civil society & ICT

31.08.2007 Deutsche Welle, Germany's foreign broadcaster has made its television programs available live on many mobile devices, making it possible to watch DW-TV while away from TV and computer.

30.08.2007 e-Krishi centre in an Indian state of Kerala is making people of Malappuram district more happy in Onam festival by offering them cheap goods than any other place.

29.08.2007 UNESCO has launched a book titled, ‘Building National Information Policies: Experiences in Latin America’ in Kingston. The book emphasizes the importance for Latin American and Caribbean countries to adopt National Information Policies (NIP) to preserve their people’s right to access information.

29.08.2007 The brand new website,ErasmusPC has been launched which is an International Network for Culture and Cities. Its aim is to gather ideas and to formulate and promote initiatives relating to urban and cultural development.

29.08.2007 Algeria and the United States have ratified a second agreement which is extending over the next five years, to cooperate in science and technology.

29.08.2007 British House of Lords has found in an inquiry of a personal online security that the internet supports a criminal economy, though the incidences of e-crime are huge but with no existence of accurate data. So the governments, the manufacturers of hardware and software, internet service providers, and the criminal justice system must act against burgeoning e-crime.

27.08.2007 Global Alliance for Youth and development (GAID) is organizing a Global Forum on Youth and ICT for Development: Youth and ICT as Agents of Change, at Geneva International Conference Center in Geneva, Switzerland from 24 to 26 September, 2007. The forum aims to help the youth in exploring and exploiting ICT for the advancement of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

27.08.2007 United Nations officials called on top Chinese executives to utilize information technology to improve the plight of poor people and to fight against poverty, illiteracy and disease in their home country and around the world.

27.08.2007 The Intel Foundation partnered with the Digital Empowerment Foundation, a New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation has granted a donation of US 60,000 (Rs.25 lakh) towards women's education and empowerment in India.

27.08.2007 Researchers in Canada have revealed that computer analysis of existing drugs may be a key to fight new infectious agents and antibiotic-resistant pathogens like deadly tuberculosis strains and staph 'superbugs', making it easier to tackle sudden outbreaks. They said that the use of such "emergency discovery" technology could save time, money and lives during a sudden bio-terrorism attack.

24.08.2007 Asia Pacific survey, on mobile banking opportunities, has come up with a report titled, ‘Mobile Opportunities for the Financial Sector’. The survey which was conducted in five countries found that one of every three Indians with a bank account is ready to switch to another bank, offering free mobile banking. Indian users are found more aware of mobile banking than those in other countries.

24.08.2007 The researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, London, have found, with the aid of a computer game that how the brain response to fear changes as a threat gets closer.

24.08.2007 Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) is extending the Competition deadline to 9 September 2007. The Competition is part of GKP’s ongoing programme in the area of youth-led social enterprises. It is fully web-based and open to applicants worldwide until the (extended) closing on 9 September 2007. 100 winners selected by an international online jury will be announced on 20 October 2007.

23.08.2007 IBM India Research Laboratory has developed a IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology, which can be used to integrate the speaker independent continuous speech recognition of Hindi to edit the translated text. The speech recognition technology eliminates the need to learn different keyboard mapping.

23.08.2007 An e-Book entitled, ICT in Agriculture: Perspectives of Technological Innovation provides an overview of successes and failures in the development and adoption of ICT in agriculture and the rural sector.

23.08.2007 ICT4D dgCommunity has taken an extensive interview of Barbara Fillip from the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and Mark Surman from Telecentre.org, on major telecenters' issues, the outputs of a recent publication untitled "Making the connection: Scaling Telecenters for development" .

22.08.2007 The Federal Government of Australia has unveiled a new Internet based health system for remote areas which will help the government ensure the health issues identified in child health checks are properly followed up.

22.08.2007 An NGO in the South Indian state of Chennai has set up an Internet centre for visually challenged people to use cyber space for free. This is the only centre in the country, where visual challenged people can walk and brows.

21.08.2007 According to researchers at Tel Aviv University, the people who crave for computers first thing in the morning and obsessively check emails in the middle of the night are suffering from "Internet addiction disorder". They said that Internet addiction can be better diagnosed if treated like any other extreme and menacing addiction, such as kleptomania and pathological gambling.

21.08.2007 According to the Report by the Centre for Public Policy at Brown University in the US, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are capable of developing websites to offer best possible electronic services.