Better Living Through Technology

Do you harbor a secret desire to dazzle your friends at parties and around the watercooler with your knowledge of high tech communications wizardry? A new 3-page free report,”Everything Businesses Want to Know About Web 2.0 (But are Afraid to Ask)” explains the technology in easy-to-understand terms. In fact, while Web 2.0 has had plenty of air play in the past few years as being the driving technology behind dynamic and interactive sites like Wikipedia, Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, and others, it is nothing more than an extension of the same technologies that have evolved along with the development of the commercial Internet we have all come to know and love. This article in the Fall 2007 edition of TMIS eNewsletter has a link to the report so you can fulfill your wish to dazzle your friends and learn 5 steps for joining the Web 2.0 club.

In addition, here are some articles highlighting a few of the innovations that some individuals and businesses are using through sophisticated interactive web sites to engage their audience or customers while creating a community. Interactivity, participation and collaboration combine to create a sense of belonging and give participants a reason to keep coming back and maybe even bring their friends.

Learn about Monique A. Dearth, recently named one of the “2007 Enterprising Women of the Year” by Enterprising Women Magazine. She used the force of her own personal dream of helping other HR professionals who wish to transition from full-time status to smart, flex-time positions balancing career and family to shape her virtual hub for new career roles as independent consultants.

Learn about “Web 2.0 Goes to Work,” an initiative being deployed by IBM to enable enterprise customers to gain new competitive advantage through the creative integration and transformation of all types of information. Their suite, called Info 2.0, enables organizations to easily catalog, combine, transform and remix any type of data and content for innovative uses.

Other articles describe how Web 2.0 technology is becoming increasingly available on mobile devices like smartphones and the iPhone, and how one company’s vision of letting users easily integrate photos, video, and other web services into their blogs won them this year’s Best Web 2.0 Innovation Award.

We wish to acknowledge the Ericsson telecommunications company for launching their pilot Gramjyoti Rural Broadband Project in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. They are collaborating with India’s Department of Telecommunications to provide high speed internet connectivity for access to a range of new services for the first time using wireless WCDMA/HSPA technology. This area was chosen for the project because most families there have access to mobile phones but little access to fixed telephones.

As a special point of interest for our readers, we want to remind you that it is now time to renew your enrollment on the FTC’s national Do Not Call registry. Many people are not aware that the initial enrollments they made in 2003 were only valid for five years. Their numbers on the registry will automatically expire if they do not enroll again. Re-enrolling is easy to do from the http://www.donotcall.gov site, or by calling 1-888-382-1222.

I am grateful to be in a collaborative business with many talented and skilled professionals. Additional feedback and recommendations for our products and services at TM Information Services are always welcome.

- Mary M. McLaughlin

From the Front Page of TMIS News
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Free Report Guides Businesses on World of "Web 2.0"
Culver City, California

"Web 2.0" technology, describing terms in easy-to-understand language and including practical steps for implementing Web 2.0. The free report, titled "Everything Businesses Want to Know About Web 2.0 (but are afraid to ask)," tackles one of the most discussed topic that businesses face.

Web 2.0 has received much press in the last few years as the Internet continues to develop and mature. While the concept of Web 2.0 came out of the technology industry, it has assumed an important place in the business world. All businesses, from the home office to the large enterprise, will eventually be touched by the Web 2.0 phenomenon and understanding its basic tenets is an important first step before adopting the technology that underpins it.
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Women's Careers Finding Web 2.0 Options at HR OptIn
Atlanta, Georgia

You've heard about the new era that is sweeping the World Wide Web? Dubbed Web 2.0, this online revolution is all about sharing: be it a personal page at MySpace, a video on YouTube, a podcast or a blog. Now, a Website called HR OptIn has brought the power of Web 2.0 to working women, or more specifically, to women who used to be working for some of the top organizations in America but who took time off to care for a child, a parent, or to raise a family.

HR OptIn was created to help talented women opt back in to their chosen profession by sharing ideas and knowledge at a virtual online HQ. In this case, the chosen profession is Human Resources or HR for short, a department you'll find at most mid-to-large size companies. HR OptIn, and its parent company, Atlanta-based Incite Strategies, Inc., already has relationships with some of the nation's premier HR departments at Fortune 1000 companies across America.
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IBM Initiative to Move Web 2.0 to Center Stage
Boston, Massachusetts

IBM has announced "Web 2.0 Goes to Work," an IBM initiative to help organizations bring the value of Web 2.0 -- such as easy access to information, rich, browser-based applications, and social networking and collaboration software -- into the enterprise in a security-rich, reliable way. Web 2.0 is about combining content, collaboration and rich user experiences that are transforming the Internet from static Web pages into a dynamic platform for social interaction, while enabling the creation of powerful, Web-based applications.

"IBM is uniquely positioned to develop an information ecosystem to meet the needs of organizations as they adopt Web 2.0 principles and technologies," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "We're combining the collective experience, resources and expertise from across the company to help our customers realize the value of Web 2.0 in the enterprise." As companies embrace this more dynamic, social Internet, they realize the benefits of having a service oriented architecture (SOA). While SOA helps build a flexible computing infrastructure, Web 2.0 arms users and communities with software assets needed to create a new class of rich, lightweight and easily deployed software solutions. "Our goal is to make today's consumer-based technologies relevant to businesses by building offerings that deliver a highly-productive and integrated entry into Web 2.0-based solutions," said Jim Deters, president of Ascendant Technology, an IBM Business Partner. "Businesses who do not take advantage of these technologies will be ultimately forced by users into this new computing era or will face significant growth hurdles."
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Ericsson Pioneers WCDMA/HSPA Ecosystem Pilot in Rural India
Stockholm, Sweden

Ericsson has launched the Gramjyoti Rural Broadband Project, an initiative to introduce benefits of WCDMA/HSPA technology in rural India and connect communities to high-speed internet services for the first time. The trial project was launched in early September and will showcase the benefits of mobile broadband applications across 18 villages and 15 towns close to Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu.

