France has just announced to triple the amount of 'public surveillance' cameras. I cannot help but wonder about the impact on their network and hardware that will have to support this extra video imagery. As you probably know, video data is quite heavy storage-wise, and therefore has quite an impact on bandwith (data transport) too.

French interior minister Michele Alliot-Marie announced Thursday the government is planning to " triple" the existing CCTV surveillance capacities across the country, with a view to curbing the risks of terrorism and acts of violence.(People's Daily Online)

The french mean to accomplish this by interconnecting the current existing surveillance networks together, which seems smart to me. As with all governments, different parts of that government typivally build there own systems, and find out only 20 years later they should have built it together.
I guess there's a learning curve in everything.

online communities are a typical product of Web 2.0. The internet has evolved into much more that just a place for computers to connect, it has become a place for people to meet. Years ago, the rise of forums were leading the revolution, today the online communities have taken over.

A survey of over 200 US-based IT professionals, published this week by King Research, shows that 100 per cent of those who participate in online communities say they get professional benefits from the experience. And 85 per cent also say they get personal benefits.(Reg Developer)

Interesting news. As you probably know, a lot of people disliked social networks because of the (obvious) link to non professional, personal social networks where people hang around and chitchat in their free time. Several networks are actually growing into professional ones - facebook has already been adopted by many corporations and other companies have their own social networks installed internally.

It is all about communication, and I am glad to see that it is getting picked up and taken seriously by people with influence in big corporations.

Skype, probably the biggest non-SIP voip provider in the world, violates GPLv2, the open source license. The software itself is fine, but one of the SMC phones they sell through their site runs linux. The source code was not provided, as stated in GPLv2.

Skype did, however, issue a flyer that contained URLs to the GPL license and to the source code. The GPL only permits a URL for software that is delivered over the internet.(TheRegister)

I happen to own this phone (although not bought from Skype), and indeed, I never received the source code either. Nothing that will shake the world. Skype has been convicted of the crime by a german court after complaints of Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who also runs gpl-violations.org. The punishment will fit the crime - a small fine will be issued.

Evolution is a process that takes many thousands of years. We, animals as well as plants, adapt slowly to the ever changing environment we live in, to fit better and maximising chances for survival. In this process, some parts of our physiology become unwanted, others need extra attention to development. In these days, I think the brain needs more excitement and stimulation in order to evolve in a brain that will be able to survive and find it's way in the society that is to come - one where technology dominates all life.

Nintendo is probably way ahead of it's competitors with their range of 'brain age' software packages for it's game computers. I believed that the brain program for nintendo DS was a hype and would eventually disappear, but now that the package has also been released for the Wii, I know this is a winner. Maybe nintendo doesn't even know it yet, but this could potentially have a big influence on nintendo itself, but also on our society as we know it. We better all hurry to the store and get one.

Nokia is one of these companies of which you don't expect to move into another field but the cellphone business. But Nokia looks beyond it's horizon and expands into the Web world.

Not so long ago, the company has bought Widsets, a site that offers mobile rss widgets that work perfectly on mobile phones. And they've taken things even further with the acquisition of media sharing portal Twango.

twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media.(Read/WriteWeb)

I believe that this will launch Nokia into the web. Not only will this allow current Nokia owners to do more with their mobiles, this will most certainly attract other people to start using nokia products. A great step for a company that is, by origin, a cellphone manufacturer.

Read more about twango here.

Tomtom, the famous producer of gps navigation units, currently the biggest in Europe, has announced a bid of €1.8bn on Teleatlas, a creator of maps for use in electronic navigation devices. It's an interesting move. Tomtom claims that it will improve customer feedback on the maps and the navigations devices as a whole. I doubt that is the real reason. I suspect it is a move for more power in the gps navigation market. And that's only logical.

Tele Atlas also supplies data to rival Garmin, a relationship that apparently won't be affected by the purchase.(TheRegister)

GPS Passion thinks a bit different about this.