Google's Kansas City broadband project is designed to shame the top US cable and telecom giants. Why is the U.S. ranked 28th in broadband speed?

As part of this effort, Intel will release its Intel Perceptual Computing Software Development Kit beta to developers early next year. The idea behind perceptual computing is to provide the Ultrabook with human-like senses to allow the computer to perceive the user's intentions. Key to this is Intel's Creative camera, which is a screen-mounted system that includes a low-power HD 760p image sensor designed to work at close range, along with a 3D depth array and dual microphone array.

It seems very promising to chart the genealogy of hackerspaces from the point of view of hacklabs, since the relationship between these scenes have seldom been discussed and largely remains unreflected. A methodological examination will highlight many interesting differences and connections that can be useful for practitioners who seek to foster and spread the hackerspace culture, as well as for academics who seek to conceptualise and understand it. In particular, hackerspaces proved to be a viral phenomenon which may have reached the height of its popularity, and while a new wave of fablabs spring up, people like Grenzfurthner and Schneider (2009) have started asking questions about the direction of these movements. I would like to contribute to this debate about the political direction and the political potentials of hacklabs and hackerspaces with a comparative, critical, historiographical paper. I am mostly interested in how these intertwined networks of institutions and communities can escape the the capitalist apparatus of capture, and how these potentialities are conditioned by a historical embeddedness in various scenes and histories.

"Having worked in academia, government and industry, I've had a unique opportunity to build products in each sector. Much of this product development has been around building data products. Just as methods for general product development have steadily improved, so have the ideas for developing data products. Thanks to large investments in the general area of data science, many major innovations (e.g., Hadoop, Voldemort, Cassandra, HBase, Pig, Hive, etc.) have made data products easier to build. Nonetheless, data products are unique in that they are often extremely difficult, and seemingly intractable for small teams with limited funds. Yet, they get solved every day."

"Selon un rapport de l'association Big Brother Watch, spécialisée dans la défense des libertés publiques, 100 000 caméras de vidéosurveillance scrutent les collégiens et les lycées en Angleterre, au Pays de Galles et en Écosse. L'étude, qui porte sur 2 000 établissements, souligne que dans certaines écoles, le ratio est de 1 caméra pour 5 élèves et que plus de 200 ont installé des caméras dans les toilettes et les vestiaires. En outre, les caméras sont davantage installées à l'intérieur des bâtiments qu'à l'extérieur. Des chiffres à mettre en regard avec celui des 51 600 caméras contrôlées par 428 autorités locales, toujours des chiffres de Big Brother Watch. Des chiffres qui corroborent ceux de l'association des professeurs et maîtres de conférences (ATL), le troisième syndicat enseignant britannique, qui rapportait en 2008 que 85% établissements scolaires étaient équipés et que 10% avaient doté les toilettes. En mai 2010, le nouveau Vice-Premier ministre libéral-démocrate britannique avait pourtant annoncé vouloir mettre un terme à la société de surveillance, expliquant entre autres que la vidéosurveillance serait mieux encadrée."

"Now that informal investors can crowdfund startups for equity, this could be a highly effective way to encourage a part of the economy that greatly affects employment and GDP."

"Moves to allow the digitization of 'orphan works' and free up the metadata around 20 million cultural objects will benefit the public and could inspire a new wave of apps and web services. But the underlying motivation is fundamentally political."

"Broadband networks are spurring improved quality and helping lower the cost of care in rural areas by reducing time to access of critical treatment and increasing the resources available to diagnose conditions."

Bientôt finie, la « paperasse administrative » ? Une nouvelle étape sera en tout cas franchie ce 1er octobre 2012. Dans un communiqué (.pdf) daté du 13 septembre, la Direction générale des finances publiques rappelle qu'à compter du 1er octobre de cette année, « les entreprises soumises à l'impôt sur les sociétés, quel que soit leur chiffre d'affaires, auront toutes une obligation de recours élargie aux téléprocédures en 2012-2013 ».