By creating a stable ecosystem based on leading WCDMA/HSPA technology, Ericsson will provide these communities with high- speed internet so they can access a range of new services including: telemedicine; e-education; e-governance; online local information; voice and video call services; and live TV and entertainment.

The initiative seeks to demonstrate how WCDMA/HSPA technology can be a major catalyst for social and economic empowerment in this developing region, helping to bridge the digital divide and increase productivity and quality of life. Communities and schools will be among the beneficiaries of the initiative. More than 3,000 high school students within these communities will now have high-speed internet and can take e- learning courses, gaining access to new information and educational resources for the first time. These communities will also benefit from health services such as live interactive check-ups via telemedicine.

Mats Granryd, Managing Director of Ericsson India, says: "Ericsson aims to help India's rural population get first-hand experience of broadband applications. This pioneering project will provide communities with access to meaningful broadband services for the first time. Building an efficient and affordable WCDMA/HSPA rural broadband can help serve as a blueprint for the widespread introduction of internet and broadband connectivity in the future." The location for the project was chosen for the Rural Broadband Project because it reflects the typical telecom profile of rural India, where many families have limited or no access to fixed telephones, but do have access to a mobile phone.
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Integrated IBM Storage, Server and Services Solution Provides Enterprise Archiving, Storage Virtualization and Data Protection to Hospital and Research Networks
Nashville, Tennessee

IBM has announced its new Grid Medical Archive Solution, a cross-IBM offering comprised of storage, software, servers and services. The GMAS solution provides hospitals, clinics, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies with a multi-tier, multi-application and multi-site enterprise storage archive for delivering medical images, patient records and other critical healthcare reference information on demand.

The need to retain massive volumes of business-critical fixed-content data for long periods of time is presenting new data and storage management challenges for health care organizations. Users continue to demand fast performance as well as higher and broader availability of patient records and medical images. Massive data volumes combined with long retention periods require storage administrators to deliver a cost-effective storage strategy that meets the users' needs, protects valuable data, scales on demand, simplifies data migration and automates recovery for both planned and unplanned downtime.

"With mounting advances in medicine coupled with a longer-living population, healthcare organizations are increasingly embracing new technology that puts the patient in the center of the delivery model and drives innovation to increase the quality of patient care," said Hernan Vega, Vice President, Healthcare and Life Sciences, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "IBM GMAS is a great example of how advanced storage technologies, virtualization and grid computing can improve the way hospitals access, store and manage their critical patient data over time."
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Blue Flavor Launches Mobile Web 2.0 Application Portal for iPhone

Blue Flavor, a leading design, development and consulting company with a focus on new media, announces the launch of Leaflets, a new mobile portal providing free Web 2.0 applications optimized for modern "Mobile 2.0" phones and handheld devices, beginning with Apple's iPhone.

Via iPhone's built-in Safari browser, each Leaflet gives users easy access to a popular Web 2.0 application optimized for mobile devices. Additionally, content providers will have an outlet to release their original content and applications to Mobile 2.0 device owners. Applications currently utilized on the desktop, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming, Newsvine and others, will be available for immediate access via iPhone. Through the use of web standards like XHTML, CSS, RSS and XML, a popular destination can be translated into a Leaflet in only a few hours.
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Vox Named Best Web 2.0 Innovation

Six Apart, the company that provides the TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox blogging services and the Movable Type publishing platform, is proud to accept an award on behalf of its newest blogging service, Vox, for Best Web 2.0 Innovation. The editors and writers at Shiny Media, a UK-based blogging network, announced the award at their annual Shiny Awards 2007 in London.

Together with editors of the UK's leading gadget websites, techdigest.tv and shinyshiny.tv, and with input from a guest panel made up of The Guardian, The Sun, InStyle and Q magazine gadget gurus, they selected winning products in ten different categories, including Wag Gadget of the Year, Smartphone of the Year, and the category in which Vox won, Best Web 2.0 Innovation. "We're thrilled that Vox was selected as the Best Web 2.0 Innovation," said Mena Trott, cofounder and President of Six Apart. "We are glad to see that people appreciate our vision of letting users easily integrate photos, video, and other web services into their blogs. Thanks to Shiny Media for the award."

Vox is a free hosted blogging service for sharing experiences with friends and family. Vox's rich privacy filters give members granular control over who views their stories, photos, groups, videos or audio clips. Members can easily set any of six levels of privacy on any piece of content they share on Vox.
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IBM BladeCenter Powers eICU "Telemedicine" Network, Connecting Patients to Medical Care Experts

IBM and VISICU, Inc. have announced a joint effort to wire a telemedicine network to provide remote critical care support to military hospitals along the Pacific Rim. Tripler Army Medical Center (Honolulu, Hawaii), in conjunction with staff at University of Hawaii, will manage the remote monitoring and support system using VISICU's eICU® technology on IBM BladeCenter servers. The eICU center, in collaboration with remote military hospitals, will provide an enhanced level of care to active-duty military, their families, and other beneficiaries.

VISICU's eICU solution enables military hospital personnel throughout the Pacific Rim to "electronically connect" with the remote eICU center in Hawaii. This allows instantaneous access to critical care specialists who are able to monitor patient status and speak directly with bedside clinicians to guide appropriate intervention. By taking immediate action, patients can be stabilized to prevent further complication subsequently eliminating or delaying the need for air evacuation. Using state-of-the-art network and video technologies, along with device connectivity and Smart Alerts, the eICU specialists have the potential to provide support for over 300 patients across the Pacific Rim.
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