digital content.

JeromeDL uses both the semantic web and social networking technology to organise these digital libraries and can be applied to e-learning, web archiving and e-government.

Also to be presented at the conference is ActiveRDF by Eyal Oren, an open source technology that aims to bridge the gap between emerging semantic web developments and existing data structures on the web.
This tool, which National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway said has elicited worldwide interest, will allow web developers to take advantage of the leading-edge advances in the semantic web using familiar software such as Ruby on Rails."

Via SiliconRepublic

"A free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed. Primarily aimed at children, Scratch does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages.

Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks. The digital toolkit, developed in the US at MIT's Media Lab, allows people to blend images, sound and video. "Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people - it's only for a special group with technical expertise and experience," said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT.

"We have developed Scratch as a new type of programming language, which is much more accessible." "

Via the BBC

"A book written by a US soldier about his experiences in post-war Iraq has won the Blooker prize for books based on blogs.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell, walked off with the $10,000 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize. The prize comes as the US government is clamping down on soldiers blogging without prior content approval. "My War may be the last frank and open military blog blook", said Paul Jones, chair of the Blooker judges.

Arianna Huffington, columnist and blogger who was among this year's Blooker judges, said Buzzell's book was "endlessly surprising... delightfully profane". She said it was "an unfiltered, often ferocious expression of his boots-on-the-ground view of the Iraq war". Buzzell started blogging shortly after being posted to Iraq, writing his website from a cyber cafe in an army tent. "

The Blooker Prize

"Amidst an atmosphere of mainstream media buzz over the practical applications of semantic technology, Wilshire Conferences announces the keynote speakers scheduled to appear at the upcoming Semantic Technology Conference, May 20-24 at the Fairmont San Jose, in San Jose, California.For the first time in its three-year history, this year's Semantic Technology Conference features two interactive keynote panels aimed at providing attendees with a comprehensive look at the players and products that comprise the current (and future) state of the industry. These panels will showcase key customers, developers and entrepreneurs -- as well as leaders in the venture capitalism sector -- who have already made major commitments to semantic technologies in their product and service offerings, applications and investment portfolios. "

Business Leaders,Technologists,Investors provide multi-faceted look at Semantic Web Technology

Semantic Technology conference

"Most tech enthusiasts have wondered why web browsers on mobile phones suck so much. Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker has been thinking about it too, and looking at how Firefox can be ported to mobile platforms."

Interview with Mitchell Baker CEO of Firefox

"Microsoft thinks the advertising business model for traditional media — venues where advertisers still channel most of their spending — will fall apart faster in the coming five years.

Meanwhile, it's positioning itself as a prime location for the kind of interactive, targeted advertising that is defining the Web and other digital media.

Chairman Bill Gates spelled out his vision of the future of media Tuesday, in front of about 1,000 advertising professionals in Seattle for Microsoft's Strategic Account Summit of its top advertising customers."We're saying newspapers will go online, and there will be massive innovation that comes out of that," Gates said. "We're saying that TV, the biggest ad market in the world, will completely go online and have the kind of targeting interaction that you only get out on the Web today."

Media to move to Web

Picture courtesy of  Pixeltrix

"The Oculas was created by British designer Lee McCormack in 2002 as a solution to define boundaries between work and leisure. The resulting product was an innovative piece of design that provided the user with a unique immersive environment dedicated to the experience within."

The Oculas

"The current Business Week section on CEO Guide to Technology is focused on the semantic web. Items include

• Taming the World Wide Web - A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data
• Weaving a Web Around Information - Semantic Web technology allows companies to provide context for data, helping them distinguish or connect info from disparate sources
• Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee - Neal Goldman, CEO of Inform, explains Semantic Web technologies that are making it easier to categorize and find information on the Web
• The Future of the Web - The next big thing in data management takes skill, time, and experience. These tips should help you get the most out of the Semantic Web
• A video interview with Neal GoldmanCEO of Inform in which he “explains Semantic Web technologies that are making it easier to categorize and find information on the Web” "

Ceo guide to the Semantic Web

Via Tim Finin

Picture courtesy of Business Week

"As well as homing in on visual feasts around the globe, users of Google Earth may soon be able to listen to the sounds that accompany them. A Californian company has created software that can layer relevant recorded sounds over locations in Google Earth, New Scientist reports. Wild Sanctuary has over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from all over the world. The firm is in talks with Google, although no official agreement has yet been made. Its director, Bernie Krause said: "A picture tells a thousand words, but a sound tells a thousand pictures."

