The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) recently announced that the organization has finished their trials of the Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) standard. One of the more compelling parts of the new standard is the ability to automatically log into hotspots using simply SIM card identification and not the traditional username and password, something that will be highly beneficial to carriers using Wi-Fi offload to ease congestion on wireless networks. The WBA has just recently announced that numerous global telcos have agreed to begin conducting trials of the technology starting in the fourth quarter, with actual product being available sometime in the first half of 2013

BT Wi-Fi is the exclusive hot-spot provider for the London 2012 Olympics, and a promise made in 2011 to have some 500,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the capital has been met. The celebration for meeting this target was to deploy new wi-fi hotspots along 27 miles of the River Thames. The hotspots are a mixture of commercial deployments, and BT Total/Infinity customers offering access via the partner Fon. Though while the number of Fon sites is increasing, oddly in the TV advertising for BT Infinity it is neglected for the risky prospect of sharing a private Wi-Fi key with pretty people you don't know very well.

"The 2012 CIO 100 Awards honor 100 companies that exemplify the strategic partnership of IT and business. How to Use This Chart Learn about the 2012 CIO 100 Award winners and their winning projects, and find the companies that interest you the most, with this interactive chart. Click on the tabs to sort the data according to location, industry or revenue as well as project type (the main technology used for the project), the primary business function it benefits and its impact. Click on the company name to get more details, including a description of the winning project and more about the technologies used."

Quand vous considérez le nombre de tablettes différentes, ordinateurs portables, navigateurs Web et systèmes d'exploitation qui accèdent de jour en jour à Internet, c'est un petit miracle que les concepteurs et les développeurs Web parviennent à rester raisonnables… Bien sûr, il y a les standards du Web et des organisations entières qui existent dans le seul but de s'assurer que l'Internet que vous voyez est généralement le même Internet que tout le monde voit. Mais, le grand nombre de dispositifs peut poser un petit problème lorsque vous tentez de créer un site ou un service qui fonctionne bien en masse…

"One night in 2007, Kim Fraser, a sewing enthusiast and fabric lover, realized what was missing from her living room: curtains with big yellow polka dots. Instead of searching fabric stores for the perfect pattern, she thought, wouldn't it be cool if I designed my own? She wasn't a graphic designer, but she figured it couldn't be that hard."

"It has been close to a year since the Nest "learning" thermostat was introduced to the public, bringing us one step closer to that elusive home of the future. Founded by the former senior VP of Apple's iPod division, Tony Fadell, along with his partner Matt Rogers, Nest Labs set out to create what is essentially the iPod of the thermostat world. The round, user-friendly device was initially met with excellent reviews, but were these based in reality or were they the result of some Apple-like hype?"

Stubbornly high U.S. unemployment, a weak housing market combined with a mature business prone to regular programming blackouts has seen more than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year.

Observers are once again questioning the reliability of high-volume trading technology -- and the people who run it. This time, Knight Capital suffered an expensive glitch Wednesday when its systems issued "erroneous orders" to the market, distorting results and forcing Knight to make good on many false trades. Knight could lose $440 million from its bad morning yesterday.

"The milkman. Thomas Guides. Dial-up. AOL. Bank deposit slips. NOT unlimited texting. Floppy disks. Yellowbook. Furbies. All of these things have either gone the way of the dinosaur or are on their way out. The digital and social age, unless you are cryogenically frozen and your fingers are too stiff to tweet, has completely inundated our lifestyles. The innovations of my childhood are the expectations of the aptly named "Generation Always On" of which my little sister is a product of. Little does she know, she's entering her teen years on the precipice of an unbelievable shift in the way people compute, work, interact, experience, consume. And no one has their finger on the pulse of this digital evolution quite like Google, who have been crafting the frontier of the cloud into… well, anything but a frontier for kids like my sister."

