Dilbert Goes Beyond the Strip
Are you still experiencing Dilbert the old-fashioned way — by actually reading the comic strip? Unless you truly are a geezer, it’s time to bring a little multimedia into your daily Dilbert Experience.
RingTales have an exclusive deal with United Media, Dilbert’s licensing and syndication company, to produce and distribute daily animated versions of the Dilbert comic strip. This includes yet-to-be produced strips and over 7,000 comics in the Dilbert library.
With an initial launch on Dilbert.com and MSN, daily Dilbert animated cartoons have also launched on YouTube (www.youtube.com/dilbert), and on iTunes as a free, subscription podcast. These animated shorts bring the comic strip to life in a way that is perfect for the multi-platform digital media world. Fans can instantly send the animated strip to friends, search and share favorites, and comment on and rank the content.
Mastering Those ‘T-Shaped’ Skills
It’s understood that university students in every discipline must have advanced IT skills in addition to mastering their focus studies. IBM has put forward new initiatives to enable such a strategy. Back in November, the company launched a video game designed to help MBA programs develop both business and IT skills.
Innov8 is an interactive, 3-D educational game available to more than 2,000 universities globally, at no charge. The game, which is based on advanced commercial gaming technologies, creates “what if” scenarios so users can visualize how technology and related business strategies affect an organization’s performance. The game is supplemental to courses including Business Process Management, Corporate Strategy and Operations and IT Management.
Last week IBM also revealed a new program with Michigan Technological University to help students develop the multi-disciplinary skills increasingly required by employers globally. Businesses are looking to hire professionals with “T-shaped” skills, which encompass both deep business skills, represented by the horizontal line of the “T,” and technical understanding, represented by the vertical line. Top employment prospects will understand the dynamics of the globally integrated enterprise, can work across geographically distributed teams and have experience using open source technologies to address real world business challenges.
IBM is teaming with Michigan Tech to develop curricula and sponsor an “on the job” learning program (www.enterprise.mtu.edu) to encourage the development of these sought after skills. In an effort to encourage the use of open source technologies, IBM has donated WebSphere software with the agreement that any assets created through these programs will be made available to other universities around the world at no charge. A video providing an overview of the program is at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lecmtt2fxY0.
Forum for eGovt Ideas
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has launched a new forum for governments, citizens, researchers and other stakeholders to investigate how best to use web technology for good governance and citizen participation. eGovernment refers to the use of the web or other information technologies by governing bodies to interact with citizens, between departments and divisions and between governments themselves.
“I encourage people from government agencies to join this W3C forum to make the web better serve the people,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. “Open Standards, and in particular Semantic Web Standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change. Publishing Linked Data on the web enables creative re-use of it — citizen mashups, and commercial mashups, which combine the data from many sources to stunning new uses. By joining this forum, you can learn good ‘eGovernance’ and how to build an Open Standards platform on top of your existing tools and services.”
The eGovernment Interest Group (www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/) is open to the public. The group is the culmination of several years of work by W3C in this area, including two workshops on eGovernment in 2007, one in Europe and one in North America.
Help Set a World Record
Download Day is an attempt organized by Mozilla to set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and will occur on Firefox 3 launch day. There isn’t a definitive launch date for Firefox 3 yet, but it should be this month. The clock on the world record will start ticking the second Firefox 3 goes into general availability.
Participating in setting the world record is simple. Just download Firefox 3 as soon as it is available, preferably from Download Day Headquarters. To know when the exact day will be, click to www.spreadfirefox.com now and provide your e-mail address when pledging to download Firefox 3. Mozilla will send you reminder e-mails and notify you of the exact date.
It will take approximately a week after Download Day for Guinness World Records to review Mozilla’s download logs and validate the record attempt. Mozilla will only count downloads that are fully and completely transmitted. Mozilla will discard duplicate downloads with the help of a cookie system.
This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number to beat, but ideally Mozilla would like to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. According to Mozilla, “Let’s shoot for five million — the sky is the limit!” Let’s hope their servers and network capacity can cope.
