A recent survey conducted by ISPreview reveals that as much as 92% of the UK broadband users are not happy with the steps taken by the government to improve the state of high-speed internet in the country. The government has set the target to provide a 2Mpbs connection as minimum for internet bandwidth provided to each household by year 2015.
However, the survey has also shown that 89% of the total 842 people which participated in this survey feel that the 2Mbps bandwidth will be insufficient by 2015. This could be justified by the fact that more people are adopting internet lifestyles by using VoIP clients, watching videos and making use of bandwidth hungry technologies for both entertainment and productivity.
According to the Chancellor, George Osborne, the UK government is going to spend more than 500M Euros in the upcoming years to increase the spread of internet by 30%, especially to the rural areas and the 2Mbps is the minimum standard for household connections. However critics point out that this speed is not enough to cope with the future bandwidth requirements that might lead to limited resources for the UK population for internet connectivity while the world witness tremendous growth.
In contrast, the European Union is working to make the “basic broadband” compulsory which would require a minimum of 30Mbps broadband speed to be enforced in the member states by year 2020. This might push the UK government to increase the current broadband standards.
Skype has released the new version of its popular application for iOS devices which now supports video calling over Wi-Fi and 3G networks. The update which is available for iPhone and iPod Touch was a much awaited feature especially after competing applications rolled out this feature earlier.
The two-way video calling will now be supported on Phone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 4th Generation in both portrait and landscape mode with compatible mobile or desktop application. The older devices without a camera such as iPod Touch 3rd Generation and iPad will be able to receive video calls, which is a great improvement since competing apps including Apple’s Facetime provides no such support for older devices. However, naturally, these devices cannot return the video signal.
The capability of making video calls over 3G is the most wanted and unique feature of Skype 3.0 that enables high-quality video calls over your cellular 3G network out of the box. However since cellular data rates are higher, it will cost more in terms of consuming the already limited 3G bandwidth. Some tests showed that the service is consuming around 3.4MB data per minute.
Another unique feature of this device is to ability to call desktop computers with both Windows and Mac OS X support running the compatible Skype application. Hence a much larger user base is now supporting the video calling feature.
Google Chrome is one of the fastest evolving browsers and has maintained a steady growth over the past months. The browser is now going to become more reliable and crash free by introducing flash sandboxing. This feature will improve speed and is available from today in Beta stage.
The chrome sandboxing technology that earlier worked for each tab is now extended to the Adobe Flash plug-in for Windows. The new feature works by adding an additional layer of protection that guard against malicious code and malware from attacking your computer through the browser. This would prevent hackers from accessing your hard drive to steal information due to the new protection layer. The sandboxing will also allow chrome browser to start flash as a new process, which will prevent the browser crashing if one of the flash objects fails.
The new update also brings a new feature called “Chrome Instant”. Users can enable this feature to allow the browser to automatically open the most common visited pages while the user types the URL. This trick will efficiently utilize the URL typing time to further speedup page load experience.
One of the most anticipated update in the new beta is the addition WebGL support. This new technology will bring hardware accelerated 3D rendering to the browser based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API. This would allow for richer content and smoother graphics in the browser.
Location based services have gained a lot of momentum in recent months with more digital services providing the ability for users to share their locations. Twitter has been the most popular place for users to share their location and they have recently updated their Places API to give official support for many popular location-reporting engines.
Twitters API Places had previously supported Gowalla and Foursquare, two of the more popular location based applications and with the API update developers can now integrate location updates into all sorts of services.
The new update also allows developers to access data sets from different Twitter partners such as TomTom, Gowalla, Zagat, Yellow Pages Groups etc. Currently these data sets do not include information from Foursquare or Facebook Places who are considered to be the largest places databases. Since Foursquare users can still check-in by tweeting through Foursquare, this move seems to be part of business strategy rather than a technical constraint.
The new API also provides statistics regarding search results for Places that would supply information about most visited places or places visited by friends. This would also include new location information from data partners such as supported restaurants or stores.
We look forward to seeing more small businesses using location based applications to reward loyal customers.
It’s almost 2011 and you know what that means? Parallels Summit 2011 is right around the corner and it’s time to get registered if you haven’t already. Parallels Summit 2011 is being hosted in Orlando, Florida, on February 22-24. For three days the web hosting community comes together to share ideas, strengthen relationships and learn about the latest technologies and strategies being developed for the Cloud.
This year has seen big steps forward in Cloud based services and Parallels Summit is the perfect place to get informed on what 2011 will bring to make sure your company is a part of it. If you are a hosting provider there are valuable opportunities to listen to the industries best speak and demo the newest Parallels products.
If you are a Communications Service Provider expect 2011 to be even more competitive than 2010 with Cloud services for small businesses taking off. The organizers of Parallels Summit 2011 have made content specifically designed for CSP’s to ready you for the year ahead.
If you are a web hosting reseller or an independent software vender make sure you can attend, so as not to miss all the important coverage of what 2011 will bring for your business. Parallels Summit 2011 takes pride in giving your business every opportunity to network and become informed by talking face-to-face with the leaders from the industry’s top companies.
This years speakers include many of the leaders within Parallels who will cover insights into the Small Business IT market and Parallels technical vision. Also speaking are experts from Microsoft, McKinsey, Go Daddy, SoftLayer, Symantec and more.
