Hum A Few Bars And I’ll Search It Out |
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Editorial notes
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Monday, 12 February 2007 |
 A European research consortium hopes to make it much easier to find audio/visual content online. The new search approach will be driven by content or example rather than relying on key words and tags.
Led by IBM Research, partners from academia and industry have launched the Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval (SAPIR). SAPIR aims to find new ways to analyze, index, and retrieve the vast amounts of speech, image, video, and music filling the digital universe.
"Today's popular search engines work within defined boundaries," explained Yosi Mass, project leader for SAPIR at the IBM Research Lab, Haifa. "Sapir's goal is to establish a giant peer-to-peer network, where users are peers that produce audio-visual content using multiple devices and service providers are super-peers that maintain indexes and provide search capabilities.”
SAPIR will incorporate such technologies as voice recognition, image processing, indexing algorithms, sophisticated ranking mechanisms, and real search in audio-visual content. Searching by example rather than text-based queries will allow users to say a word out loud and have the engine look for a similar speech pattern. Another scenario would mean participants could input a picture of a saxophone and have the engine search for similar shapes. |
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Telecom Carriers Will Spend Billions To Try To Survive The IP Revolution |
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Editorial notes
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Tuesday, 06 February 2007 |
More than half of global tier-one telecom carriers trying to establish new lines of business will fail through 2010. Mobile broadband, Internet Protocol (IP) technology and the desire to become full-service providers are increasingly driving telecom carrier strategies. However, according to the research firm Gartner, as they confront these industry upheavals, carriers face risks in building non-core telecom business units and over-investing in immature technologies. It said the reality for most telecom carriers is a future where they have to strive to be profitable on much lower margins than today.
Historically, carriers have been able to depend on high revenue growth from broadband or mobile services, but they now face the prospect of rapidly declining revenue growth. Gartner predicts that year-on-year growth of total revenue from telecom services (80 percent of total global telecom market size) will shrink to just 1.7 percent in 2010. Gartner expects total telecom service revenues to rise only modestly over the next four years from $1.3 trillion in 2006 to $1.5 trillion in 2010.
As a result, Gartner said that over the next few years more carriers will invest in new markets, such as media or IT, to compensate for revenue losses in traditional telecom services like public switched telephone network voice. Examples of this practice include:
Telecom Italia’s recent transformation into a media company. It has signed agreements with Fox, MGM and Sony and is pushing for content distribution to increase the demand for higher fixed-broadband connections.
The partnership between BT Global Services and HP for integrated IT services. This is a step towards hosting BT’s application and managed services business.
SK Telecoms entrance into the content creation market. It has acquired Korea’s largest music recording label, YBM Seoul Records.
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Don’t Trust Your Boss? You’re Not Alone |
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Editorial notes
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Monday, 29 January 2007 |
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A new report says that nearly half of employees don’t trust senior management. It gets worse. Employees are not simply losing confidence in their senior managers — many workers think their front-line supervisors are flat-out callous liars stealing credit for anything good that happens. With a brand new year comes the start of the season that many employees and their managers dread: performance reviews. Results of a new survey really should have every manager concerned.
Watson Wyatt’s WorkUSA 2006/2007 survey of more than 12,000 full-time U.S. workers across all job levels and major industries showed that senior management’s confidence ratings from employees have dropped slightly since 2004, from 51 percent to 49 percent.
Now a “silver lining” type of person may say, “Well, the survey merely indicates a 2 percent drop in trust and confidence since 2004.”
However, in contrast, many of those ratings had risen considerably from 2002 to 2004. The fact that only 49 percent now say they have trust and confidence in their senior managers means more than half of the employees surveyed have serious, deep-rooted problems with management.
Perhaps what is most telling, compelling and, really, just sad is, either way — 49 percent or 51 percent — nearly half of employees don’t trust their manager.
“This dip in ratings is concerning because employees’ attitudes about their senior leaders are a key factor in building engagement,” said Ilene Gochman, national practice director for organization effectiveness at Watson Wyatt. “People want to work for companies where they have confidence in the organization and trust what senior management is doing. Fostering that trust is especially important in today’s global market as it creates an environment in which employees understand that changes to the workplace may be necessary to remain competitive.”
Certainly, the notion of a dysfunctional workplace and tedious management is well documented and represented in our culture, from Dilbert comics to the movies “Nine to Five” and “Office Space” to the BBC and NBC television programs “The Office.”
It gets worse, with another recent study showing results that are even more dispiriting.
Apparently, employees are not simply losing confidence in their senior managers — many think their front-line bosses are flat-out callous, lying to employees’ faces and stealing credit for anything good that happens.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 06 February 2007 )
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