The loss of Internet access in Myanmar has slowed the tide of photos and videos shared with the rest of the world but people outside of the troubled country continue to use new media sites and other technologies to protest military activity in the Southeast Asia country. ADVERTISEMENT
Reporters without Borders and the Burma Media Association reported that the government cut off all Internet access in the country on Friday morning and they said that all Internet cafes in the country also have been closed. The Web site of the Myanmar Post & Telecommunications, the government-run telecommunications provider, appears to be down. But Burmese and other interested people around the world continue to discuss the issue online and use the Internet to organize opposition to the military crackdown. The Democratic Voice of Burma, a Web site run from Norway, is posting reports of activities in the country. Ko Htike, who lives in London, had been posting notes and photographs from people in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), until the Internet connection went down. Those sites have been crucial in the reporting of both the protests staged by monks in Myanmar and the reaction by the government which sent in the military to stop the protests. Reports of the number of dead range from ten to hundreds. The Facebook group, "support the Monk's in Burma," currently has nearly 128,000 members, with new members joining rapidly. They're using the site to organize a day of protest around the world. The page also has hundreds of photographs attached, including many that appear to have been taken in Myanmar. The combination of the broader penetration of Internet access and the availability of personal media, like cameras and computers, is what has allowed the broad-based creation of news beyond the traditional news organizations, said Kirsten Foot, an associate professor at the University of Washington and the co-author of the book Web Campaigns. But the Internet is not the only technology that can help the outside world monitor what is happening in Myanmar. The Association for the Advancement of Science has already analyzed satellite images, that it says, document and corroborate accounts of specific instances of destruction of villages and of a growing military presence in specific areas and forced relocations in Myanmar from the middle of last year through early 2007. Since the recent military activity in the country, satellites have been deployed to collect new images of the country's urban areas, the AAAS said. Without Internet access to the country, the images could be crucial in understanding the level of military deployment there. Still, it's unclear if the satellite images and the upswelling of protest and support online will have any influence on the Burmese government. But in a "twisted way," it might be good news that the Burmese government has cut off the Internet, said Foot. "If anything, it shows that the government in Burma is sensitive to international pressure and therefore they don't want what's happening to be seen internationally," she said.
Configuring a newly bought laptop with OEM installed Windows Vista Premium.
In an attempt to initialize Windows Media Center(curiosity).
I encountered this screen What did I expect to when I clicked the middle button with the text "View the Privacy Statement Online". I was hoping to see the browser window popping up and displaying the Privacy Statement ‘Online’, but instead I got this screen.
The link mentioned here can’t be clicked or copied. So you need to copy it character by character to your browser to get to a longish privacy document. I give up trying to configure Windows Media Center.
Tarundua, October 01, 2007 04:06 GMT+01
More than $23.6 million in Department of Homeland Security grants awarded to the state since 2005 are sitting unspent in Colorado Department of Local Affairs coffers.
Grant allocation totals released by the office of Gov. Bill Ritter last week show 38.3 percent of the $61.6 million in grant funds allocated through the Department of Local Affairs in 2005 and 2006 have not been spent as of June 30.
The leftovers of the 2005 grants, which total $7.3 million, expire March 31; the leftover 2006 grants, which total $16.3 million, expire June 30.
GJ Sentinel, October 01, 2007 03:19 GMT+01
Cablecom. (Bloomberg News)
LONDON: In the film “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey plays a cable television installer who goes to great lengths to befriend a customer, giving him a free, unauthorized service upgrade. In the real world, American cable companies may be less eager to please, but nonetheless they dominate the pay-TV and broadband businesses.
In Europe, by contrast, “in most countries we are still the little guy,” said Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global, which owns cable networks in a number of European countries, as well as Asia, Australia and Latin America. But now the European cable business wants to raise its profile, with Liberty Global and other investors trying to persuade consumers, content providers, competitors and regulators alike that the cable guys are on their side.
“Usually the cable company is the one that's providing the innovation in the market,” Fries said. “But as an industry, we are probably under-represented and underappreciated in Europe.”
