Google’s Fusion Tables, a way to manage large amounts of data online with powerful visualization capabilities built into it, was recently graduated out of Google Labs and became an app available on the Google Apps dashboard. Read More »

Alma Whitten (Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google) in her blog post “The freedom to be who you want to be…“ makes the distinction between three modes of online use which Google sees itself as serving. The distinction between the three is important for those of us who are interested in online privacy, especially for those activists who are working in closed or repressive societies. Read More »

A few thoughts on How WordPress is Made:

Distributed work environments are going to become increasingly more common. Questions of how to foster team collaboration or create a company culture will become more complex. Read More »

Catholic Relief Services (CRS)

The Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) team at Catholic Relief Services (CRS), a humanitarian relief agency headquartered in Baltimore, had been collecting and compiling an impressive array of digital resources with the goal of creating an M&E Digital Library. The collection included articles, bibliographies, checklists, guides, surveys, and training materials in a variety of formats from PDFs to documents and presentations.

Read More »

Who has not heard of Grameen phone ladies? In 1997, GrameenPhone (a for-profit affiliate of Grameen Bank) piloted an innovative concept called the Village Phone Program. GrameenPhone would lend money to village women under this program. Women buy a cell phone and airtime from GrameenPhone to become phone ladies. They start a service business renting out their phone and airtime to other villagers. Villagers talk to their friends and family dispersed all over the world. Villagers pay money to phone ladies. Phone ladies make a handsome profit. Phone ladies buy more airtime from GrameenPhone. GrameenPhone makes a good profit. And everyone lived happily ever after. Read More »

This month’s issue of Baseline Magazine has an excellent overview of World Bank’s information and communication technology related activities, infrastructure, and budget. (Warning: Don’t blame me if your eyes pop and jaws drop at the numbers mentioned in there.)

The article spans about 12 pages, so for those of you who do not want to read it in its entirety, here is the gist: Read More »

Announcement at php.net
PHP 4 end of life announcement

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued. Read More »

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) data from the survey of women business owners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Responses based on interviews with 1,228 women business owners from five countries (Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and UAE) between May-October, 2006. Read More »

Morocco broadband statistics: Read More »

An announcement in the Google Blog:
Easier IT for nonprofits

Since we first launched it in August 2006, Google Apps has become one of our most flexible offerings. It’s helping to meet the needs of family domains, businesses of all sizes, Internet Service Providers and universities. Starting today, we’re extending the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered nonprofits. Read More »