November 2009 Archives

From ReadWriteWeb by Jolie O'Dell

Virgin Media, one of the UK's leading providers of television / broadband / mobile / phone services, has announced plans to use deep packet inspection technology to track illegal file-sharing activity among around 40 percent of its UK users. Users whose activities are being monitored will not be informed of this fact.

The tech comes from Detica, a company better known for working with government data and intelligence agencies than media files and P2P networks. Their CView product is designed to help put an end to illegal filesharing, and with ISPs showing interest, it's unlikely that Virgin's deal will be the last we hear about.

By REUVEN COHEN from Elastic Vapor

Lately there seems to be a minor debate among the clouderati about the semantic differences between the term "the cloud" versus the use of "cloud computing". So I thought I'd jump into the fray.

As someone who spends his days eating, breathing and sometimes drinking cloud computing, it's fun to see how the debate has recently devolved into a debate purely focused upon the finer semantic nuances of the various terminologies. The debate seems to generally focus on the varied usages within the companies that are attempting to "cloud-ify" themselves & their products/services. This cloudification seems to be the trend du'jour within the technology industry, an attempt to augment marketing materials and or product positioning to include cloud related buzz words, whether they make sense or not.

By Henrik de Gyor from Another DAM blog

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can be used for preliminary research even before considering other external sources/vendors to acquire new assets or before creating new assets. You may already have what you need internally, so it may be worth looking inside your organization first. A DAM should  able to provide users with "for placement only" (FPO) assets for consideration in a project. These FPO assets could be watermarked by the DAM to easily discern between a lower quality FPO asset (which can not be published as is) and the approved asset for use in a project with the proper rights cleared.  Provided you have a fair number of assets for a project with enough metadata to find what you have on hand in a DAM, searching the DAM first may yield less research time for a project.

Realistically, once you acquire and/or create new assets, you may want to add them to the DAM in a timely manner so others may find it too.  This makes it easier to reference and use these assets again whenever it fits the need of a project.

DAM user can create a DAM lightbox (or special collection) of specific assets found  in the DAM for a particular project which could can shared and collaborated over with other DAM users, regardless of geographic location. These digital lightboxes could even be created and edited before meetings to discuss the project to streamline the process.

From Browserwire.com

We have been looking into getting a digital asset management system to house, manage, and retrieve our graphical, marketing, and other files. In researching this online, we found that there wasn't a lot helpful information out there. So, to save you some time, here some some things to look for when picking an asset management system:

• Hosted (SaaS) or in-house client-side application
• Ease of use and user-friendly interface - This one was key for us as we found many solutions with complex, multi-stepped, and poor UIs.
• Disk space - default capacity and scaling up options
• Subscription and setup fees
• Number of users and admins supported and upgrading options
• Ability to brand interface
• File upload & download options - single file, batch uploads, ftp
• Basic and advanced search capabilities
• Supported file formats
• Preview mode of static versus multimedia files - being able to view a streaming file snippet within the tool is a great feature
• Ability add metadata, keywords, captioning, etc.
• Auto-rendering multiple file sizes of a single file
• Report generation and alerts
• Localization support
• Lightbox/favorites
• Third-party access - e.g. for agencies you work with, you can send them a pick-up link for a file without the need to login to access the file.
• Access rights - security and password protection capabilities.
• Customer references