Changes to business digitisation brings
Yesterday the UK’s Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) demanded sites such as YouTube to be closed, for encouraging CyberBullying.
Proposed by Kirsti Paterson at the national conference held in Harrogate, the motion was “Conference deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour.”
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BSkyB has agreed terms to buy set top box maker Amstrad in a £125m deal.
The two companies have already been working together for several years, with Amstrad supplying around 30% of Sky’s set top devices – with those orders making up a hefty 75% of its business.
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New research has revealed that over two thirds of all European silver surfers use broadband as their main Internet connection and that broadband adoption amongst the old ‘uns is growing faster than average European Internet users (26% year on year growth compared to 14%).
According to the research from the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), the growth in broadband penetration is having a big impact on how the old folks are communicating and spending their leisure time, with one in four logging on to the Internet in a typical week. Weekend use was recorded as growing at a rate of 19% year on year.
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A credit information group has warned that users of popular Internet networking sites may be putting themselves at increased risk of suffering identity theft
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Ben Lavender, the person who came up with the idea behind the BBC iPlayer, originally called iMP, is leaving the BBC this afternoon.
We’d been told about the news a while back, but have held off until the information was public. Looking at his Linkedin profile, we see that it now shows his new role, as Group Digital & Product Director at LoveFilm.
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The world still can’t get enough of computers as second quarter sales figures reveal a mighty 12 percent hike from the same time last year.
The wriggling bag o’stats from research firm Gartner and IDC put Hewlett-Packard at the front of the sales pack, grabbing the biggest share of the world’s PC market with unit shipments soaring by 37 percent.
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Trebles all round at Twofour Digital as they announce the winning of the three year contract to produce and host the webcasts of all proceedings from the House of Commons and House of Lords, made available through the Parliament Web site.
The webcasts include live coverage of all UK parliamentary proceedings and Select, Public Bill and General Committees as well as selected archive footage.
We imagine this is in no small way due to Phil Haggar now being within the Twofour fold, them having bought his Makeni Webcasting production company back in April this year.
What’s the relevance? We first met the very competent Mr Haggar when he ran Westminster Digital way back in 1999 – whose business backbone was … Webcasting Parliament.
It appears that Twofour’s ambitions don’t stop there, besides growing through acquisitions of companies, it’s also working for the European Parliament to design and deliver a ground breaking webTV channel broadcasting scheduled content in 20+ languages.
We received a newsflash from the Wall Street Journal (I guess they would be the first to know) at 4:27 this morning that the Dow Jones board had voted in favour of the News Corp take over, with only Leslie Hill, a member of the Bancroft family, and Dieter von Holtzbrinck abstained from the vote.
Christopher Bancroft – who it is understood is actively seeking alternatives to the News Corp. bid – left the meeting early.
It’s reported that News Corp. was “grateful” to Dow Jones board for its vote.
News Corp have been trying to get their hands on Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, to add to their already large portfolio of highly influential media titles and companies around the world.
The next, and possibly final stage, is for the Bancroft family to approve the boards approval. Given the family has asked for more than $60 per share in the past – the current News Corp offer, valuing the company at $5Bn – it’s anyone’s guess which way it will go.
There’s been considerable concern voiced about how good an idea it is for Rupert Murdoch to be in control of a major force of financial reporting in America.
We nearly fell off our chairs when we saw the Independent reporting that Virgin-backed games company, A World Of My Own (AWOMO) were hoping to list for $1Bn in London and Frankfurt.
The Big Idea is that people will use the 3D world of AWOMO to download their games.
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The Telecom and Internet industries are squaring up for a right old fist fight over who rules the consumer mobile search business.
According to market research firm eMarketer, the battle looks set to resemble a full on pub brawl, with telecom carriers, handset makers, publishers, directory and yellow pages outfits, Silicon Valley big boys and a load of start-ups all looking to grab a piece of the mobile search action.
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