September 22, 2008 • 7:54 pm 0
Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations,
Filed under: For Fun, Industry News , Firefox
• 7:50 pm 0
Mac users can expect the next round of OpenOffice (OpenOffice.org is an open source productivity suite similar to MS Office) software at the end of September 2008.
Microsoft Office’s competitor was originally due for release in mid-September at the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference in Lyon, but was delayed following “issues with non-English transcripts”.
Version 3.0 will be the first to accommodate Mac users without requiring them to install the X11 Window System, an interface that allows Unix-based applications to work on Macs which has previously been used.
It is expected the the new OpenOffice will be modernized in looks to compete with the successful MS Office 2008 for Mac released late last year.
Filed under: Industry News, Mac Related , OpenOffice
• 5:03 pm 0
THE global economy is driven by the internet and online communication between branches and companies, and most of the content business users and consumers access on the internet is held on servers and databases outside SA.
International bandwidth capacity is therefore crucial, which is why undersea cables are a critical component of SA’s broadband infrastructure, says Angus Hay, Neotel’s chief technology officer.
In the local market, international bandwidth capacity relies largely on a single undersea cable, SAT-3/WASC/SAFE, and until recently Telkom has had exclusive rights to the SA landing portion of this resource. But in terms of the Electronic Communications Act, other operators now have access to the cable, although Neotel is the only one that can take advantage of this because it has an international licence, says Hay.
He says Neotel leases raw capacity on SAT/3 SAFE and can resell it to other operators and service providers wholesale and bundle it with services for businesses and consumers, such as internet access and telephony.
However, with the rapid increase in internet traffic, the capacity of this cable is being taken up fast. This situation will be relieved by the new Seacom undersea cable, which will connect SA and the East Coast of Africa to the rest of the world and is expected to be in operation by the end of 2009, he says.
The philosophy behind the Seacom cable is to provide open access, says Hay. In partnership with Seacom, Neotel is landing the cable in SA, which means it will own the rights to it in the country, but operators and service providers will be able to purchase raw capacity on the cable directly from Seacom.
“We want to increase the size of the market and do not have a problem with competition.”
Many global outsource companies and online companies like Google have elected not to base their online servers in this country due to lack of international capacity and high prices, but Seacom will help to change this, says Hay.
He says over the past two years there has been a 65% reduction in the lease price of bandwidth on undersea cable in SA, but it still costs double against Europe and the US.
“We are expecting a dramatic drop in prices with Seacom.”
Filed under: Industry News , broadband, Seacom
• 3:06 pm 0
Intel has begun shipping its first dual-core Atom processor, the company said on Friday.On its price list, Intel characterizes the processor as one designed for nettops and netbooks, such as the Asus Eee PC line.
The Intel Atom 330 is clocked the same as the existing single-core Atom 230, or 1.6 GHz. It contains a full megabyte of level-2 cache, split over both cores; the 230 contains just 512 Kbytes. The new chip also is rated for 8 watts of thermal design power, and includes support for DDR2 667 memory. The Atom 330 is designed for the Intel 945GC Express chipset, Intel said.
The Atom 330 is priced at $43 per processor in 1,000-unit lots; the Atom 230 is priced at $29.
Filed under: Industry News , CPU, Intel
• 10:24 am 0
Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service
Record companies are scrambling to find new ways to distribute music in the face of declining music sales. The latest is slotMusic, a microSD card containing music in MP3 format without DRM (digital rights management), playable on pocket devices such as mobile phones.
EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music have joined forces with memory card maker SanDisk, which is developing the technology behind slotMusic.
The cards will hold 1G byte of data and will ship with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) adapter so that users can add their own content using a PC.
SlotMusic cards will first be available at brick-and-mortar and online stores throughout the U.S., including Best Buy and Wal-Mart. A launch in Europe is also to follow. A complete list of slotMusic albums, availability and pricing will be announced in time for the coming holiday season, the companies said. So far, there are no details of the artists whose music will be available on the cards: The slotMusic Web site simply says that “the year’s biggest releases” will be available in the new format.
To persuade listeners to buy a physical medium rather than download the songs, the record companies will offer extras including liner notes, album art, videos, and “other creative content that an artist may choose”. Music tracks will also be played back at up to 320K bps.
Using microSD cards to store music sounds rather cumbersome to Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at CCS Insight. Built-in storage is still a scarce resource on most mobile phones, so users are dependent on memory cards for storing all kinds of data.
