From Australian IT :

NEW ZEALAND Telecom today announced a $NZ220 ($203) million project to switch every telephone line in the country to an internet protocol platform within seven years to replace the existing phone network.

...via Smart Mobs

New from Google. Supposedly built on the Jabber engine:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:

Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call

Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room

Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away

Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.

Stowe Boyd talks about something he calls Social Architecture:

Authors and readers both leave social traces behind (or "gestures"), as a result of their activities. Authors point to other blogs in their posts - either by link or by name - and create ageless links like blogrolls: these represent an implicit social network relationship between the parties, not just a topical pointer, like a search engine provides. And the actions of readers (which includes all authors) create similar gestural information: explicit, shared evidence of reading like comments and bookmarks, and implicit value indications, like the frequency of return to a specific blog, or the number of comments left.

...

Machines -- software applications, like Google or Technorati -- "read" the blogosphere, too, although not in the way that people do. These apps are plowing through the blogs, indexing the text, and, on the social side, algorithmically evaluating the value of various blogs or blog posts based on the social cues that readers and writers have left behind, as well as less social analysis, like keyword incidence.

From the Globe and Mail: VoIP in the US is growing faster than anticipated:

The biggest factors in the numbers are cable TV companies, which are using VoIP to bundle phone service with their TV offerings in hopes of staving off competition from incumbent phone companies that are just beginning to get into the TV business.

Time Warner Inc.'s cable division is now the nation's second-largest VoIP carrier, trailing only Vonage Holdings Corp., one of the earliest commercial providers of the service. Vonage is estimated to have 750,000 U.S. subscribers, more than three times its level a year ago.

...via Smart Mobs

From New Scientist:

A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software "bots" to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.

...via Smart Mobs

Get Real reports that the current rumor is that Technorati will be sold to a 'large search company' in the next week or so.

Ethiopia has made a strong committment to broadband technology in education committing up to 10 percent of the GDP to creating access and providing hardware for schools and government access to the internet:

Most secondary schools have now received the huge plasma-screen televisions that will soon display internet-streamed MPEG 2 digital video, including instructional films and quizzes. In the meantime, the screens are used to show recorded lessons broadcast over the country’s TV network, but the internet-based system will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way they use their high-tech teaching materials. With TV broadcasts, everyone has to go at the same pre-determined speed, but streamed lessons can be paused or fast-forwarded, allowing the teacher to repeat information for struggling students or skip ahead for those who are doing well. It will also let teachers see the material in advance and plan lessons to make best use of it, instead of going into the broadcast blind.

...via Smart Mobs

There's been a fair amount of interesting talk about offering college courses via mobile phones. Here's an article from the Guardian on mobile learning in elementary and high schools:

According to the LSDA, mobile phones can have a positive impact on learning, particularly for students who find traditional teaching methods difficult to deal with. Jill Attewell, the programme manager for the m-learning project, points out that "most kids have a mobile phone and it's already a big part of their lives. So, if we can use that enthusiasm to get them involved with their learning activities, it can only be a good thing." Schools in the UK have already started to take advantage of their pupils' fascination with all things digital. Wren's Nest primary school, located in the west Midlands, has implemented a project where pupils are given PDAs. So far, it's proven successful.

...via Smart Mobs

An article in the Guardian on plans for the future of Wikipedia and Wikimania:

Among the projects under discussion are an online atlas charted by members of the public; a repository of classical music to be performed by student orchestras; a file format to rival the mighty MP3; an online curriculum stretching from kindergarten to university; and an archive of images of paintings by the old masters. In short, Wikipedia is to spread its wings over many more forms of culture.

...via Smart Mobs

Uji in Japan is pilot testing RFID tags with information for touristsi:

According to Kyoto Shimbun, the city of Uji in Kyoto prefecture and the city of Hikone in Shiga prefecture will test RFID-based information services for sightseers. RFID tags will be embedded in the environment and sightseers will use mobile phones and PDAs with integrated RFID readers. Delivered to these devices is information about nearby sightseeing spots and stores. Hitachi and KDDI will join this project.

...via Smart Mobs

This discussion says that it's not the meetings, it's what we do with them:

If the meeting is focused on making a strategic decision, we spend as much as ten hours of design time for every hour of meeting time. We want people to think together, not just listen to reports or information that could have been distributed in other ways. Getting people together is expensive, too expensive not to engage their best thinking around important issues. We focus most of our thinking meetings at the strategy level with just enough content presentation to make sure people have a firm grasp on the elements of the issue. This means giving people information prior to the meeting and providing content that has been boiled down to the bare essentials. It means developing visual representations and prototypes of the information so that people can interact with it on different levels. It also means understanding that most strategies fail and deliberately looking for alternatives.

...via Patrick Mayfield

In Hermosa Beach, CA, the city offers free wireless:

Hermosa Beach, a California beach town of 21,000 will offer free broadband wireless service (802.11 a/g) to all city residents and businesses using WiFi-Plus, Inc. multi-polarity antennas as part of the most advanced wireless mesh WiFi system in the country.

City Councilman Michael Keegan championed “the vision to provide the FREEway to the Internet to the city like other basic services, as a public amenity and convenience”, following his experience with a Hotspot at his local bakery/café. “Hermosa Beach residents now have a choice to surf the Internet just as they surf the Pacific - with rad’ speed 5 times faster than DSL at up to 6 Mbs per second, and “glassy” conditions”. Said a city official.

...via Smart Mobs

Allen Varney in an article at The Escapist talks about converting a role-playing game from paper to online with collaborative input from fans. He provides suggestions that could be useful in any cooperative development project:

1. Excited interest
Promote your idea. Convey why it's cool, why people should mess with it, and how they can improve it. If you can't get a dozen people excited about your creative property, it's probably not worth pursuing anyway.

2. Fast, frequent communication
After you build energy, synchronize effort. Use mailing lists, instant messaging, forums, blogs, and shared netspaces of all kinds. Use a Wiki! A collection of editable Web pages is probably your best resource. Note, though, Wikis select for deeply involved contributors. It takes so much time to stay current, lightly involved onlookers may soon drop out.

...via BoingBoing

David Sifry of Technorati talks about the state iof the Blogosphere:

• Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
• The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
• A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
• About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
• About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

...via BoingBoing

More on the Philadelphia muncicpal wireless project:

Wireless Philadelphia aims to strengthen the City's economy and transform Philadelphia's neighborhoods by providing wireless internet access throughout the city. Wireless Philadelphia will work to create a digital infrastructure for open-air internet access and to help citizens, businesses, schools, and community organizations make effective use of this technology to achieve their goals while providing a greater experience for visitors to the City.

According to ElectricNews.net, teenagers are starting to spend more of their money on technology and less on clothes:

Mobile phones, MP3 players and hand-held computer devices continue to threaten the traditional hold of the clothing industry on spending in the youth market. Younger consumers are seen as the largest growth segment for the wireless industry based on data supplied by Simmons Market Research Bureau.

Older teenagers are driving an exponential increase in text messaging volumes and Packaged Facts estimates the youth market has a spending power of USD485 billion. "Marketers should note that women in the 15 to 24 age group are more likely to use a computer and more likely to own a mobile phone and use it for text messaging," Don Montuori, Packaged Facts acquisitions editor said.

...via Smart Mobs

The BBC has been doing a lot of work toward making its content open and available to people. Now they've added APIs allowing people to remix BBC content for new uses:

BBC Backstage provides a way for programmers to integrate BBC content into their web applications - the only caveat being that it must not be used commercially. Information is made available through "application programming interfaces" (API) – software-based rules which allow a programmer to harness the BBC’s content – and include connections to news feeds, television and radio listings, travel information and weather data.

...via Smart Mobs