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Who is what? What is where? Where am I? Are you there?
You have hit the other collection, a newslog designed for the curious.
 Microsoft is planning to release an assault on the search advertising industry this coming June, according to the Associated Press. Pulling from the Chinese research leg of the company, the Beast of Redmond aims to add highly targeted and contextual next-generation search marketing technology to its weapons cache to continue its bout against the new nemesis found in Google. - more on webpronews . |
 Thanks to support from successive EU-funded projects, Tiga Technologies, an advanced IT consultancy, is creating a spin-off company to commercialise a pioneering electronic arbitration system called e-Dispute©. The e-Dispute© prototype provides fast online arbitration, mediation and conciliation services. Claimants and respondents can be anywhere in the world and select from a range of languages to work in. They can send messages securely and explain their preferences to an arbitrator. “Robot agents digest all the information and make proposals to the parties,” explains Jacques Gouimenou, managing director of Tiga Technologies. “Once the arbitrator is agreed upon, the robot agent finds a suitable ‘meeting’ date for everybody.” Meetings are supported via video conference and chat room facilities. “Our system reduces delays and costs. It is also very secure,” he adds. To evaluate the prototype arbitration system with potential customers, Gouimenou won funding from the European Commission ‘s eTEN Programme for the e-Dispute© project. Acknowledging its undisputed advances to date, it has since been voted eTEN project of the month for December 2005. The e-Dispute© platform has been successfully piloted at the European Court of Arbitration and the Emilia-Romagna Chamber of Commerce. Further trials are scheduled at several UK hospitals to assist with claim resolution. Recently, Gouimenou attended the European Tech Investment Forum in Berlin seeking capital for this latest venture. “We are now looking for €1.5-2m investment to set up a company dedicated to the promotion and commercialisation of the e-Dispute© system,” explains Gouimenou. “There is a huge market for e-Dispute© and we want to maximise our chances with professionals.” Before reaching this point of commercialisation with electronic arbitration, Tiga Technologies, founded by serial entrepreneur Gouimenou in 1997, has followed an instructive and enlightening Rpath. In the late nineties, Tiga  Technologies coordinated an ESPRIT programme-funded project called PRONEL involving Hugin, Siemens and Schlumberger. The project developed a special data mining software tool that enabled probabilistic relationships between variables in a dataset to be identified and illustrated in a simple graphical form called a Bayesian network.“When it finished, we continued working on the subject in cooperation with Schlumberger, providing consultancy,” elaborates Gouimenou.“We also started the IST-funded project e-Arbitration-T, building on the results achieved in PRONEL.” For e-Arbitration-T, Tiga Technologies and their project partners developed an Internet-based system to help resolve disputes between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). “We developed a platform and autonomous agents capable of reasoning based on experience and that could improve their arbitration behaviour incrementally,” says Gouimenou. Software developed in PRONEL helped with mathematically modelling the relationships and possible outcomes between disputing SMEs, and together with the results from e-Arbitration-T, form the basis of e-Dispute©. Tiga Technologies itself develops software based on learning and distributed intelligence technologies such as neural networks, mobile agents and grid technologies. In turn, the software is applied to a diverse range of industries – e-commerce, telecommunications, finance and insurance and the automotive sector. This was seized 4 u by Reseizer |
 If the incoming Stardust spacecraft fails to deliver its capsule carrying a grab bag of interstellar and cometary goodies to Earth this weekend, scientists will have to wait several years before another attempt is possible.As the spacecraft now speeds toward Earth at 4 miles per second, still ahead for mission engineers is a go/no-go capsule separation decision. Space engineers need to assure themselves that all is precisely on track for the capsule’s deployment and skyrocketing descent into Utah. After nearly seven years and 2.88 billion miles of space travel, the NASA Stardust mission is slated to drop off on January 15 its sample return capsule carrying interstellar dust and comet particles. |
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 Firstly, Skype and NETGEAR have announced a mobile WiFi internet calling phone, which they say is the first such product on the market, but there's more! Skype will announce a whole slew of partners at CES, as the company focuses on more easily integrating Internet calling into the lives of consumers. The following announcements are expected to be made:
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David Pescovitz: Robert Geddes, Republican president of Idaho's State Senate, suggests that one way to deal with limited space in prisons would be to make inmates share beds by sleeping in shifts. From Reuters:"Why does every inmate need his or her own bed?" asked State Sen. Robert Geddes. "The military does it all the time...."- A prison overcrowding expert said the concept has been discussed for years but remains completely untested. - "I can't think of any correctional facility where people share a bunk," said Robert Sigler, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama. - He warned that courts have tended to frown on prisons that are crowding their inmates, whether they have a bed or not. "It's not how many times you rotate that bed, it's how much living space you provide," Sigler said. |
| MyLinkVault is a free online favorites manager. Other favorites managers can be so clumsy to use - trying to rearrange your favorites can be slow and frustrating. With MyLinkVault, we've created an easy drag-and-drop interface, so you can rearrange your links and categories quickly and easily - it's just as easy as rearranging the icons on your Windows Desktop! Check out the favorites manager from down under! Try it out for yourself in the demo - if you like what you see, registering an account is very quick and completely free.  |
| It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006. Here is a short introduction to this serious problem. This problem is about to be solved by Christian Peter, engineer at the department for Human-Centered Interaction Technologies in Rostock, who's working on the Emotions in Speech project.
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Cory Doctorow:  James Piatt designed this purse (shaped like an upside-down, dead chihuahua with a handle threaded through its stiffened legs) in "an attempt to capitalize on last years trend that involved carrying small accessory animals. To be more specific it pretty obviously represents Paris Hilton's discarded and dead chihuahua." Link (Thanks, James from BoingBoing!) This was seized 4 u by Reseizer |
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 Office Live will is believed to be the standard once it launches. Until then, there is a window for services like Airset (and others I’ve seen but can’t write about yet) to gain customer traction. Here a bit from the AirSet "about" site: AirSet is the next step in the evolution of personal information management from Airena. The website is currently in beta testing and mobile clients will be available this summer. AirSet simplifies life by connecting users' contacts and calendars so information is collaboratively kept up to date - it's easy to set up groups for friends, family, work, and community activities to keep everyone interconnected and synchronized. All at no charge and free of advertising. AirSet enables its users to instantly access, update, and backup their information from any location or device: PCs, PDAs or mobile phones. The AirSet MobileClient is a full-fledged application that synchronizes with the AirSet web server to provide constantly updated information whenever the network is in range. You can use the MobileClient and work with your calendar and contacts even when your phone can't reach the network. The AirSet MobileClient requires a nominal monthly fee. |
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