The w3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has spoken: their new Pronunciation Lexicon Spec will create a “100% standard” for speech-enabled web applications. Besides creating Web apps driven by voice, PLS 1.0 provides web access for mobile phones.

"There are 10X as many phones in the world as connected PCs. Phones will become the major portal to the Web,” says James Larson, co-Chair of the Voice Browser Working Group. “Speech recognition is not yet widely associated with the ‘visual Web’. But this wil Continue reading...

With internet addresses running out in mid-2010, the move to IPv6 will give the Internet a much larger address space and ensure future growth, says internet pioneer Vinton Cerf.

And he should know, he made the decision for the IPv4 32-bit address space in 1977, “at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," and when “128-bit address space seemed excessive.” Now at Google, Cerf feels the internet will see lots of change.

Coming is a domain name system security via DNSSEC (Domain Continue reading...

Music industry may be finally taking a step forward, but cable & telecom giants want to take steps backward. Customers of Comcast USA now have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage: 250GB per month, per account.

Users over the limit get a phone call warning and second time, Comcast suspends service for a year. That really hurts customers streaming HD video or using online backup services. And Comcast will not provide tools to help users monitor usage.

Cable & telecom instinct Continue reading...

No one knows but--like the universe-- either the web is REALLY infinite or it’s just TOO BIG to count. While the first Google index in 1998 had 26m pages, and by 2000 the index reached 1 billion, this year Google's web spiders identified more than 1 trillion unique URLs.

Each day Google does the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road of a new “continent” about 50000X as big as USA with 50000X as many roads and intersections.

And that' Continue reading...

The music and film industries persuaded the UK’s six biggest Internet providers (Virgin Media, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali) to send warning letters to consumers suspected of illegal file-sharing. ISPs argue they are not responsible for content. But they were pushed to do the deal after the UK government said it would impose legislation. The plan follows France (who bullied their ISPs) and countries such as Australia, Denmark, Japan and New Zealand who are in di Continue reading...

Australian & Danish researchers discover they can dramatically boost the throughput of existing networks by scratching photonic technology to incite it up to 1 terabit per second capacity.

The scratch is actually in a photonic integrated circuit that uses the 'scratch' as a switching-path (like when trains switch from one track to another). The switch takes only one picosecond to change so in 1 second the switch can turn on and off about 1 million times.

According to the Centre for Ultra-high Continue reading...

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a standards-based, short-range wireless connectivity technology to enable 2-way interactions between electronic devices.
The technology is based on RFID, which makes it compatible with the existing contactless infrastructure already in use for public transportation and payment. NFC is suitable for applications that can make plastic cards and paper tickets obsolete, resulting in cost savings and a solution to business/consumer needs in multiple industries.

Communication Continue reading...