FRS launched the Rural Telecom Educational Series as part of an ongoing effort to promote rural telecom and educate those who will determine its future. The series has played a vital role in educating both national and local policy-makers on the issues facing community-based telecom providers. FRS publishes papers on an ongoing basis that highlight critical issues to rural telecommunications, such as universal service, net neutrality and wireless technology. One copy of each paper is complimentary; additional copies are available for purchase. Please visit the FRS E-Store to place your order.

Construire et généraliser des modalités innovantes, ouvertes, responsables, globales de création et de partage de la valeur pour s'inscrire positivement dans le monde qui s'annonce, pour mener une révolution économique.

"AR is advancing rapidly as a new medium, moving beyond just a technology. One of the things I've dedicated myself to in this field is exploring what AR does best and the opportunities that exist in AR as a medium for storytelling and creating engaging experiences. Each medium has unique characteristics to be harnessed, capabilities that extend beyond other mediums. We're presently in this exciting phase of AR, of identifying, as well as being able to technically influence, what these capacities and criteria are and can become. Just like film, television, radio and photography when first novel, AR presents brand new terrain ripe for creative exploration. With this comes the possibility of forming new conventions and developing a stylistic language of AR."

The Open Data Institute (ODI) will be a global first: a collaboration between our leading businesses and entrepreneurs, universities and researchers, government and civil society to unlock enterprise and social value from the vast amount of Open Government Data now being made accessible. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has put Open Data at the heart of his agenda for government and in his Autumn Statement last November Chancellor George Osborne announced the intention to launch the ODI to stimulate innovation and enterprise. The ODI, an independent organisation led by Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, will be formally opened in October.

"e moins que l'on puisse dire c'est que l'annonce de la création de Numergy par SFR/BULL et CloudWatt par Orange/Thalès suscite le débat dans la communauté tech française. J'ai demandé à quelques personnes du "milieu" ce qu'elles en pensaient, voici les arguments les plus souvent cités quant aux a priori sur ce "cloud" à la française."

"Al'automne, le gouvernement doit annoncer les grandes lignes de la politique qu'il entend mener au niveau des pôles de compétitivité, à la suite de l'audit finalisé cet été. A l'heure du « redressement productif », la question cruciale est de savoir si ce dispositif, mis en place en 2005, soit cinq ans avant le lancement du programme d'investissements d'avenir (PIA), donne des résultats assez probants pour être maintenu en l'état. Réalisée par les cabinets de conseils Erdyn, BearingPoint et Technopolis, en coordination avec la Direction générale de la compétitivité, de l'industrie et des services (DGCIS) ainsi que la Délégation interministérielle à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'attractivité régionale (Datar), cette évaluation couvrant la période 2008-2011 renvoie, à première vue, un constat global positif. « Il convient de souligner le rôle fondamental de mise en réseau qu'ont joué les pôles, non seulement entre la recherche et les entreprises, mais également entre les PME et les grands groupes », souligne Patrick Haouat, associé gérant du cabinet Erdyn."

"L'appel des 451, exprimant les intérêts corporatistes à courte vue des acteurs de la "chaîne du livre", oublie les enjeux fondamentaux liés au livre numérique, au centre desquels les droits des lecteurs. Notre chroniqueur Calimaq se charge de nous les rappeler."

"Crowdsourcing can create an artificial chat partner that's smarter than Siri-style personal assistants."

"Ubiquitous computing has a grand vision. Even the name of the area identifies its universalizing scope. In this, it follows in a long tradition of projects that attempt to create new models and paradigms that unite disparate, distributed elements into a large conceptual whole. We link concerns in ubiquitous computing into a colonial intellectual tradition and identify the problems that arise in consequence, explore the locatedness of innovation, and discuss strategies for decolonizing ubicomp's research methodology."

"A complete list of free online courses offered by Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity"