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FIAM participates
in RIMA 2002
RIMA, the International Conference on Educational Multimedia, will take
place in Quebec City from the 18th to the 21st of March and FIAM will
participate in some of the workshops. RIMA is a forum for debate and discussion
focusing on the development of multimedia learning (onsite and distance
learning) and educational products.
The event is also an opportunity for recognizing excellence in educational
multimedia technologies at the national and international levels. The
conference will focus on three major themes :
1) commercialization of e-learning products
2) education and training for the user and
3) issues of research and development.
Twenty four workshops will look at these issues in more details. Several
international key speakers have been invited among whom Brenda Laurel
from Purple Moon, Pierre Moeglin from the soon to be created
French Maison des sciences de l'homme, French philosopher Pierre
Lévy, founder of La Cité des sciences et de l'industrie
de la Villette in Paris and Walter Stewart from Silicon Graphics.
Organizers are expecting a wide participation from as far as Cameroon,
Finland, Uruguay and Hungary. For those of you interested in participating,
be informed that RIMA is offering a 500 C$ reimbursement per participant
for groups of four coming from outside the province of Quebec. For more
information please see www.rima2000.org.
Global
Digital Opportunity Initiative comes to life
US-based Markle Foundation and the United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) announced early this month, during the World Economic Forum,
a long sought initiative called the Global Digital Opportunity Initiative
(GDOI) aimed at bridging the Digital Divide between North and South :
information technology (IT) teams will be travelling to specifically chosen
developing nations for the purpose of advising them on how to implement
programs and policies aimed at increasing access to and usage of digital
technologies.
Behind this idea is International Partners Group, a mix of private
and public sector companies and organizations such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard,
Sun Microsystems, Grameen Bank, Egypt White and Case, Media Lab Asia,
ITU, UC Berkeley (CITRIS), the International Development Research Centre
and the Harvard Centre for International Development.
These IT teams will be working in approximately twelve chosen countries
(the first three being Mozambique, Tanzania and Bolivia) and will provide
technological and policy assistance and advice in such areas as healthcare,
education and electronic commerce. The initial budget to implement the
first leg of GDOI will be about twelve million dollars. For more information
on the initiative see www.markle.org/news/_news_pressrelease_020502.stm.
How
to marry Internet and electricity
The French government and other players have been quite critical of how
slow Internet penetration and broadband has affected access and usage
among the population at large. As a partial answer to this going concern,
French authorities have decided, in an attempt to bridge the so-called
Territorial Digital Divide within France, to use the 100,000 km national
electrical network as a means to deliver high-speed Internet to those
who want it. RTE, the manager of the national electrical network
and a former subsidiary of state-owned Electricité de France, was
chosen as the company in charge of delivering this service. 2,000 kilometres
of optical fibre are already in place for RTE use and to meet the lofty
objectives of the government, up to 20,000 km are to be installed on the
existing electrical poles. RTE, which says that it will provide the service
for free (only the use of its own resources will be charged to the users),
considers the investment to be a better deal than having to dig and bury
optical cable. The additional layout should cost 400 million Euros approximately
and will deliver broadband Internet, within a five kilometre radius, to
all cities above 7,000 inhabitants and to half of those between 5,000
and 7,000 inhabitants. The 'last mile' however will be provided by the
local municipalities who will have to invest in their own optical fibre
infrastructure. Source : www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3234--261600-,00.html.
Internet penetration
in the Middle East
Amman-based research and consultancy agency Arab Advisors Group (AAG)
released a study comforting the fact that Internet usage in the Middle
East is rising rapidly. Analyzing data from 8 Middle Eastern countries
(Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Oman and the UAE),
AAG's report shows that the increase in usage is both a function of Internet
bandwidth and subscribers. According to AAG analyst Shahin Shahin, the
increase in total bandwidth (1,195 Gbps, 154% increase between 2000 and
2001) in relation to subscribers (1,08 million, 47% increase between 2002
and 2001) is unevenly distributed among the 8 countries but indicative
of the upward trend. In the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that ratio
more than doubled as bandwidth increased twice as much as the number of
subscribers. For more information, please see www.ameinfo.com
and www.arabadvisors.com.
Music Online still has a long way to go
It will take some time before you manage to download, in a convenient
and economic fashion, your favourite music using online services Press
Play or Music Net, two online b2c music sites introduced late
last year by the Entertainment Majors (Warner Music, and BMG for Music
Net and Universal and Sony Music for Press Play). This argument has become
a leitmotiv during the last MIDEM in Cannes (January 19-24, 2002). Acquiring
Napster and MP3.com for 60 and 372 million dollars U.S. has not been much
of an investment for both BMG and Vivendi and revenues lost due to music
piracy from the likes of peer to peer sites such as Kazaa and Morpheus
amounted to over five billion dollars U.S. for each of the past two years.
IFPI, the International Federation representing the recording industry
worldwide values music sale losses to 5% in the United States, 8% in Asia
and a whopping 20% in Latin America. Only France and the U.K. saw, in
the contrary, a rise in music sold in stores and through Internet. Analysts
are arguing that the Majors are spending too much time creating roadblocks
to piracy instead of finding innovative ways of enticing online buyers
to the enormous music catalogues they hold in their vaults. For statistics
on the recording industry see www.ifpi.org.
Internationalizing Domain Names
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are getting ready to
tackle the complex issues related to multilingual domain names. They have
organized a symposium in December 2001, in collaboration with the Multilingual
Internet Names Consortium (MINC), for the purpose of sifting through
the legal and technical issues related to extending the domain name system
to alphabet characters other than that of the English language.
The trend toward this internationalization is obvious : by 2003, ITU and
WIPO estimate that 2/3 of Internet users will be non-Anglophones and yet
domain names on the Internet are, for the time being, created with a limited
set of Latin characters frequently used in English. Roberto Blois, Deputy
Secretary General to ITU has argued recently that 'people speaking Arabic,
Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tamil, Thai and other non Latin languages are
disadvantaged'. Both organizations are looking for solutions which increase
access to resources offered by the Web. Introducing new characters to
the issue of domain names requires that close attention be paid in such
areas as intellectual property protection, the development of an adequate
multilingual domain names administrative infrastructure, competition,
access to markets and conflict resolution in addition to other cultural
and social issues. For more information see www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2001/np03-fr.html.
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This
month, we will start with Mr. ROY VARGAS, General Manager of Costa Rican
software developer company