With a slotMusic card one would first have to take out the main memory card, put in the album, listen to it or move songs to the built-in storage (if available), take out the slotMusic card and then put back the main one. The fact that card slots are hard to get at on many phones doesn’t help either, according to Pescatore: Reaching them on some models involves taking out the battery.
Pescatore also questions whether consumers will be able to find slotMusic in stores, and thinks that download services like Nokia’s Comes With Music and Orange Music Max will be more viable alternatives.
Filed under: Industry News , Sandisk
• 9:20 am 0
The use of speech analytics in the contact centre environment is fairly widespread, but its use in a post-call survey is a new application with important benefits for companies wanting to raise the bar in customer service.
It is doubtful how accurate conventional post-call surveys are. A survey of 362 companies conducted by Bain & Company in the US in 2006 revealed a startling incongruity. Companies were asked if they were delivering a superior service, and 80% replied “yes”. Their customers were asked if they were receiving a superior service and only 8% replied “yes”. Clearly management did not have accurate information. Many people have an intense dislike of call centres but the companies believe that they are delivering a better service.
Speech analytics is able to detect a customer’s mood, monitor his/her tone and react to key words (e.g. swear words). Using speech analytics in a post-call survey, the contact centre can automatically detect how that customer is feeling – not necessarily from the content of their responses, but from the tone. That may not solve the call centre-dislike syndrome but it may give management pointers to what puts customers off!
“If the analytic software detects that a customer is upset, it is able to transfer the call immediately to a team leader or supervisor who can deal with the problem there and then. This is revolutionary for problem resolution”, said Dave Paulding.
Over the past few years, contact centre managers have woken up to the fact that they need to do more to get an accurate view of their customers’ experience of their service. As technology advances, companies are choosing post-call surveys over mailed questionnaires and follow-up calls as they have a relatively high response rate – 10 to 15% versus 2% in mailed surveys – they are cheap to implement, and companies can get the results quickly.
But while post-call surveys enable the company to get a view on service areas that could be improved, as well as input into agent training that may be required, the customer who received the bad service still leaves the contact centre with a problem.
“We are now working on interactive speech analysis with the focus on emotion detection. We have written algorithms that will set thresholds to detect anger, increase in voice speed and increase in voice pitch, all indicating that the customers are getting annoyed.
“One could pull a few recordings and analyse the reasons why customers are unhappy and perhaps intervene by giving the agent more training. But where does that leave the customer? For him or her the damage is done! We are now working on a system that monitors the conversation in real time and will alert the supervisor if a call handling is going awry. The supervisor can listen in and whisper-coach the agent as the call progresses or if necessary take over the call and rescue the situation.
“In the real time speech analysis process the system is able to monitor both sides of the conversation and provide the supervisor with the option to intervene if either side is getting hot under the collar.”
Talking to call centre managers it becomes clear that while the customer is king, some “kings” also do not know how to behave and bombard the agent with strong and unacceptable language, often becoming outright abusive. If a real-time speech analyses system is installed, the supervisor can come online and politely calm down the customer and explain that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. Call centre managers in the telecommunications environment have their hands full to assist the agent in dealing with difficult and often unreasonable customers. A real-time intelligent speech analyses system will go a long way to win customers and keep agents happy in their job.
“We have incorporated all the facilities in our core system which means customer can buy the licences for the model they require and upgrade when one of the other inbuilt facilities are required”, said Paulding.
Filed under: For Fun, Industry News , Language
• 7:54 am 0
Computerworld Malaysia’s Broadband over Powerline (BPL) provider Velchip Sdn Bhd has formalised three major partnerships to advance the world’s biggest BPL (modems using existing electrical power lines to deliver the connection) project announced earlier in April 2008. The project intends to offer 60 million people un-capped high speed Internet at 224Mbps. The most amazing things though is that this is set to cost only (USD)$1.58 per user per month.
Filed under: For Fun, Industry News , broadband
September 21, 2008 • 9:02 pm 0
This month, internet giant Yahoo has begun to randomly request information from users about how to improve their front page. The fortunate few will be asked to get feedback on how they would like to view information and applications on the site.
The main aim of this revamp is for the company to improve its already staggering amount of visitors and hence improve revenue. Yahoo claims that its index page is the most trafficked on the web with more than 300 million per month.
Filed under: Industry News , Yahoo
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