By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Handheld Computer Yet to Reach the Masses
The low-cost Simputer developed for use in India is being regarded as a failure - "Picopeta has sold fewer than 2,000 units in the past 12 months, far below the target of 50,000. Worse, only 10 percent of those Simputers were bought for rural use. Encore software, the other company making Simputers, also sold about 2,000 units." The major reason for the slow sales seems to be the dramatic drop in price of traditional computers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cross-Platform, Videoconferencing-Enabled
Robin Good calls it cross-platform but if it won't work on my Linux desktop it isn't really. Still, the arrival of this open standards based video-conferencing system is worthy of note. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Three Keys to Implementing a Laptop Program: Over-Plan, Over-Train, and Over-Support
This article is pretty well summarized in the title, though it is worth noting that the introduction of laptops into the classroom is only the first, and smallest, part ofa laptop program. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bookmarklet: Delicious Linkbacks
Nifty. A link that you can drag to your bookmark toolbar. Go to a web page, any web page, then click on the bookmark. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Computers 'Can Harm Learning'
Once again the Woessmann-Fuchs study that I criticized last November is getting media play (they must have hired a publicist), this time because it is being presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seven Myths about Voice over IP
Reasonable article with a typical IEEE conservatism addressing the prospects for Voice over IP (VOIP) technologies - that is, internet telephones. The author takes an enterprise point of view, noting that VOIP entails bandwidth and equipment costs, but also points out that it is likely to replace traditional telephony. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Greasemonkey as a Lightweight Intermediary
We're still in the early stages of this, but rapidly approaching a time when websites will be manipulated at will by the browser. This item is a description of Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that lets you create a JavaScript function that is executed whenever your browser loads a given page; the script loads and displays extra data in from another server. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EVDB
EVDB is a calendaring service that supports RSS feeds of custom calendars. The beta launched today. As the website says, EVDB "helps people find relevant events and share their discoveries with others. We're building a worldwide repository of event and venue data that the whole world can use. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. To the High-Tech Employers: Sorry About Those Missing Skills
I am in agreement with the sentiments in this post and echo the author's request of the high-tech community looking for innovative and creative workers that it stop with the 'back to basics' and 'standardized' test regime that makes fulfilling that request impossible. More...