ICT and healthcare - networking session in Helsinki

At the IST Event 2006 in Helsinki from 21 to 23 November 2006, I am planning to hold a networking session dedicated to ICT and healthcare on behalf of my company Eurescom, the R&D organisation of European telecoms network operators.

The title of the networking session is "How can ICT improve Healthcare? Research topics for FP7".

This interdisciplinary session will bring together ICT and healthcare experts for identifying innovative demands and research topics for EU Framework Programme 7. The guiding question is, which new ICT solutions are needed to enable the healthcare sector, including the care for the elderly, to become more efficient and effective.

To facilitate a dialogue between ICT and healthcare experts, the Café Conversation format is used: in three rounds, small groups of changing composition will discuss the guiding question.

The networking session will have two main results:

1. A group of experts from ICT and the health sector, who are interested in interdisciplinary collaboration for exploring innovative solutions in the healthcare sector.

2. An initial set of important research topics for FP7 in the area of ICT and healthcare.

For sustaining the discussion, Eurescom is providing a mailing-list on ICT and healthcare, which is open to everyone interested. Please let me know, if you wish to be included.

The exact date of the 90-minute networking session needs to be decided yet.

Further information is available on
the networking session page

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Technorati Profile

Mobile TV – a new killer application?

Studies have shown that there is a rising customer demand for mobile TV. It may not be a killer application yet, but at least mobile TV is a promising new service. The original plans to roll out mobile TV services on the mass market before the football world cup in Germany have not materialized. However, there are a number of pilot projects, and the majority of customers in these pilots have responded positively to new service.

The forthcoming Beijing Olympics in 2008 could be the starting signal for mass-market adoption of mobile TV. The market forecasts for mobile TV are very positive. BBC News quotes a report by analysts Informa which predicts that more than 210 million people will be watching TV on their mobile by 2011. By the next World Cup in 2010, 10% of handsets in 2010 will be able to handle broadcast mobile TV signals, according to the report.

Before this will happen, a number of issues need to be solved. One limiting factor is that there is a competition between different technologies, like DVB-H, DMB, and streaming via UMTS, which may confuse potential customers and could, thus, limit commercial success. Pricing is the next critical issue. In a pilot project in Helsinki, customers expressed they would be ready to pay 10 euro per month for mobile TV services.


World Cup ushers in mobile TV era
Article in BBC News, 7 June 2006

The latest issue of Eurescom mess@ge, a European R&D magazine for telecommunications edited by me, features some articles which explore technological and business aspects of mobile TV:


Mobile TV – the next European mega trend?
In his introduction article, Eurescom mess@ge editor Peter Stollenmayer provides a concise overview on the main technologies and the state-of-the-art of mobile TV.

Mobile TV technologies
Mobile TV, Mobile Broadcast, Mobile Media Services, or Handy-TV in Germany, ometimes in combination with the adjective "interactive", are different terms, basically meaning the same: bringing video and audio content and services to mobile devices. In this Tutorial CELTIC Director Heinz Brüggemann explains some of the most prominent mobile TV technologies and their advantages and disadvantages.


DVB-H pilots in four European countries
From March 2005 to June 2006, pilot trials on mobile TV services via DVB-H have been conducted among consumers in Finland, the UK, Spain, and France. Eurescom mess@ge editor-in-chief Milon Gupta summarises the results.


European DMB project MI FRIENDS kicks off
MI FRIENDS is a pilot project on mobile TV via the DMB standard, which was initiated by the Bavarian Regulatory Authority For Commercial Broadcasting (BLM). In an inside report, Peter Kettner from BLM explains what the project is about.


Better quality for mobile TV
Mobile TV puts specific challenges to service providers in regard to the quality of service. Based on results from EU research project DAIDALOS, Karl Jonas from Fraunhofer FOKUS explains how multicast distribution can be improved to make watching soccer matches on mobile devices more fun.

