30-04-2012 23:09 The newest ridiculous threat that our Government is hyping up in order to take our liberties and make money: CYBER WAR
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CISPA - Our Congress Can't Sleep At Night Because of Digital Bombs
By Tony Daltorio - May 1, 2012 | Tickers: EBAY, GOOG, TEF, VOD | 0 Comments
Tony is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.
As with SIM cards cards, the future of the new digital wallet industry may hang on decisions made in Europe. The decision revolves around the so-called Project Oscar in the United Kingdom. This is a proposed mobile payments system put together by Britain's leading mobile phone operators Vodafone PLC ADR (NASDAQ: VOD), O2 owned by Spain's Telefonica S.A. ADR (NYSE: TEF) and Everything Everywhere, the merged UK business of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.
Warnings about Project Oscar to European Commission regulators in Brussels have been sounded by two US companies, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), which owns PayPal. Both companies, of course, have a lot to lose in the fast-developing mobile payments market if the new system proposed by the European telecom companies becomes the dominant system throughout Europe. The telecom companies have a lot at stake too since they see this sector as the most promising area in their hunt for streams of revenue.
The worry for Google and PayPal is that Project Oscar may make a reality that the payments chip could be built into mobile SIM cards. This would ensure that the mobile operators like Vodafone would have full control over the digital wallet, raising at least the possibility that Google and PayPal would be cut out completely.
Even if the payment chip was built into the phone itself instead of the SIM card, there is a problem for the American companies. A quarter of the mobile phones in the UK are being subsidized by the partners in Project Oscar, meaning that on those phones Google and PayPal could still be shut out if the telecom operators refuse to sell or subsidize those phones.
Paypal may have the most to lose if Project Oscar comes to fruition. It would like to be seen as the leader in the industry as it moves to define the future of money. CEO John Donahoe recently said, PayPal mobile payment volumes continue to be on fire. A rapidly growing part of PayPal's $1.3 billion in revenues is coming from two areas overseas markets and through many of its recently-launched mobile payment initiatives.
This tussle is just the latest as players jockey for position in a very profitable market. According to Juniper Research, the global mobile payments sector had already grown to a $240 billion market in 2011 and is forecast to at least triple in size over the next five years. A key part of that global market will be Europe.
Google is launching their Google Wallet service in Europe in the first half of this year in the race to become the most commonly used digital payment method for consumers. Google has said that it has actually been easier to find companies in Europe willing to partner with them on the Google Wallet than it has been in the United States. So it obviously does not want to be behind the eight ball in a key European market like Great Britain.
PayPal spoke for all parties looking to break into the European mobile payment sector when it said We believe that consumers should be able to choose from a wide range of payment methods [in Europe]. For their part, the European telecom companies stated that Project Oscar will make it easy for companies of all sizes to create brand-new services that will sit in the mobile wallet. It remains to be seen who the European Commission sides with and what the decision on the matter will be.
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Digital Wallet War Heats Up Again
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ARX (Algorithmic Research), provider of the market-leading CoSign digital signature solution, has recently announced extended language support for the popular digital signing engine. In addition to English, CoSign now supports Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese.
This update comes shortly after ARX released the upgrade of the CoSign for SharePoint solution, which enables organizations that have invested in business automation through SharePoint to eliminate the need to resort to paper each time a signature is required. CoSign for SharePoint supports each of the most popular applications and file types, including Office, PDF and InfoPath. Users can easily add their digital signatures to InfoPath forms in their native formats, with neither CoSign nor InfoPath installed on their machines. CoSign also integrates seamlessly with built-in and third-party SharePoint workflow solutions (Nintex, K2, etc.). Professionals working on-the-go can use the solution to keep processes moving forward regardless of their location by digitally signing via any popular smartphone or tablet device.
"The extended language support that CoSign offers allows us to more precisely meet the needs of our existing and future customers around the world, and enable them to more smoothly integrate the tool into their processes," said Gadi Aharoni, CEO, ARX. "It falls in line with our commitment to support organizations across industries and geographies in seamlessly and effectively streamlining their operations."
About CoSign Digital Signatures
ARX (Algorithmic Research) is a global provider of cost-efficient digital signature solutions for industries such as AEC, life sciences, healthcare, government, energy, and manufacturing. ARX CoSign is the market leading digital signature solution. CoSign digital signatures fully automate signature-dependent processes affordably and compliantly, allowing organizations to go paperless and save time and money. Compatible with major document types including Word, Excel, PDF, PDF/A, and IBM Forms, CoSign signatures are globally verifiable without requiring proprietary validation software. CoSign is also centrally managed by your organization for reliable control over signature privileges. Learn more about the CoSign digital signature solution.
CoSign is a registered trademark of Algorithmic Research, Ltd. All other trade names and trademarks are the property of their respective holders.
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Digital Signature Software supports 8 languages.
Imagine a real estate market where it is profitable to build new skyscrapers, even if they sit at 40 percent occupancy. Eventually you run out of landnot to mention the staggering maintenance and energy costs you rack up.
