“Did you know ?” 2008 version.
A 5 minutes movie about pace of innovation, information technologies and globalization.
A broad idea of what is coming next and impressive figures.

Did you know ?

PingER project made this “Internet Weather” map of Africa and shows the network performance measured from Trieste Italy to African Universities, from April 2007 to March 2008.

Darker red dots indicate higher speeds such as enabled by ADSL or better . Clearer, lighter red dots indicate lower speeds, in some cases as poor as 56kbps modems. If a site is unreach able its dot disappears, so flickering dots indicate fragility. If all dots disappear the measurement host expe rienced an outage. Africa’s network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the US and falling further behind. These measurements are made by the international PingER project and provide hard evidence of the extent of the Digital Divide for planners and policy makers.

In Africa, only 4, 99% of the population have access to the Internet. An average small compared to 41.18% of Europeans and Americans who are familiar with the Internet says another report published yesterday.

About PingER
PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links, developed by the IEPM group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The network performance of more than 300 hosts are monitored worldwide.

Found two interesting posts about how Twitter becomes a real-time news media and how it contributes to spread news all over the World despite telecommunication networks breakdown and/or government censorship.

Smart Mobs author Mark A.M Kramer asks if Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could make humanity morally accountable ? Today, even with a very limited presence of the International community (politics, journalists as well as Aid workers) we continue to receive near real-time information from Myanmar through various multi-plateforms communication media such Twitter, SMS, RSS etc.

Ten days later, in China, an powerful earthquake shook the Sichuan province, information that Technology blogger Robert Scoble claimed that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Is Twitter's slogan "What are you doing" should be now replaced by "What's going on" ?

Sources: SmartMobs, BBC