Broadband critical to meeting UN’s Millennium Development Goals
The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures Internet users by region (source: ITU)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The number of people using the Internet doubled to two billion in the past five years, new figures from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva show.
The fastest rate of growth is in developing countries, but huge gaps in access remain:
“By the end of 2010, 71 percent of the population in developed countries will be online compared to 21 percent of the population in developing countries. While in developed countries 65 percent of people have access to the Internet at home, this is the case for only 13.5 percent of people in developing countries where Internet access in schools, at work and public locations is critical. Regional differences are significant: 65 percent of Europeans are on the Internet, compared to only 9.6 percent of Africans.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Lift conference in Geneva is about to kick off and remind us, as it does once a year, how and why our lives are so intertwined with technology and where this will likely take us in the future.
“Known in techno-parlance as users, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects,” and with that bow to the huge world of technology users, the Lift conference opens in Geneva 5 May, welcoming 1,000 people.
Lift was born in Geneva and now has an Asian version in South Korea, a French version in Marseilles, as well as mini-spinoffs call Lift at Home.
But the Geneva Lift conference remains at the heart of this conversation on the future of technology, with its sometimes quirky, usually irreverant mix of specialists from many fields. It encourages people from government, academia, and business to mix in a way they rarely do otherwise in Geneva, with a strong dose of entrepreneurial spirit to help them.
Highlights this year include a colourful mix:
- Frederic Kaplan, workshop on reinventing books, magazines and newspapers in the digital age
- main session: “The redefinition of privacy”, with a group of speakers that includes the head of communications at the Salvation Army
- main session: “The old new media”, ending with an independent podiatrist who talks about working with people’s feet
- Rolf von Behrens, “Leapfrogging Facebook, how we can and why we should”
- Aubrey de Grey at a main session on “Generations and technologies”
- a series of speakers who will look at the question of whether we’ve reached the limits of web 2.0 and where we’re headed with social communities.
Editor’s note: A small number of places remained late Tuesday. Online registration (CHF1,250)
GenevaLunch will be covering the conference live Wednesday to Friday.
To Facebook or not? That is the question in Payerne
Payerne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Several students of the Gymnase Intercantonal de la Broye (GYB), a secondary school in canton Vaud, thought when school re-opened last week that they had lost access to Facebook and Messenger while in school. Online chatting and access to social platforms is still alive and well for the 900 students at GYB, the principal says.
According to school principal Thierry Maire, the bans, reported 1 September by some Swiss media, is not quite what the school is implementing.
Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, said 30 June that China will allow computer makers more time, retreating from the 1 July deadline set earlier for all new computers to have the Green Dam censorship programme installed, which the government says is designed mainly to protect against pornography. The Financial Times reports that pressure from PC makers and Internet users in China is partly behind the delayed deadline, and that independent tests show the software censors more than porn sites. The government says it is continuing to install the software in Internet cafes and schools.
