The ZTE Broadband Deal

Much has been written about the ZTE Broadband Deal and the recent expose forces the government to change its game plan for the project. The government indeed has to improve its process in procurement to make things more transparent and well thought of. I hope the time will come when the Commission on Audit will be able to release a report as to how much expenditure in government ICT has gone to waste for poor project leadership and sustainability.

What also caught my attention during the hearing was the inquiry made by Senator Mar Roxas that shows a glimpse on how ICT projects like this are thought of.

Part 1

Part 2

Additional reference:

• NBN Deal: The Truth According to DOTC

Winners of 2007 Intranet Design Awards

The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) recently announced the winners of its 2007 Intranet Design Awards. They are:

• American Electric Power (AEP), United States
• Comcast, United States
• DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany
• The Dow Chemical Company, United States
• Infosys Technologies Limited, India
• JPMorgan Chase & Co., United States
• Microsoft Corporation, United States
• National Geographic Society, United States
• The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), United Kingdom
• Volvo Group, Sweden

Although the use of the Internet in promoting products and services online has grown dramatically, the use of Intranets in companies, especially in this part of the world remains to be seen.

Here's a video as well featuring one of the directors of NN/g who talked about the awards.

Underestimate? - Trillions more internet addresses may emerge

The foundations are now being laid out for the inevitable upgrade of the Internet towards IPV6 that may result to emergence of trillions more Internet addresses. (Truemors)

I asked Lawrence Hughes of InfoWeapons about this and he believes that trillions may be an underestimate. "Each NETWORK gets many trillions of addresses (a "/48 block" of 2**80th addresses), and there are enough "/48" allocation blocks for every human alive to get over 4000 of them."

InfoWeapons is a member of the IPv6 Forum and Lawrence is the head of the Philippines chapter. The company is also a member of the US IPv6 Consortium. They have been running a production IPV6 network for almost 3 years in Cebu.

Additional references:

• DigitalFilipino.com Podcast Episode 9
• E-Commerce and IPV6 (by Lawrence Hughes, InfoWeapons)
  This was presented during the E-Services Philippines 2006 event.
  

Online casino bluebook

Every now and then, we get advertisement placed in our site. A recent one we got lately is from the online casino bluebook. The site is a guide to popular online casinos and poker rooms.

The site ranks online casinos by bonus size, payout percentage, customer service, game features, number of games, software graphics, and ease of use. It will be interesting to know how many of these sites are actually hosted in the Philippines where registration is allowed in some of our economic zones.

It can't be denied that despite legal impediments in some countries, online casinos and gambling are still growing since they first started going online in the late 90s. The site reported that there are nearly 800 online casinos on the Internet today.

I wish I have known of this site much earlier. I had an inquiry this year about doing a market research on online casinos operating in some countries. This site has done its research and even listed online casino sites that requires no deposit.

It includes a listing of bingo hall, poker rooms, and even sportsbook where it marked those allowing horse betting as well.

Serious players and prospective entrepreneurs could consider joining its newsletter also as a $1000 monthly giveaway is raffled every month.

(This is a sponsored post)