Actually, the size of the cable business, as well as the level of innovation, varies widely from market to market across Europe. More European households - about 63 million - get their pay-TV from cable than from any other source.
But in countries like Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where cable is nearly ubiquitous, it is largely in the form of old-fashioned analogue connections. Less than one-quarter of European cable TV connections are digital, compared with about half of those in the United States, according to Forrester Research.
Even in markets where cable is predominantly digital, like Britain, cable has been left behind by satellite and free, over-the-air digital TV systems. Meanwhile, telecommunications companies have been more successful than cable companies at selling European customers bundled services like broadband, telephone calls and digital television.
“While cable is the dominant television technology throughout the region, there has been a lot of difficulty upgrading it to digital,” said Ted Hall, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, a research company.
After a round of consolidation fueled by private equity deal makers, analysts have said that European cable companies may be in a better position to make the investments in networks, content and marketing that could help them compete with telecommunications and satellite companies.
Last year alone, the three leading cable operators in France merged into one nationwide provider, Numericable, and the two biggest cable companies in Britain got together to form a company now called Virgin Media. Another operator with national scale was formed a year earlier when a Spanish cable company, Ono, acquired the cable operations of a telecommunications company, Auna.
Private equity has taken an active role in the consolidation, with several of these companies helping to finance the deal in Spain. Private equity firms also control Numericable and the leading cable company in Germany, Kabel Deutschland, along with smaller operators in a number of other countries.
Liberty Global, a spinoff from the media empire of the American cable entrepreneur John Malone, has also been busy. It recently pulled out of France, Sweden and Norway, markets where analysts said it had little hope of building a dominant position, but it acquired market leaders in Switzerland and Ireland, among other acquisitions.
There has been speculation that Liberty Global, the largest international cable business, might be interested in building up its European presence by acquiring Virgin Media, which put itself up for sale in July but put the process on hold in August amid the turbulence in financial markets.
“We'll see if that asset becomes available again and then look at it if it does,” Fries said. “It has some interesting attributes.
“We're also examining opportunities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And in certain markets in Western Europe, we'll take a look at things that come available.”
Analysts have identified Germany as potentially attractive to Liberty Global, since recent developments have suggested that a long-awaited consolidation of this most fragmented of European cable markets is under way.
While the number of cable operators has been whittled down to one in several European markets, an estimated 4,000 companies are involved in the business in Germany, according to Cable Europe, a trade group. Three of them, known as Level 3 operators, own much of the network infrastructure and some connections to consumers; most of the rest, called Level 4 providers, operate only the final link from, say, an apartment building to a customer's home.
Regulators created this separation in an effort to limit the power of Deutsche Telekom, which originally built the cable network but was not allowed direct access to customers. Deutsche Telekom was later required to sell the network, which is now in the hands of Kabel Deutschland, Unity Media and Kabel Baden-Württemberg.
Posted Sep 30th 2007 4:44PM by
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LONDON: Trusting ads - relatively
Among U.S. consumers, the word most closely associated with advertising is “false.”
That disquieting finding - for marketers, at least - comes from a trawl of blogs, social-networking services and other online discussion forums by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which measures consumers' brand perceptions on the Internet.
The word association project was carried out in conjunction with a broader survey by Nielsen of consumer attitudes toward advertising in 47 countries. That study showed that consumers typically place more trust in recommendations from other consumers than in other advertising.
“The advertising industry has to do better work, and it has to do a better job at communicating the value it brings to consumers,” said Jonathan Carson, co-founder of BuzzMetrics, which is part of the market research company Nielsen.
The picture is not all doom and gloom for marketers or for media owners reliant on advertising, however. The study showed, for instance, that consumers in developing markets still have relatively high levels of trust in advertising, even if their counterparts in developed countries are more cynical. In the Philippines and Brazil, for instance, 67 percent of consumers said they generally trusted advertising.
