Call for Papers for the WebRTC Fundamentals Summit will be open through October 11, 2013. If you are an WevRTC speaker and would like to join WebRTC Fundamentals Summit faculty, please contact us via «contact organizer» by email «events (at) sys-con.com» with your session proposal and bio.

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Call for Papers for the WebRTC Fundamentals Summit will be open through October 11, 2013. If you are an WevRTC speaker and would like to join WebRTC Fundamentals Summit faculty, please contact us via «contact organizer» by email «events (at) sys-con.com» with your session proposal and bio.

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At the Tau Institute, we develop relative, «pound-for-pound» rankings that can uncover diamonds in the rough and more important, show well a nation is doing with respect to its available resources. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

We’ve ranked 102 nations, and include an overall ranking as well as regional rankings and rankings by income tier. We’ve also developed “raw” rankings, which emphasize technology parameters more than the socio-economic ones, and therefore can be used to show a country’s raw potential.

I’ll list our current leaders in several categories in an upcoming article. For now, I’d like to focus on an interesting relationship between Internet access, broadband access, and income.

I noted previously that Uganda is emerging on our charts because a relatively high number of its people have Internet access, given its low per capita income. Developing this stat goes to the heart of what we’re doing, as we seek to identify those countries that are doing the best with what they have.

A cursory review of data from the International Telecommunications Union shows the usual suspects as the world’s leaders in Internet access: Northern and Western Europe, South Korea, Canada and the US. However, we would like to know who leads the world on a relative basis, ie, who is doing the most with the resources they have? So, if we integrate the percentage of Internet access directly into the per capita income among the 102 countries that we survey, we find a Top 15 as follows:

1. Kenya
2. Uganda
3. Vietnam
4. Tanzania
5. Nigeria
6. Morocco
7. Senegal
8. Sudan
9. Egypt
10. Bolivia
11. Philippines
12. Yemen
13, Tunisia
14. Ghana
15. Malawi

This view may serve of some value to us in developing our “raw” algorithms. African nations dominate, and it shows how there are flickers of potential within the lower-income nations of the world.

To refine it a bit, we can then integrate the percentage of Internet access into fractional exponents (square roots and beyond) to dampen the influence of lower income on Internet access. We also measure our iterative results against a nirvanic “Perfect Land,” a statistical nation we’ve created that has optimal performance in every category we examine. In doing so, and in feathering in a 10% logarithmic adjustment, we come up with a Top 25 of:

1. Morocco
2. South Korea
3. Latvia
4. Estonia
5. Slovakia
6. Croatia
7. New Zealand
8. Malaysia
9. Netherlands
10. Czech Republic
11. Lithuania
12. Poland
13. Finland
14. Taiwan
15. Vietnam
16. Sweden
17. UK
18. Slovenia
19. Germany
20. Denmark
21. Bulgaria
22. Canada
23. Hungary
24. Hong Kong
25. Kenya

Again, this applies only to a ratio of percentage of population with Internet access versus per capita income. It is not in itself one of our official rankings. Rather, it is just one little glimpse of how we conduct our overall methodology. And it provides a nice relative look that doesn’t simply parrot a correlation between wealth and connectivity.

It also provides a flavor of how we balance various factors to create looks that don’t follow traditional methods, which trend heavily toward simply having wealthy nations on top, developing nations on the bottom. We are continuously fine-tuning each of our formulas and algorithms, and will be fine-tuning this view as well.

In any case, notably missing from this list are the United States (which we believe to be a consistent underperformer in its deployment of IT infrastructure, given its resources), as well as all of the BRICs nations (which we also find to be underperformers in all of our rankings).

Later, I’ll address broadband connectivity (not just overall Internet access), as well as mobile access…after I let my floating-point core recover for awhile.

read more

At the Tau Institute, we develop relative, «pound-for-pound» rankings that can uncover diamonds in the rough and more important, show well a nation is doing with respect to its available resources. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

We’ve ranked 102 nations, and include an overall ranking as well as regional rankings and rankings by income tier. We’ve also developed “raw” rankings, which emphasize technology parameters more than the socio-economic ones, and therefore can be used to show a country’s raw potential.

I’ll list our current leaders in several categories in an upcoming article. For now, I’d like to focus on an interesting relationship between Internet access, broadband access, and income.

I noted previously that Uganda is emerging on our charts because a relatively high number of its people have Internet access, given its low per capita income. Developing this stat goes to the heart of what we’re doing, as we seek to identify those countries that are doing the best with what they have.

