Sweden Votes to Adopt City-Wide IBM Road Charging Solution in Stockholm
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The Swedish National Parliament today voted to permanently adopt the road charging system trialed by IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Swedish Road Administration in Stockholm last year.
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IBM says its joint development with Honda Motor Company has yielded a hands-free, voiced-commanded and real-time car navigation system, which has been put into market.
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IT officials from three California cities detailed their experiences Monday with trying to set up municipal wireless networks, efforts that have yielded varying degrees of success.Speaking during the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif., IT executives from Anaheim, San Francisco, and Los Angeles noted development plans for these networks, both for public services and to bridge the digital divide between those with Internet access and those without."Really, it?s been the applications that have been the driving force," said Robb McIntosh, information services manager for Anaheim.The city is in the process of building wireless links for public safety, public works, and other services. EDS runs the city's IT, McIntosh said. Meanwhile, Anaheim's citizen Wi-Fi network, intended for resident access to wireless capabilities, is 70 percent developed, McIntosh said.San Francisco's now-stalled efforts to build citywide wireless links were inspired by the digital divide, said Chris Vein, San Francisco CIO."[Bridging this divide] remains the driving force for us today," Vein said.Plans had called for a mesh network to cover all 49 square miles of the city. EarthLink was supposed to provide the system but that plan did not come to fruition. "Now, we're kind of stepping back, taking a big breath and looking at what we have to do next," Vein said.Anaheim's choice for paying for its citizen wireless network involves selling subscriptions. In San Francisco, payment options such as subscriptions or simply using taxpayer funds are still on the table."We're taking a look at everything," said Vein. "We haven't ruled anything out."Los Angeles also cited digital inclusion as its reason for seeking a wireless network, said Mark Wolf, assistant general manager for the city's Information Technology Agency.Wolf stressed the hurdles in having to provide wireless coverage to a city spanning 464 square miles and extending from the ocean to the mountains. Los Angeles has been doing Wi-Fi on a small basis and has been learning from cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco. The plan is at a crossroads, Wolf said."It?s a good thing that it's at a crossroads and not cross hairs, in the sites of a gun," said Wolf.?Aside from the altruistic goal of digital inclusion, Los Angeles also is equipping its police force with sophisticated wireless equipment from Motorola. Video capabilities allow police to see a scene before arriving; other features include license plate-scanning, mobile digital cameras, and facial recognition systems.In other talks during Monday's general session at the conference, Padmarsee Warrior, CTO of Motorola, stressed that multiple wireless standards such as Wi-Fi and the newly approved WiMax standard will continue to coexist. While Wi-Fi is limited to covering hot spots, WiMax is good for covering large areas."The right kind of debate for the industry to have is what combination of these technologies provides true value to public safety, to governments, to municipalities, to consumers, to enterprise, to corporations, etc., as the world becomes mobile. And the world is becoming mobile," Warrior said.Speaker Esme Vos, co-founder of MuniWireless.com, emphasized applications for wireless. These included making wireless capabilities available on public transit so people can get their work done while commuting, traffic management, and energy management. Cities such as Riverside, Calif., Tuscon, Ariz., and Milpitas, Calif., are utilizing wireless to provide city services, she said.With cities doubling in size every five years but without the ability to double the number of municipal employees, cities are looking to leverage wireless, Vos said.
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International Business Machines Corp.  IBM.N said it is making the design of its "blade" computer  servers widely available, in a move designed to gain wider  acceptability in data centers and the telecommunications  industry.
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Drivers of 4x4s, high-powered sports cars and other high-emission vehicles will have to pay $49 a day to enter central London, triple the current charge, while the most fuel-efficient vehicles will get a free ride, said the mayor, Ken Livingstone. Mr. Livingstone, left, who introduced the daily congestion charge on trucks and cars entering central London in 2003 to cut traffic and pollution, said the change is primarily aimed at the big cars owned by people in wealthy parts of the capital. The changes will come into effect in October. Mr. Livingstone said that 17 percent of the cars that visit each day, about 33,000, will pay the $49 charge, while 2 percent will go free. The remaining 81 percent, along with trucks, will continue to pay the current $16 fee.
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LONDON -- IBM said Monday that it won a Â£500 million ($972 million), seven-year services contract to help move U.K. bank Lloyds TBS from its traditional voice infrastructure to a converged voice and data network.
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The government on Tuesday moved to bolster Saab Automobile AB&#39;s lure to parent General Motors by agreeing to use state money to improve road and rail access to the company&#39;s last automotive plant in Sweden.
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Business & money: Meeting in Gothenburg next month to be attended by institutional investors from around the world
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the company will work with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego on a substantial upgrade to the center's technical capabilities.
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Motorists should pay charges to drive on the road network, a key government-backed report is to recommend.
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Congestion charges could be introduced in Belfast in the future, according to a city council document.
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Stockholm, Sweden- Hundreds of European cities and towns restricted auto traffic last month, part of the continent's annual campaign to lower air pollution by encouraging commuters to use public transportation, ...
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JEJU, South Korea -- Samsung Electronics Co. showed off its vision for the future of mobile technology Thursday, sending data wirelessly at blazing speeds to a moving minibus.
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By Rodney Tanaka, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Calif.  Dec. 13--PASADENA -- A local tech company is partnering with IBM to build  chips used in digital cameras and X-ray machines.
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Red Green Ken makes bid for recycled lentil votes London mayor Ken Livingstone yesterday announced a comprehensive shift in the capital's "congestion charge" road-pricing policy, reorienting the tolls much more towards green issues and away from actual congestion charging.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission is considering introducing a voluntary code of conduct on energy efficiency for datacenter operators. Next week, the Renewable Energies Unit of the Commission's Joint Research Center will meet in London to discuss the idea. If adopted, a code of conduct would be voluntary, said Antonia Mochan, spokeswoman for the science and research unit of the Commission. Those organizations that adopt it would agree to abide by certain principles or standards, she said. The London meeting will include a session on the technical capabilities for reducing datacenter energy use and what a code of conduct -- if one is to be adopted -- should include. Participants will include hardware manufacturers, including Intel, datacenter designers and datacenter operators. The Commission has made few regulations about computer energy consumption, said Kevin Fisher, Intel's standards and regulations manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, earlier this week. Environmental agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, which placed limits on greenhouse gas emissions for countries, are driving government interest in reducing energy consumption, Fisher said. Enterprises are interested in reducing utility costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA)Â Energy Star programÂ is used internationally as a specification for energy-efficient desktop computers, but the specification does not address servers. Part of the problem is a lack of metrics for establishing efficient server power consumption, although several efforts are under way, Fisher said. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit group based in Warrenton, Virginia, is developing a first-generation benchmark for evaluating the energy efficiency of servers. The benchmark will measure energy use in conjunction with performance metrics. In December, U.S. PresidentÂ George Bush authorized the EPAÂ to study datacenter power consumption. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab at the University of California is also study energy issues with servers, and a report is due to the U.S. Congress in June, Fisher said. The Renewable Energies Unit meeting is a day after the UK Energy Summit organized by Datacenter Dynamics at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London and will be held in the same venue. Â
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IBM said Monday that it is partnering with ACI Worldwide, an electronic payment software vendor, to create a payments system based on service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.