TechWatch has just published a report on the future of Ethernet, 100G Ethernet and beyond, which explains the background and technical development to the next upgrade of the thirty-year-old family of networking standards, which will be formalised in 2010. The key thing is that, traditionally, Ethernet has developed in incremental steps of ten. This means … Read more
This afternoon I attended JISC’s Libraries of the Future conference in Oxford. I was in the Second Life version of the conference and I think I probably got the better part of the debate. Whilst the Real Life talks were OK, there wasn’t really that much I hadn’t heard before, albeit dressed up with different … Read more
A couple of weeks ago I spotted an article about the ISTC, a new publishing standard. What was particularly interesting was that it seems to have potential for much wider application: Ted Nelson’s ‘transclusion’ came to mind and there would seem to be the potential for using an ISTC to identify and make micro-payments for … Read more
Yesterday’s Guardian featured 100 top sites for the year ahead, and it was interesting to note how many of these were connected to location-based services. For those in HE who are interested in the educational issues surrounding these technologies, you might be interested in the TechWatch report on Future Location-based Experiences, published in January 2005. … Read more
ICT 2008 is a big conference and there are great many parallel sessions covering a veritable smorgisbord of technology areas. Taking a helicopter view of the proceedings gives a pretty good idea of the likely direction of travel for EU-funded ICT developments over the coming decade. I’ve collated a list of all the work packages … Read more
In a previous blog item I talked about the future of the institutional CMS and why TechWatch wasn’t going to commission an update to its 2001 report. You may remember that I focused on two of the main concepts from the CMS report: processes rather than products, and blurring the boundaries between systems. At the … Read more
In the Web 2.0 report we published last year (What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education) we noted the importance of geo-spatial data in the development of mash-ups and we’re now planning to return to this subject with a new open call. The growing interest in the use of geospatial and geographical … Read more
Back in September 2001 TechWatch published a report on Content Management Systems, written by Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes. At the time it very quickly became one of the most popular TechWatch reports ever published, and is still a steady favourite, even today. I can’t take any of the credit for the report as it … Read more
TechWatch has recently been asked to contribute its thoughts on future technology developments that are likely to have the most significant impact on library and information services in higher education. It’s for Update, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, and one of the interesting questions they’ve asked us is about … Read more
Last summer TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document formats. The issue was one of standards: increasing pressure, particularly from the EU, was being brought to bear on public sector software procurement practices to only buy software that conforms to open standards. The argument is about how taxpayers’ money should be spent. In essence, … Read more