Certainly no chief executive officer would sign off on such a business model, right? Well, that is the current state of corporate information systems. Over the decades, the arrival of ever-cheaper, more powerful computers every few years has made it easy and inexpensive for large companies to simply add new systems to handle extra capacity, creating acres of slap-dash, poorly designed data centers.
This ad-hoc approach to the design of corporate computer systems has left the majority of the worlds enterprises with highly inefficient, brittle digital foundations that siphon off money that would be better applied to creating new revenue and business opportunities. Today, more than 70 percent of the average corporate IT budget goes to basic operations and maintenancejust keeping the lights on, according to a new study from IDG commissioned by IBM (IBM).
The traditional IT business model has rested largely upon the promise of ever-denser microprocessors, as defined by Moores Law. That promise is failing us. Over-built and outdated data centers have brought the worlds corporations and governments face-to-face with the physics of density when applied to silicon-based semiconductors: heat. Denser, more powerful chips produce servers that run hotter, causing power and cooling costs to grow in inverse proportion to Moores Law.
With the total cost of owning and operating a new data center approaching $1 billion in some cases, cost-per-watt has become a guiding metric for many C-suite executives. This has left some companies flirting with such seemingly absurd plans as locating new data centers near the Arctic Circle to leverage the earths cooling power.
This digital sprawl and inefficiency would probably have gone uninterrupted, were it not for the explosion of Big Data and mobile computing brought on by omnipresent Web and cell-phone connectivity. Todays data-creating entitieswith socially networked customers, tweeting employees, YouTube (GOOG)-uploading marketers, and an Internet of data-savvy and data-spewing objectsare challenging the limits of the traditional IT model, clogging networks and overflowing storage systems.
Despite the challenges, the virtues of density will continue to shape the industry, but in different ways. Three-dimensional chip packaging, for example, is the latest technique to create super-dense microprocessors and memory chips. As chips extend upward, clutter can be cleared. In the next three years or so, new nano materials made from organic and man-made compounds will allow bricks of silicon to more easily dissipate heat. The thousands of cables that you see in a data center will be packed into a silicon cube one-inch square. These and other technologies, coupled with new models such as cloud computing, will offer companies an opportunity to remodel their IT infrastructure.
Another radical shift will be to bring computing to the data. Todays corporate systems routinely move mountains of data to different applications and servers for various processing tasks. With corporate data piles now measured in exabytes (five exabytes is the equivalent of all the words ever spoken by human beings), it is no longer feasible to bring the data to the server. IBM estimates that the fixed costs of shuttling an exabyte of medical data for processing can easily approach $10 million. That figure includes the hardware, software, energy, and manpower needed to store and move the files. In addition, data that is constantly on the move stands a higher risk of encountering errors or getting lost.
These are important technological developments, but they wont go far enough unless senior management pushes for new data centers and corporate systems that make real-time processing of data far more common than it is today, when it is largely relegated to factory-floor operations or a few niche applications. The ability to cull and process data wherever its created, vastly reducing the amount of information that warrants storage space or transit across networks, will become a top corporate priorityand an important competitive advantage.
Smart IT managers and executives will use this quick analysis of data to create new business models. Productivity levels also stand to gain as more engineering talent is freed from low-value work such as maintenance and directed toward IT projects that can enhance the company.
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The Case Against Digital Sprawl
PM Julia Gillard congratulates the Bulldogs after their match against Greater Western Sydney at Manuka Oval on April 28. Photo: Getty Images
I LOVE airports, but I can't be precise about why. It's a bit like a love of football in many ways.
An old friend's ex enjoyed airports so much she would sometimes drive out to Tullamarine just to sit in the departure lounge and watch planes take off and land. Whenever I go to an airport I make it my business to get on a plane, or at the very least pick up a friend who needs a lift home. I'm a bit old-fashioned like that.
A modern footy season is full of contrast. In the space of six days, the Dogs took on the oldest club in the land (Melbourne FC) at the most famous of fields, the MCG. Then we fronted up to a ''franchise'' so new it still had that fresh-paint smell. And the game was played in Switzerland - actually it was Canberra - but neutral turf anyway.
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Despite their repetitive nature, no two games of football are the same. They're like the faces on a packed morning train - each one kind of the same, only different. A player's diary of a road trip during the season is a bit like that too - you've read them before and I've written them before, but like the sullen faces of the morning commute, no two road trips are alike.
First things first: Gia wasn't on last week's flight, which was a concern for me. I don't need a schedule on trips away because I usually have Danny, and Danny is never late. He leaves the room for dinner, I leave the room; he books in for physio; I book in for massage; etc. He rarely lets on that all this annoys him, but I know it does. It must.
As I'm one of the more senior Dogs these days, my reward is a seat in the exit row. I take out my book, Rake At The Gates Of Hell, a biography of sorts about Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan. I like that it's a look at his life in the context of Irish history, making sense of why this eccentric man is the way he is. Well, in the context of neutral ground, this famous Irish folk song had me thinking, then laughing out loud. It's about a young lad with parents on either side of the Catholic/Protestant coin:
One day me mum's relations,
They came to visit me.
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Ready for take-off, hoping to fly high