Who can get the information?
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Search engines, Web services
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have recently published the 2009 edition of Measuring the Information Society – The ICT Development Index(IDI).
The pdf of the core findings is freely available from the ITU.
They make interesting reading – particularly when looking for analysis on where the greatest growth lies and how people access information with ICT.
Africa is a world leader. The data from the ITU on the IDI reveals that ICT access to information growth, across a broad spectrum of carriers and hardware, was 100.4% in North Africa from 2002 to 2007.
The equivalent growth rate in Western Europe was only 23.4% in the same period.
Much of the growth in Africa is in non-traditional internet access areas. Mobile phone market penetration is six times higher in Africa than in Europe.
If we were starting a web/information social business in Africa having all data and output available in mobile friendly versions, just like this Third Sector blog, would be an absolute given.
To their continued credit, Google are making strides to get information to these non-traditional access routes. Google has just released a set of SMS friendly services called Google SMS.
Offering mobile phone users an SMS marketplace, search service and tips – delivering advice on crops, health and clinics. All designed for the currently less well developed or mature hard-wired infrastructure markets. Go Google.
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Flickr Creative Commons image by Telelavoro
Google translator toolkit (beta)
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Search engines
We love translation – building our web sites with machine translation facilities and using Google online translation services to publish printed material in other languages to support our clients and community organisations.
Google have recently lanched the Translator Toolkit. You can play your part in improving machine translation at Google, helping to correct automatic translations in a simple editor.
You can compare and contrast translated pages, search past translations for new words or publish the translations themselves directly to Wikipedia or Knol.
Translation – better with Google.
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Have you met Bing?
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Search engines
Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft. Is it Google or something else? Neither is the answer really.
The UK version does not have all the functions of its U.S. sibling, but offers some interesting new design and uses that sets it apart from previous Microsoft search services.
The preview of video searches in-browser is excellent, as is the mix and range of search results.
The pop-up page preview for each search entry, offering as it does a precis of the page and major links, is a real ‘click saver. Have a look.
The ability to generate rss feeds from all search results is a winner, and for the social-site browsers amongst our subscribers – the xRank facility lets you see who’se popular and who’se not in the cyber world.
This last function is a bit of a ‘something for everyone’ offering, we think. But overall a great attempt at bringing a new user interface and search service to the web.
Short video courtesy of Jing -Pro screen capture made simple.
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About our business
Very mobile friendly
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