Online Olympic auction kicks off

Right To Play has kicked off its online auction of athletes’ Olympic memorabilia and sports gear from the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Olympians are donating items to the auction, which they hope will raise money in support of Right To Play programs. Right To Play is an international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play programs to improve health, develop life skills and foster peace for children and communities around the world.

The Right To Play online auction runs through Aug. 25 at www.righttoplay.com/athleteauction and items will be added daily. Some of the items online include:

• Canadian flag bearer and Olympic kayaker Adam Van Koeverden donated his flag bearer’s sash, signed by the Canadian Olympic team present at the Beijing opening ceremonies.

• A 2008 Olympic handball penant/flag that has been signed and donated by the Chinese handball team.

• A signed Olympic tennis uniform (Swiss) donated by Timea Bacsinszky.

• A signed Olympic badminton uniform (Ukraine) donated by Larisa Griga.

• Signed 2008 Olympic shirts from Nick Robinson Baker, Great Britain; Mohamed Srour, Egypt and Deniz Nazar, Turkey.

Blogging about the experience

Olympic athletes taking part in the Lenovo “Voices of the Olympic Games” blogging program have found that blogging creates deeper connections with fans worldwide — many they did not even know existed. These are the first Olympic Games where athletes are blogging during the competition time period itself. Until 2008, athletes were allowed to write blogs only until the opening day of the Olympic Games, and could then resume their blogs after the conclusion of the Games. This year, new regulations from the International Olympic Committee enable athletes to write blogs about their experiences off the field during the actual 17 days of competition.

With more than 100 athletes in the program, the blogs are a way to provide insight into the minds of athletes as they train and compete — a look into their lives, behavior and training that fans cannot get anywhere else. To date, there have been 1,374 athlete postings on the forum (www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames), reaching more than 8.5 million Olympic fans through conversations on third-party blogs and social media sites.

From Beijing, Carissa Gump, a US Olympic weightlifter, said athlete blogs are even more popular than she had expected. “It’s because people get to know us better, find out so much more information about us, giving us more exposure. Readers feel like they have a connection to us personally.”

“I’ve been able to reach friends and family in Peru and have received support from Peruvians around the world,” said Peter Lopez, a Peru Olympic tae kwon do athlete. “As an athlete, that’s what I need, support from people around the world. Most comments I get come from the blogs about my personal experiences.”

Be informed to be healthy

n You buy boxes, bags and cans of food at the supermarket, but you need to be a chemist to read the labels on those products. What are ingredients such as Lecithin, Gum Arabic and Calcium Citrate? Might your child be allergic to E476? Is Dextrose Monohydrate allowed if you have blood sugar problems? The online resource www.LabelWatch.com is an informational website that allows consumers to go beyond the fancy packaging and actually understand what’s really in a food product. With a growing database of over 25,000 brand-name products, LabelWatch.com lets users to compare their favorite foods by providing information and determinations about the additives, ingredients and nutritional facts contained in each product.

On the site, ingredients are linked to the LabelWatch.com proprietary ingredient glossary, which is color-coded for easy understanding. The ingredient glossary was created using information supplied by many reputable sources, including: The National Institutes of Health, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Food & Drug Administration, and Foods Standards Agency UK, among many others.

LabelWatch was founded by Diane Manning, who suffered for years from the chronic health condition Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Doctors and medications failed to help her, but eliminating a few foods and additives from her diet completely solved the problem.

“I became an avid reader of packaged food labels. This was time-consuming, confusing and often misleading,” noted Manning. “I looked for an easier solution, but none existed. That’s when the idea for LabelWatch was conceived.”

LabelWatch.com is free for everyone to use and, by simply registering on the site, users can also create customized shopping lists made up of the best products for themselves and their families. The site also contains a Smart Shopping section that offers information about reading labels and food shopping, an in-depth database of Smart Recipe cards and videos, and information about Smart Living as it applies to dieting, beauty, fitness and natural health.

Innovation research awards from HP

HP Labs Innovation Research Awards have been won by 41 professors worldwide. As part of a newly announced open and competitive process that reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries spanning the globe, HP selected 41 projects at 34 institutions. In addition to US universities, awards were given to professors at universities in Germany, Russia, India, Canada, Singapore, Japan China, Turkey, Israel, Portugal, England, Scotland and The Netherlands.

“Today, no one has locked up the really good ideas. To stay competitive, the technology industry has to have internal and external innovation paths,” said Henry Chesbrough, author of three books on open innovation and executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “Industry-academia collaboration is an open innovation example that can provide competitive advantage to companies that know how to leverage the enormous creative potential of university researchers.”

Awardees will work with HP Labs researchers on speculative and potentially game-changing research, the results of which are expected to generate the next set of technology breakthroughs in the areas of information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. HP Labs Innovation Research Awards provide project funding of up to $100,000 for one year to each academic institution and are renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements. These awards include support for one graduate student researcher, who is also eligible to apply to the HP Labs internship program (http://www.hpl.hp.com/jobs/).

The next request for proposals is planned for spring 2009. More information about the awards and selected proposals is available at www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/.

Multilingual domain names

The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit corporation that coordinates the global Internet system of unique identifiers, has approved the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in the top level of Internet addresses. The board endorsed the IDNC Working Group Report to expand the world’s Domain Name System and to work on adapting it to accommodate Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) in scripts other than Latin, such as Arabic or Devnagri and ideographic writing systems, such as Japanese.

This process will facilitate the development of the Internet as a global information and communication tool by enabling multi-script addressing and ensuring access to millions of users who are deprived of this core resource of knowledge societies due to language constrictions. The way forward on this issue is certain to be discussed in more detail at the next ICANN meeting which takes place in Cairo, Nov. 2-7, 2008.