A cursory review of data from the International Telecommunications Union shows the usual suspects as the world’s leaders in Internet access: Northern and Western Europe, South Korea, Canada and the US. However, we would like to know who leads the world on a relative basis, ie, who is doing the most with the resources they have? So, if we integrate the percentage of Internet access directly into the per capita income among the 102 countries that we survey, we find a Top 15 as follows:

1. Kenya
2. Uganda
3. Vietnam
4. Tanzania
5. Nigeria
6. Morocco
7. Senegal
8. Sudan
9. Egypt
10. Bolivia
11. Philippines
12. Yemen
13, Tunisia
14. Ghana
15. Malawi

This view may serve of some value to us in developing our “raw” algorithms. African nations dominate, and it shows how there are flickers of potential within the lower-income nations of the world.

To refine it a bit, we can then integrate the percentage of Internet access into fractional exponents (square roots and beyond) to dampen the influence of lower income on Internet access. We also measure our iterative results against a nirvanic “Perfect Land,” a statistical nation we’ve created that has optimal performance in every category we examine. In doing so, and in feathering in a 10% logarithmic adjustment, we come up with a Top 25 of:

1. Morocco
2. South Korea
3. Latvia
4. Estonia
5. Slovakia
6. Croatia
7. New Zealand
8. Malaysia
9. Netherlands
10. Czech Republic
11. Lithuania
12. Poland
13. Finland
14. Taiwan
15. Vietnam
16. Sweden
17. UK
18. Slovenia
19. Germany
20. Denmark
21. Bulgaria
22. Canada
23. Hungary
24. Hong Kong
25. Kenya

Again, this applies only to a ratio of percentage of population with Internet access versus per capita income. It is not in itself one of our official rankings. Rather, it is just one little glimpse of how we conduct our overall methodology. And it provides a nice relative look that doesn’t simply parrot a correlation between wealth and connectivity.

It also provides a flavor of how we balance various factors to create looks that don’t follow traditional methods, which trend heavily toward simply having wealthy nations on top, developing nations on the bottom. We are continuously fine-tuning each of our formulas and algorithms, and will be fine-tuning this view as well.

In any case, notably missing from this list are the United States (which we believe to be a consistent underperformer in its deployment of IT infrastructure, given its resources), as well as all of the BRICs nations (which we also find to be underperformers in all of our rankings).

Later, I’ll address broadband connectivity (not just overall Internet access), as well as mobile access…after I let my floating-point core recover for awhile.

read more

By Eoin Jennings, general manager hosting services, Easynet Global Services

A little learning is a dangerous thing, scribed poet Alexander Pope in 1711, possibly to distract his wife from improving her bible studies knowledge or honing her counterpoint skills.

Three hundred years later and whilst most of us no longer frown upon a lady flashing her ankles nor rush to join a harpsichord recital, never could the statement be truer.

Smartphones and tablets have brought about the collision of the worlds of IT and telecoms, and are responsible for us all knowing a little bit about IT. 

If we can find ‘Settings’ on our iPhones, we can find ‘Control Panel’ in windows or ‘Internet Options’ in Explorer, delve in and make the changes we want, removing the need for the IT helpdesk – blissfully unaware that we’re putting our organisation at risk. In businesses across the globe, CIOs are breaking …

Consumers need to be made more aware of what they’re purchasing in a cloud solution, according to the latest research paper.

The team of researchers, including IBM and Google, published their findings in a paper entitled ‘Verifying Cloud Services: Present and Future’, and aimed for this to be an education for cloud customers – punters need to examine “in breadth, rather in depth”, how a CSP performs.

The researchers put this down to a series of issues which need answering: is the service running the right software? Is the service doing what it is supposed to? How efficient is the service? Does it comply with security policies, if any?

Of course, this comes down to the niggling matter of SLAs. A CSP puts down an SLA, intending to give the client an idea of availability and performance. Yet the researchers say this isn’t always the case.

The paper argues …

SYS-CON Events announced today that BMC Software, the global leader in enterprise cloud management, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For more than 30 years, BMC has helped thousands of companies around the world master tough IT problems. From mainframe to mobile, from the back room to the boardroom, BMC delivers the automation, integration, and sophistication that enable the business and IT to perform like never before.

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In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has announced that the end of life (EOL) for Windows Server 2003 is July 14, 2015. If you’re wondering what this means for you, it comes down to this – there will be no patches or security updates, putting your applications and business at risk. New threats won’t be addressed and your WS2003 systems will become a security risk and compliance nightmare. In a recent blog post, Microsoft warns us to “watch out for performance bottlenecks,” but that’s the least of the worry. Do you have a plan in place to protect yourself (i.e., your job?)

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The Industrial Internet refers to the world of connected sensors on people, equipment, machines, parts, assets, vehicles, inventory, etc. These items are connected by embedded wireless chips that monitor sensors and wirelessly send data to a server somewhere in the world. Here is an example of how one of the largest companies in the world is utilizing the industrial Internet.
Every major part of a GE jet engine, locomotive or turbine is equipped with wireless sensors that continuously measure and wirelessly send every aspect of performance to a central server that is often in the cloud. As the data is received by the server, it is analyzed by big data analytical solutions and the results are used to improve everything from the flight path to energy efficiency.

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