Archive for the ‘Computing Technology’ Category

Irish telecoms market data

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

The latest edition of Comreg's Quarterly Report (pdf) is now available, and it's got some interesting nuggets hidden in it. First, VoIP is now showing up in call volumes - although Comreg only tracks certain VoIP services, and not internet-based offerings such as Skype. There's a suggestion in the report that ...

Personalized (online) radio services from the BBC?

Friday, July 7th, 2006

There was an interesting teaser earlier this week, from the DG of the BBC, when he talked about:MyBBCRadio [which will] use peer-to-peer technology to provide "thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves".. Elsewhere it says the technology will build on podcasting and the BBC iPlayer, so ...

Interrogating population density

Sunday, April 16th, 2006

Sascha notes that internet penetration does not correlate closely with population density, and asks what it does correlate with in this context. Dredging up memories of my previous career, my sense is that population density has some impact, but so too does the variance in density. That is, two of the ...

WiMax as grassroots telecoms backbone?

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Perhaps related to my dialogue with Paul at Mediageek regarding creating a grassroots telecoms backbone, Om Malik draws attention to the potential of WiMax for backbone purposes. He suggests that a WiMax backbone for the United States could be built for $3 bn which is, as he notes, quite a ...

Grassroots responses to net neutrality debates

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Over at Mediageek, Paul is thinking about possible grassroots responses to attacks on network neutrality. Without plotting specific policy responses he references previous (and ongoing) debates on media policy, and responses such as Indymedia and LPFM:By way of comparison, the micropower unlicensed radio movement provided both an immediate means of ...

Why use ANPR? To cover the costs of ANPR

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

Why introduce ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition)? Well, according to this rather muddled rationale, it should be used to defray the cost of the cameras introduced in order to operate the ANPR system. Think I'm joking?He argues that automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology should be applied in new ways ...

Data retention and vehicle tracking

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Just before I came home for Christmas I was Paul's guest on MediaGeek on WEFT. We had intended, originally, to talk about the state of community media in Ireland and Europe generally, but ended up spending most of the show talking about the Data Retention compromise that had just passed ...

Data retention mission creep

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

Terrorism. Organised crime. File sharing. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? That's what the music industry seems to think in Europe, where they are lobbying for the proposed data retention directive to beextended to cover all criminal offences, including piracy, and not just "serious" crimes, as the original proposal ...

Professional tagging

Monday, October 31st, 2005

As if the annotated audio idea wasn't enough, today I got pointed towards details of the BBC's programme catalogue - a 7 million line database - which is being prototyped on a Rails framework. Of interest, of course, is that the database was developed and maintained by professional librarians, so ...

Annotated audio

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Given my critical approach towards digital audio it's easy for people to characterize me as Luddite in tendancy. I'm not sure if it will help to say that I find this technology to be absolutely fascinating.