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Skype has been the byword for cheap voice communication. Now other approaches and devices are edging up to offer a potential free voice market. On the services side, for example, Talkbiznow claims to be the only business networking site to allow users to hold free voice conferences. On the devices side, that ‘funnest’ iPod ever, the iPod touch, may also now be the most useful, courtesy of free software from Truphone that effectively turns it into a mobile phone.

Spanish researchers have carried out a study looking into the potential future impact of robots on society. They conclude show that the enormous automation capacity of robots and their ability to interact with humans will cause a technological imbalance over the next 12 years between the haves and have nots.

DEISA Extreme Computing (DECI) participants of Initiative Awards 2009 involved 42 scientific projects being allocated supercomputing resources through the EU's unique infrastructure of supercomputing systems involving more than 49 million processor hours, Projects were awarded two to astro sciences: six to bio-sciences, four to earth sciences, eight to engineering , thirteen for materials science and nine to plasma physics. The UK collected in total, two each in biosciences and plasma physics, and one in materials science. Asking what were priorities from an ESPCR spokesman, an August 2008 Computing World article and its news on HECToR projects "designed to challenge the machine’s capabilities during its first six months of operation since its launch in January 2008" was pointed out with the information that priorities were unchanged.
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Cold weather is a great focus for the mind on energy needs. From economics now blowing cold over wind farm reliability, to nuclear protagonists eyeing up attitudes in twenty years, and US development of small, modular reactors, energy comes back full circle to another new study of renewable energy resources in the Western Isles, to be published early next year.

Companies concentrating their data center automation efforts on server automation are making a strategic mistake. Glenn O'Donnell, a senior analyst at Forrester Research believes what's needed is a more holistic view of data center automation. "It's misguided to give server automation all your attention," he said. "You have to look at servers, the network, storage and applications together. The real magic is orchestration."

A better work culture would bring women back to IT, says the the new chair of the BCS Women's Forum, Rebecca George. Changing organisational cultures could go a long way to slowing the exodus of women leaving the IT industry every year she notes. Polly Purvis, executive director of ScotlandIS executive director has urged action for the value added economy. Now Edinburgh-based, Elizabeth Duncan, who runs Remote Work Management, originally based in Aberdeen, agrees in the following article. But does anyone listen?

The newly implemented Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean, GITEWS, works with the help of new software TsunAWI, which is based on unstructured triangle lattices, and now goes into operation entering its final phase of optimisation.The system was officially handed over to the BMKG (Meteorological, Climatology and Geophysical Agency of Indonesia) by the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, slightly less than four years after the catastrophe of 2004.

Cambridge University scientists conclude that entrepreneurs exhibit highly adaptive risk taking behaviour. The study in the journal Nature, asserts that entrepreneurs are riskier decision-makers than their managerial counterparts and that the type of decision-making essential to the entrepreneurial process may be possible to teach or even enhanced in the future by pharmaceuticals. The findings coincide serendipitously at a time when a BBC3 series – ‘The Last Millionaire’ shows Scottish entrepreneur, Oli Norman, owner of Glasgow based marketing agency DADA and Glasgow’s oldest bar & restaurant Sloans, compete against 11 of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs over a six week period.

Futurotextiel 08 being held in Kortrijk, Belgium from 13 to 15 November, not only introduces visitors to spectacular and advanced textile applications from companies in the Kortrijk-Lille region, but focuses on the importance of research techniques and developments in the textile industry. The exhibition is divided into three major sections: educational, artistic, and new technology applications. In addition, a textile lab will be set up at the heart of the exhibition space. Smart fabrics and intelligent textiles are well worth the weather eye of Scotland's tweeds and cashmeres.