The Danes, by contrast, appear to be a skeptical bunch, with only 28 percent saying they trusted advertising. Many other European nationalities were also at, or near, the bottom of the list, though Americans still appeared relatively trusting, at 55 percent.
That is good news for the advertising economy, because much of the growth in ad spending is expected to come from developing markets in coming years. While marketers in developed countries worry that consumers are recoiling from advertising, such concerns do not appear to be an issue yet in places like Brazil.
“Advertising is newer in those markets, so the cynicism hasn't built up yet,” said Carson, of Buzzmetrics. “In developing markets, advertising is seen more as a conveyor of useful information. In more developed markets, people don't need it to play that role. They have too much information already.”
Even in developed markets, some media still appear to benefit from relatively high levels of trust. Newspaper advertising, for instance, is trusted by 63 percent of consumers, according to the survey, with North Americans and Latin Americans particularly showing faith in it. Only half of the respondents in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa said they trusted newspaper ads.
Television also did relatively well, with 56 percent of respondents worldwide saying they trusted it. Consumers in Latin America, where television shows featuring the best ads are a staple of prime-time schedules, were particularly well disposed toward television spots; Europeans less so.
Consumers appear to be wary about some new kinds of advertising, despite - or, perhaps, because of - the rampant growth in online advertising and other digital marketing. The format that fared worst, with only 18 percent of respondents saying they trusted it, was advertising in cellphone text messages, which in many countries can be done only if a marketer has obtained consumer permission.
Online banner ads and ads sold by search engines also fared poorly.
“The positive thing about these new digital channels is that they are extremely scalable,” Carson said. “You can get a very high reach at a low cost, compared with traditional media. But it's tempting to abuse it.”
If consumers are turned off by some kinds of digital advertising, like text messages, pop-ups or banners, that may explain digital marketers' eagerness to work indirectly, through blogs, social networks and other kinds of online forums. Of all survey respondents, for instance, 61 percent said they trusted consumer opinions posted online.
But even more consumers, 78 percent, said they trusted direct recommendations from other consumers: what marketers call word of mouth. And unlike some of the media, consumer recommendations scored highly across all markets. Everywhere, it seems, people still trust their friends.
Eric Pfanner can be reached at adcol@iht.com
2007/9/30 17:57:00 (18 downloads)
A-Z Video converter Ultimate converts your videos quickly and easily into a format that MP4 player or your portable device (Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, 3G cell phone, PMP, XBOX …) can play. You can convert almost all video formats, e.g. AVI, MOV (QuickTime), MPEG (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), MPG, WMV/ASF, DIVX, XVID.
Software License: Shareware
Operating Systems Support: Microsoft Windows
Download Link: A-Z Zune Video Converter 3.18
Homepage: A-Z Zune Video Converter
Version ChangeLog:
Not Available
They sure do look beautiful flying in formation during their annual migration, but when one of Illinois’s rare crashes and burns on a busy Moscow street corner, well, it’s never a pretty sight. Check out another pic of the carnage after the break…
[Via Tech Ticker Blog, thanks ]
2007/9/30 14:13:33 (17 downloads)
Swift Paste is a powerful clipboard tool program. Windows clipboard can only store one data when cut/copy data. Swift Paste can store multi-clipboard texts/images and easy paste these texts/images to focus window. Otherwise, user can also store given texts/images to Swift Paste; for example email/website/password/info/etc, then paste them at anytime. Swift Paste always lies topmost on the screen.
Software License: Shareware
Operating Systems Support: Microsoft Windows
Download Link: Swift Paste 2.0
Homepage: Swift Paste
Version ChangeLog:
Not Available
Audio Technica’s no to high-end cans, and we must say, its flagship set for 2007 (its words, not ours) looks mighty sexy. The ATH-ESW9 Sovereign Wood Headphones are crafted from “Japan’s finest Hokkaido cherry tree,” feature 42-millimeter neodymium magnet drivers with fiberglass housing support, and come bundled with a carrying case to keep these beauties clean when not in use. You can pick these up to listen to (or just look at) come October 19th for ¥37,800 (or about $330).
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