Category: Disaster
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, from April 20 to July 15, was probably the disaster most extensively covered online. BP itself launched a social media channel for it. Oilholic let you track the spill as it spread, as did NOAA.Continue
IBM is diving deep into the healthcare market with an array of analytics technologies it has accumulated with the $11 billion in acquisitions it has made in the past several years.
For instance, IBM is working with the National Bone Marrow Program (NMDP) to reduce by half the time it takes to find a donor.
The NMDP operates the "Be The Match Registry" of more than eight million potential donors and more than 160,000 cord blood units. Continue
More than half of small and medium-sized businesses are operating without IT security guidelines in place, according to research released by security software company AVG.
The company surveyed a sample of 2,000 SMBs in the United States and United Kingdom and found that not only do more than half have no security guidelines, but that "1 in 7 have no Internet security software or solutions in place at all."Continue
‘The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.’ ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
This past summer, my family (my wife, me, six kids) finally gave up our car. It was a liberating and scary experience.
We’ve been dependent on our automobile for so many years that giving it up was unthinkable. If you own a car, it’s probably unthinkable to you too.Continue
Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?
If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.Continue
Internetome, the U.K.'s first full day conference dedicated to the Internet of Things was held on Nov 10 in London. In front of a full attendance, with representatives from academia, government, and enterprise, a wide range of speakers illustrated the promise and the challenges of the complex systems based on smart sensor networks.
The Economist magazine featured in its current issue a special report on Smart Systems, underlining how rich, and important these ICT solutions have become, and how they will in the future sustain value added services for a wide set of vertical application areas.Continue
Today, Facebook announced the launch of its Green on Facebook Page, a place the company hopes to highlight environmentally-focused efforts. The Page currently has about 9,000 Likes and information about Facebook’s corporate green and energy efficiency programs, as well as links to its green partners.
While Facebook is already home to other environmental efforts, the company itself has made a renewed to frame itself as environmentally conscious.
That effort might be in part to Greenpeace’s campaign to criticize the company for using partly coal-derived electricity to power its servers.Continue
Although Facebook’s developer and advertiser platforms have been live for several years, large US business publications have been investigating potential Facebook privacy concerns much more prominently in the last few weeks. Whether you think recent articles by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times symbolize how investigative journalism can best serve society, or are just another example of sensational headlines based on limited information, the fact remains that these articles are getting published on the front page of influential business newspapers, and Continue
Geopolitics, drone strikes, terrorism and this summer’s catastrophic floods dominate perceptions of Pakistan, a vast culture of 170m peoples. What’s less understood about Pakistan is that it has a very connected, globalized and educated urban middle-class and its relationship with a large diaspora in the West.Continue