French parliament plans to tighten copyright laws

On 17 March, the French parliament agreed after a long, controversial debate on a bill for tightening the copyright laws. The main issues were the legal treatment of peer-to-peer networks, systems for digital rights management, and the right to make a private copy of CDs and other digital media.

If the bill is accepted next Tuesday, the distribution of peer-to-peer software which enables the unlawful exchange of protected music and videos will be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years and a fine of up to 300,00 euro. Critics like the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) expect collateral damages for Open Source software, as this is also distributed via file sharing technologies, which could also be used for unlawful purposes.

It is obvious that the lobbyists from Vivendi-Universal and other major owners of digital content have achieved most of what they wanted. Although it is perfectly understandable that the media industry want to protect their property from illegal copying, the effect will be negative not only for P2P pirates but also for honest consumers and the media industry itself. DRM software will inhibit more and more the rights of consumers to enjoy the digital content they bought. It is, thus, foreseeable that sales of CDs and DVDs will continue to decrease. The French legislative is ill advised to focus on the needs of the media producers and neglect the rights of consumers and citizens.

Social bookmarking - sharing bookmarks has become popular

Private content production on the web is growing in importance. After sharing music and videos via peer-to-peer networks, photos via content platforms and news or opinions via blogs, the latest trend is sharing personal bookmarks.

Social bookmarking means that users save a personal collection of bookmarks and share them via a web platform. The growing popularity of social bookmarking is due to the fact that it is very easy and very convenient.

The pioneer of social bookmarking is del.icio.us, a platform launched in 2003 and since December 2005 owned by Yahoo. The potential of social bookmarking is significant, because it can be used for creating social page ranks in search engines, as tried at CollaborativeRank under the roof of del.icio.us.

References:

del.icio.us

CollaborativeRank

Wikipedia entry on social bookmarking

Social Bookmarking Tools
D-Lib Magazine, April 2005, Volume 11 Number 4
(I). A General Review
(II) A Case Study - Connotea

Tag, You're It: Best Bookmarker
Wired News, 9 October 2005

Folksonomies Tap People Power
Wired News, 1 February 2005

Link Blogging - Social bookmarking systems should merge with the blogosphere
Blog by Sukumar, June 5, 2005

Open Source beer

Hearing the term Open Source most people, at least those with some interest in ICT, automatically think of software, the most famous being the operating system Linux. However, the Open Source philosophy can also be applied to the non-digital "old economy" of analogue products.

Danish students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen recently released an open source beer recipe. Their beer is called in Danish Vores Oel, which means "our beer".

There have been other attempts before to apply the Open Source principle to hardware, but not with big success, as in the case of OScar, the Open Source car project. It still needs to be proven that Open Source can be a successful concept outside of the ICT domain.

'Free' Danish beer makes a splash, BBC News, 28 July 2005
Vores Oel website
OScar project

Increased e-mail surveillance won't help against terrorists

The British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, will propose new measures for increasing e-mail and phone surveillance at an emergency meeting of the EU interior ministers on the implications of last Thursday's London bombings. Mr Clarke claimed that the London attacks could possibly have been prevented.

This statement appears to be rather doubtful. There is no evidence to confirm that scanning more e-mails and phone calls would lead to the prior detection of terrorist plots.

There is already an overload of information. The information overload would be further increased with the suggested move. Finding the relevant information would become much harder, and terrorists have proven to be clever in escaping communication surveillance. Paying the price of reducing civil liberties for some vague assumption of increasing security does not appear to be justified.

Email spying 'could have stopped killers. The Observer, 10 July 2005

Convergence of telecoms and audiovisual media

Convergence has become a major trend in ICT. After the convergence of fixed and mobile telecoms services, the next trend is the convergence of telecoms and audiovisual media.

A new industry-driven European initiative called Networked and Electronic Media, NEM, has been established, which intends to promote this convergence. NEM was officially launched as a European Technology Platform in Brussels on 29 June. The participating companies like Thomson, Alcatel, France Telecom, and the BBC consider networked and electronic media to be a new industry sector with huge growth prospects.

Website of NEM, the Networked and Electronic Media Platform