Park your mobile
Edinburgh will introduce mobile payments for parking at 266 pay and display machines, following the introduction of a similar system in Dublin. The Scottish city will introduce the scheme, which the operator, Irish firm Itsmobile, says is the first of its kind in the UK, in July or August. Users must register in advance, then ring a number on the meter from their mobile and follow the instructions to collect their ticket: the process can take less than 30 seconds.
The system can charge a user's credit card or Royal Bank of Scotland bank account, identifying users through their mobile number. According to the Irish IT website Electric News, the deal is worth a six-figure sum to Itsmobile, which is planning to announce another UK win in the next few weeks.
www.electricnews.net/news
www.itsmobile.com
Watch it?
Two dozen European organisations from 12 countries, including AbilityNet in the UK, have signed a memorandum of understanding that will result in a EuroAccessibility Project. They aim to develop a common evaluation methodology and a European certification authority for web accessibility,and thus harmonise European support for the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, and EC resolutions on Knowledge Based Society. The idea behind the WAI is that people with disabilities should have equal access to the web. This precludes, for example, pages that don't work with the screen readers used by blind users. AbilityNet says that in the UK, the Disability Rights Commission has already launched an investigation into the accessibility of 1,000 websites in the context of the Disability Discrimination Act. This is being extended in October next year to require online service providers not to discriminate against disabled users. www.abilitynet.org.uk
Exactly
Watchfire, the company that took over Bobby, the web-accessibility checker, has launched a free service that checks web pages for quality and privacy, as well as accessibility issues. Watchfire's founder, Michael Weider, said the aim was to help people design web pages that "comply with industry standards and best practices". WebXACT tests for compliance with the US Government's Section 508 and the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, plus whether or not a page links to a privacy statement, and uses visitor-tracking technology such as cookies. Companies intending to use WebXACT a lot can host it on their own website. http://webXACT.watchfire.com
http://bobby.watchfire.com
PC sales up
UK users bought 5%more PCs in the first quarter of 2003, according to the latest research figures from International Data Corporation. The desktop PC market failed to bloom - IDC reckons that consumer sales of desktop PCs fell by 12.7%compared with the same period last year. However, sales of notebook PCs jumped by 14.7%, and servers by 15.1%, to grow the total PC market. Hewlett-Packard's PC shipments increased by 17.9% and, following its takeover of Compaq, it now has almost a quarter of the UK market, by units. Dell's shipments grew by more than 25% leaving it in second place with almost 24% of the market. Time Group, Toshiba and Fujitsu Siemens made up the top five.
Read my lips
Intel has unveiled some open source software that will enable a computer to read your lips. Computer designers will be able to combine face detection algorithms from Intel's OpenCV computer vision library with Audio Visual Speech Recognition software to locate someone's face and follow their mouth movements. The stated intention is to improve the accuracy of speech recognition systems, particularly in noisy environments. This could be invaluable on the factory floor. And if the system uses so much processing power you need a new PC, so much the better.
Pioneer dies
Dr Edgar "Ted" Codd, the father of the relational database, has died in Florida at the age of 79. Dr Codd was born in Portland, Dorset, and flew as a pilot in the second world war. He moved to IBM's San Jose research lab after graduating from Oxford and Michigan universities. In his 1970 paper, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks, he proposed storing data in tabular rows rather than in more complex structures - the basis of relational databases.
Dr Codd won the Turing Award in1980, as Larry Ellison was taking advantage of the concept in building Oracle into the world's second biggest software firm. The relational model is now the standard for databases worldwide.
www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/obituaries/5674257.htm
www-3.ibm.com/software/data/news/efc.html
www.acm.org/classics/nov95/toc.html