Via the BBC

[youtube 3IcwG0jUFxU nolink]

"The Internet television startup Joost has an ideal pedigree for a company that hopes to disrupt the world of TV—its founders have been behind two similar upheavals, first with Kazaa (music sharing) and Skype (Internet telephony). In both cases Niklas Zennström, (41, from Sweden) and Janus Friis (30, from Denmark) were not the first in the field, but they built top-notch peer-to-peer networks that stood out. Kazaa cost them more than $100 million in a settlement with the record labels. Skype brought them $2.6 billion when eBay purchased the company, for which they still work. That money is seeding Joost, the ad-supported-via-Internet television service that was launched on May 1. The two are based in London, but they were in New York on launch day, when they sat down with NEWSWEEK's Steven Levy for a rare interview."

"You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time. "

Google Web history

"In a development laden with irony and emblematic of a global economic shift, IBM, the world’s largest IT firm, is getting a roasting from American tech workers, including its own employees, for moving tens of thousands of jobs to India.

Three decades after the multinational known by the nickname Big Blue was booted out of India for business infractions, it is being booed by the American tech community for favouring India in what angry workers say is a cost-cutting misadventure.

The latest bout of outrage and venting was sparked after a column by a controversial tech columnist who writes under the name Robert Cringely , who disclosed on a public television website that IBM, according to his friends in the company, was getting ready to lay-off a staggering 150,000 workers in the US, with many of the jobs going to India."

Via the India Times

picture courtesy of Lonely planet

Via Red Herring

"Russell Grant got “the tap on the shoulder” a few weeks ago.

 He joined 6.8 million other unemployed U.S. workers when he was laid off from his job as a system administrator at a La Jolla, California, biomedical firm. But Mr. Grant’s pain was Jake Ludwinski’s gain.That’s because Mr. Ludwinski is the co-founder of LayoffSpace.com, a social networking site launched Friday that aims to become the Myspace.com for the jobless.Though the site, which Mr. Ludwinski founded with his brother Maciej, lacks the music and videos of Myspace, LayoffSpace offers tools to post pictures, publish blogs, form groups, and send instant messages to other job hunters. With the modest startup costs typical of Web 2.0 companies, the brothers bootstrapped the startup, shopping for white-label, social-networking software before settling on Austin, Texas-based Small World Labs. The brothers plan to introduce advertising once the site build traffic—hopefully in a few months."

FAQ about the Semantic Web via Digg.

Via the BBC

"The concept is called social lending and the idea is to introduce people who need money to people who want to lend some - cutting out the middlemen like banks and mortgage companies. Zopa is a pioneer in this space. For the past two years it has allowed members to borrow and lend on their own terms. Alison Daniel is an HR Advisor at a magazine publishing company who was looking for a loan to pay her overdraft.

"I looked at my bank and other various banks where I could get a loan and then I heard about Zopa, went on to their online calculator and the rates came up really cheaply so I opted for Zopa," she said.

The site itself is very easy to use. After both the borrower and the lender have registered, they choose what rate at which they would like to borrow or lend. If the rate they choose corresponds then the site brings them together "

Again congratulations to Andreas Harth and Aidan Hogan on their Super Fast RDF search engine.

Via Slashdot

"The Register is reporting that Irish researchers have developed a new high-speed RDF search engine capable of answering search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second. "'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. 'These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them."

SWSE

http://www.harth.org/~andreas/

Via Silicon Republic

"Nortel has opened its global Customer and Technology Centre in Galway today. The company has invested US$5m in the centre which will be responsible for developing multimedia applications for customer contact centres. The technology that will be developed in Galway will focus on utilising multimedia capabilities such as instant messaging and video for use in contact/call centres.

The centre, situated in the Mervue campus, was opened today by Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Quality and Law Reform Frank Fahey TD. The opening was attended by Nortel’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) president Darryl Edwards."

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single8269

Via Silicon Republic

"Some 45pc of European TV viewers are watching their programmes online, according to a study released today by Motorola. The study of 2,500 broadband users from the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain showed that the French were the highest users, with 59pc tuning into their TV programmes via the internet.

At 33pc, Germany had the lowest number of broadband users using their connection for watching TV shows.
The study also suggested that TV owners were using their sets for much more than just watching programmes, with nearly a third of those surveyed using it to attach a digital camera and download and view photos.
"These results show that viewers across Europe are no longer satisfied with fitting into schedules dictated by broadcasters and are turning to the choice and flexibility offered by TV over the internet," said Karl Elliott, marketing director for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) in Motorola's connected home solutions division.

