$10,000 Writing Contest

To celebrate publishing its 10,000th article, wiseGEEK has launched a writing contest with $10,000 in cash prizes. wiseGEEK has been publishing professionally-written articles covering a wide variety of topics since 2003. With well over two million unique visitors per month, wiseGEEK has become a trusted source for clear and useful information. In response to its quality and reliability, wiseGEEK has been recognized as an iGuide Site by the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The wiseGEEK Writing Contest is open to registered users of the site, over the age of 18. The grand-prize winner will receive $7,500 and 10 other contestants will be awarded $250 each. Those entrants that don’t win will still have the opportunity to share their knowledge with millions of other people.

Submissions for the contest will be accepted until May 31, 2007. For additional information, click to www.wisegeek.com/contest.

Digital Information Generation Explodes

EMC-sponsored research from IDC has for the first time measured and forecast the amounts and types of digital information created and copied in the world — and whether it is generated from individuals or businesses.

“The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010” reveals the amount of information the world is creating and copying in a given year. It forecasts this entire “digital universe” through the year 2010, and it identifies the specific information types and geographies contributing to its growth. The report’s findings have sweeping implications for individuals, businesses and society. The complete study can be found at: www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe.

Key findings:

• The 2006 digital universe was 161 exabytes (161 billion gigabytes) in size.

• IDC projects a six-fold annual information growth from 2006 to 2010.

• While nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of the information.

• In 2006, 161 exabytes of digital information were created and copied. This digital universe equals approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written.

• IDC projects that the amount of information created and copied in 2010 will surge to 988 exabytes, a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent.

While nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by an organization along the way — on a network, in a data center, at a hosting site, at a telephone or Internet switch, or in a backup system. Organizations — including businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments and associations — will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of the information.

“The incredible growth and sheer amount of the different types of information being generated from so many different places represents more than just a worldwide information explosion,” said John Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice president, IDC. “It represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analog form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it’s infinite. From a technology perspective, organizations will need to employ ever more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the additional information that is being generated every day.”

Other key findings:

• Images — Images, captured by more than one billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe.

• E-Mail — The number of e-mail mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to nearly 1.6 billion in 2006. During the same period, the number of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.

• Internet — In 1996 there were only 48 million people routinely using the Internet and the World Wide Web was just two years old. By 2006, there were 1.1 billion users on the Internet. By 2010, IDC expects another 500 million users to come online.

• Emerging Economies — These now account for 10 percent of the digital universe but will grow 30-40 percent faster than mature economies.

Middle East ICT Woman of the Year

In recognition of her pioneering role and remarkable achievements in the Lebanese Telecommunications sector, “mtc touch” Chief Technical Officer Rula Abou Daher Al-Rabih won the “Middle East ICT Woman of the Year” award at the 6th Middle East Businesswomen and Leaders Achievements Awards ceremony. The annual awards, organized by the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute, recognize notable achievements of women professionals in Middle East business and government organizations.

“For Rula, the list of achievements is long especially after joining mtc touch, where she became known for her skills in improvising necessary changes on the spot,” said mtc touch GM Mohammad Shabib. “During the aggression on Lebanon in July 2006, Rula guided her heroic team and demonstrated unmatched leadership under crisis. She and her team managed to put back in service some major network elements in record time and restoring coverage in vast areas to ensure communications availability to Lebanese citizens.”

Open Architecture Prize Announced

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and Cameron Sinclair, winner of last year’s Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize and founder of Architecture for Humanity (www.architectureforhumanity.org) have announced the first ever Open Architecture Prize. The $250,000 Open Architecture Prize is the largest prize in the field of architecture and is designed to be a multi-year program that will draw competition from design teams around the world.

Each year, a winning design will be selected from a field of low-cost, sustainable design projects and built in a selected community. The first project for the Open Architecture Prize will be an “e-community center,” a centralized building equipped with Internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet. The winning designs will be built as part of the prize and in alignment with the 50x15 Initiative, a program founded by AMD to connect 50 percent of the world’s population to the Internet by 2015.

After the winning designs are built, the plans will be made openly available through the Open Architecture Network (www.openarchitecturenetwork.org). The Network brings together architects, designers and community organizers to freely share blueprints, ideas and resources for improvement projects in areas affected by geopolitical, environmental or economic hardship.