"'art numérique, est-ce comme la photo numérique, la musique numérique, voire même la pédagogie numérique ? Regroupe t-on sous cette appellation une pratique finalement ancienne, améliorée sans être radicalement transformée par les outils et supports numériques ?  Ou bien, comme la photo numérique, la musique numérique, voire la pédagogie numérique, l'art numérique ou net.art pour les initiés, a t-il repoussé les limites de l'art ? S'agit-il d'une création non de nouvelles oeuvres, mais de nouvelles formes d'art, dans la mesure où les TIC apportent avec elles des changements fondamentaux dans les manières de s'exprimer et, surtout, de faire société ? "

"L'Asie enregistre actuellement une hausse significative de l'utilisation des tablettes numériques et des smartphones. En effet depuis quelques années, les marchés associés à ces deux produits explosent. Et même si dans cette partie du globe, le E-Learning n'est pas encore très répandu, les entreprises asiatiques utilisent déjà cette méthode de formation en ligne pour permettre à leurs employés de bénéficier de cours de langue. De même, comme l'Asie est l'endroit où l'on peut trouver le plus grand nombre d'utilisateurs de téléphones mobiles, la tendance du M-Learning (apprentissage grâce au téléphone portable) est entrain de devenir plus en plus prégnante."

"DOSSIER Les données transitant dans le cyberespace connaîtront une croissance sidérale de 800 % au cours des cinq prochaines années, prédit Gartner. « Comme ce sont les données qui donnent de la valeur à une entreprise, les conditions sont en place pour que l'informatique décisionnelle connaisse un essor fabuleux », fait observer Stéphane Ricoul, directeur des relations clientèle, Affaires électroniques, Sid Lee Technologies."

Big Data, Linked Open Data... Les données déferlent en masse sur le web. Mais de quoi parle-t-on et quels sont ces nouveaux modèles et outils de traitement sémantique ? 

"Le fameux "déluge" des données présent et à venir est une opportunité pour les individus, l'Etat ou encore les entreprises. Vont-ils tous en profiter également ? Pas si sûr... "

"Un artiste de l'Afrique francophone à la Chambre blanche L'art numérique est un nouvel axe privilégié par le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). Afin d'accentuer son soutien à ce secteur et élargir son réseau de résidences contribuant au rayonnement des créateurs québécois, le CALQ offre une subvention de 12 000$ pour accueillir une première résidence en arts numérique à Québec."

The aim of this study is to assess the effects of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on the firms' capabilities to innovate in a selection of OECD countries. This findings support the hypothesis that ICTs act an enabler of innovation, particularly for product and marketing innovation, in both manufacturing and services. However, not is been find any evidence that ICT use increases the capability of a firm to cooperate, to develop innovation in-house or to introduce products new-to-the-market. These results suggest that ICTs enable firms to adopt innovation but they not increase their "inventive" capabilities. (www.eldis.org)

"Many enterprises are struggling to adapt and evolve with today's changes and culture and technology. Social media consultant Jacob Morgan's new book, The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools, takes on this challenge, providing a comprehensive strategy guide to emergent collaboration in the workplace. In anticipation of our upcoming webinar Making Enterprise Collaboration Work, we sat down with Jacob for some Q & A. "

There's something universally appealing about the concept of a 3D printer -- that concept being an automated system capable of turning computer code into real-world objects. I found myself forced to give a brief overview of the technology to AOL employees in our shared New York City office space after a particularly noisy initial run of MakerBot's Replicator. Reactions to such explanations tend to follow a fairly standard arc, beginning with wide-eyed wonder as one attempts to wrap their brain around the idea, followed almost immediately by a list of things they'd love to print out, given a chance. This is usually coupled with questions like "can it print food?" and "can I print a car?" Both of which speak to that larger, vitally important question: "can I print anything useful?" This, in turn, speaks to another important concern: "how long until it pays for itself?"

ansas City is about to experience the Internet as it should be. If you're in the right neighborhood, you could be enjoying downloads speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second when Google's pilot project lights up in Kansas and Missouri this September. You might think the Google initiative will force U.S. Internet service providers, which generally deliver downloads speeds a fraction of what the search giant is promising, to finally get their own fiber projects moving. But you'd be wrong. 

"The idea of a mass-market virtual reality headset that totally immerses players in a game world died out pretty quickly in the '90s, a time when the technology wasn't quite up to the heady concept. Now, a hardware designer named Palmer Luckey thinks that technology has finally caught up with the dream, and seems to have done a good job convincing a lot of game designers that he's right. Luckey's head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, launched on Kickstarter today after first being previewed at E3. The device quickly surpassed it's $300,000 funding goal (approaching $600,000 at the time of this writing), primarily by selling $300 development kits to thousands of backers. Those developers include id Software's John Carmack, (who'll be bringing Doom 3 BFG as the first game to support the headset), Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski, Unity CEO Dave Helgason and Valve president and owner Gabe Newell, who offered up supportive quotes on Rift's potential for truly immersive virtual reality."