Joe Weinman, VP of strategic solutions sales at AT&T writes that new-economy icons like Google and Amazon, with Internet-speed innovation in their DNA, have announced a dizzying array of cloud computing services, and quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying that with the exception of security requirements, “there's not that much difference between the enterprise cloud and the consumer cloud.” If that's true, he muses, it shouldn’t be too difficult for a Google or Amazon to leverage a strong consumer franchise and initial success servicing, say, Facebook application start-ups such as Animoto Productions, and rapidly penetrate blue chip Fortune 500 enterprises. But he is backing on old economy stalwarts, the telcos who have also made cloud computing announcements citing AT&T’s Synaptic Hosting service, using its 38 global Internet datacenters. He may be biased but his arguments seem irrefutable.

Like Christmas decorations appearing early in shops, so one of the electronics industries most famous meetings, that of International Electron Devices at the Hilton, San Francisco from 15-17 December, is starting to show off some early, and eyecatching bling. Among the highlights to raise interest are micro- and nano-electronic technologies for the life sciences, aimed at the marriage of brain tissue with electronics to potentially restore movement to disabled people: growing focus on device/circuit interactions: better ways to build 3D integrated circuits; inevitably advanced computer memories and nanowire-batteries for next-gen electronics, with 10 times more storage capacity.

A consortium of deaf organisations, campaigning for deaf people to have equal access to the telephone is taking its case direct to Parliament. As part of the ‘Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st Century’ campaign, TAG, which represents all the main UK deaf organisations concerned with telecommunications and broadcasting, held a reception for MPs at Portcullis House, Westminster.

In the major Artificial Intelligence competition at the University of Reading, the AI man/machine team coming closest to imitating human communication was Fred Roberts, creator of Elbot, which despite failing the Turing Test, the programme's developer was awarded the ,000 (£1,760) Loebner Bronze Award by competition sponsor Hugh Loebner.

Three items this year imply a quiet, but rapid growth in holography as the the medium for future image storage and display. In indexing, a statistical approach called Automatic Liguistic Indexing of Picture in Real-Time (ALIPR) hopes to make it easier to search the internet for photographs, but if web pictorial images prove difficult to find and retrieve, who is working on holographic images retrieval, with its enormous dimensional and conceptual offerings?

In January this year, the University of Leicester's Department of Genetics became a collaborator in the People of the British Isles project which aims to analyse the geographical variation in Britain’s genetic history. The project, funded by the Wellcome Trust and headed by Professor Sir Walter Bodmer at the University of Oxford, aims to collect 3,500 blood samples from people whose parents and grandparents were born in the same rural locality. They will use these to look at the patterns of differences in people’s genetic make-up in different regions, and so produce a genetic map of the UK. Now Dr King presents key findings exploring the potential link between surname and Y chromosome type in her PhD research for which she recruited 2,500 men bearing 500 different names to take part in the study. The results have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.

First Minister Alex Salmond was challenged last night to match Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s £300m plan to give 1m of the poorest families in England internet-enabled computers. The haptic gauntlet was thrown down by Aberdeen North Labour MP Frank Doran. And that indirectly raises the whole issue of local government financing, on which Scotland is urged to look at Northern Ireland’s council tax plans.

Why do some websites appeal and others disenchant? Some of it has to do with personal preference, but a lot lies in the "eyes have it." Sarah Ronald, MD of behavioural research agency Bunnyfoot, based in Edinburgh, is on the record that not all people responsible for building websites know what works or what does not. Companies should be concerned.
If a product design is better and easier to use than another, that product is likely to sell more. Websites that attract more people are in the same category.

The global wireless local area network (WLAN) intrusion prevention system (IPS) market will reach 8m (£93m) this year, according to a study, as both China Telecom and China Mobile have announced increased support for WAPI (Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure), China's domestically-developed WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) standard, in their construction of wireless broadband networks. In the UK, Edd Dawson, MD of broadband.co.uk, said government plans to spend £28bn on a UK- wide fibre optic network to benefit the whole country.

Fortify Software, which offers enterprise application security solutions for Business Software Assurance, is offering a free copy of Fortify 360, which includes its award-winning source code analysis, program trace analysis, and real-time analysis, to any university for the purposes of education and research. Concurrently Fortify Software might take note of a new ISO/IEC standard which helps designers and developers of user software documentation

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