"We are witnessing a nation of citizen schedulers who are in control of their entertainment, allowing them to decide not only what they watch but exactly how and when they want to watch it."
Reasons for popularity of internet protocol television (IPTV) included 35pc of viewers saying that they wanted to be able to pause, rewind or fast-forward live television.
Some 45pc of those surveyed said that they felt by 2012 they would be using their TV set as a means of communication by making video calls."

Via the BBC

Web radio station Pandora is to block most non-US users accessing its service because of licensing constraints. Mounting pressure from record labels has forced the company to stop streaming music to countries where licensing deals have not been agreed. In the US, web music is licensed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but to stream legally abroad, licences must be agreed with the rights holders.

Pandora founder Tim Westergen said he was "deeply sorry" to non-US users.

Via Silicon Republic

"There is a threat of a growing digital divide between teachers and their increasingly tech-savvy students that must be bridged as soon as possible, a leading Cisco education expert told siliconrepublic.com. Dr Michelle Selinger is networking giant Cisco’s executive adviser on education for Europe and her work involves research and dissemination of effective solutions for e-learning in all aspects of education and training.

Selinger has a strong teaching background, working in the past as a secondary school maths and economics teacher as well as with the Open University and latterly the University of Warwick where she was the director of the centre for New Technologies Research in Education.

Speaking with siliconrepublic.com Selinger said: “We believe connectivity is important in the context of education because it can raise the quality of education as well as improving children’s contribution and making them feel involved.”

Selinger warned that the gulf between teachers not trained in new technology and their students who are au fait with text messaging, instant messaging and Bebo is becoming increasingly obvious.

“Teachers and schools are not aware of the tools the kids use – ranging from Bebo to Second Life, Wikis and blogs – and view them as distractions rather than enablers. Their attitude is to leave them outside the school gates. Because they don’t use the technology themselves they are not confident about technology.”

Picture courtesy of cosn

Via Silicon Republic

"Today researchers at National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway working on the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) announced that they had set a world record in advancing the intelligent web, processing seven billion RDF statements in fractions of a second. SWSE is essentially a search engine that uses machine intelligence to trawl the web, filter through huge amounts of data and return relevant, precise results.

An RDF statement is the way in which the semantic web breaks down a search query into several different representations, according to its subject matter.

Currently, search engine technology means that in order to find information on the web, a person has to feed in the information into a search engine and then sort through suggested links to find the pertinent information.

The Semantic Web is a way of enabling the computer to carry out these tasks without the need for human direction.

Andreas Harth, a key researcher who has been working on the SWSE project for the past three years, said: “We are currently working on realising inferencing - making the web truly intelligent - and we have results already."

Picture courtesy of SWSE

Via SiliconRepublic

"There is still a considerable regional gap between Irish businesses that can get broadband access to the internet and those that can’t, with businesses in the Connaught region more likely to have a dial-up connection than their city slicker counterparts in Dublin. While 77pc of businesses in Dublin and 67pc of businesses in the rest of Leinster have broadband, only 58pc of their counterparts in Connaught and Ulster have access to broadband, according to a survey commissioned by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg).

Around 88pc of SMEs and 100pc of corporate operations in Ireland now have internet access. However, collectively the total number of businesses in Ireland with actual broadband internet access amounts to 69pc.
The survey found that while 70pc of Irish SMEs have actual broadband, this is somewhat less than their UK counterparts at 79pc.
17pc of Irish SMEs are still on dial-up and 9pc are on ISDN, compared with 12pc and 4pc respectively in the UK."

Picture courtesy of usda.gov

via The Irish Times

Carlow yesterday declared itself "Ireland's first Wi-Fi town" as it launched a new wireless broadband internet service.

Officials claim that the pilot project, which is "three years ahead of Dublin's proposed Wi-Fi network", offers business and domestic users "faster and cheaper" access to the internet than Eircom.

The service, developed jointly by e-net, a Limerick-based technology company, and Carlow County Council, will initially provide coverage for 50 per cent of businesses and 10 per cent of residences in Carlow town.

Conal Henry, chief executive of e-net, said the service would be expanded "if this commercial trial is successful" and could then be launched in another 27 towns. "Wi-Fi provides another way to deliver broadband in places where other providers might not bother about," he said.

Plans to extend the service to other towns is dependent on "appropriate funding". The Carlow start-up project has cost €3 million, with 90 per cent of the cost provided by the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources and 10 per cent by the local authorities.

Picture courtesy of CountyCarlow