August 17, 2009 6:01 AM PDT
How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it
by Ari Juels (Guest columnist CNET News)

Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending.
The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely.

This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They’re enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we’ll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads.

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Glass Platform: Android Desktop Phone For Business
by Rob Jackson on August 19th, 2009

We’ve seen the consumer targeted Android Hub concept and although it hasn’t yet come to fruition, we’re sure it will. Take that same “next generation deskphone” idea to the business world and you have what Cloud Telecomputers is calling their Android-based Glass platform.

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Stoddert Elementary School, Washington, DC
http://www.stoddert.org/

Benjamin Stoddert Elementary School, named after the first U.S. Secretary of the Navy, is located in the Glover Park neighborhood of Northwest Washington, DC just north of Georgetown.

Star Global installed Wordpress.org CMS, and customized it for this school located in Washington, DC. We ported all the content from the old website into the new site, including blog categories and authors. Documentation and training was completed over the phone with specific instructions on how to add and manage content.

Reciprocal interviews discussing social media, Victoria, BC.

Paul Holmes interview via Michael Allison’s Communication

Michael Allison interview via Paul Holmes Blog

HTML5 Canvas Experiment
by Sebastian Deutsch on August 3rd, 2009

Click here to launch the experiment! (beware: sophisticated browser needed)

HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new betas of Google Chrome and Opera, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.

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The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), located in Washington, DC, was created in 2004. They required a new graphic design, content architecture, and to be ported into BM2, an enterprise level content management system. Star Global was supplied with the design, and provided the migration procedure, template slice, custom coding to manipulate the parameters of the CMS, and the new content architecture with pages to launch.
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, Washington, DC

TESTIMONIAL:
To you and everyone at SG, I have to thank you for your tremendous help with the redesign of the ATA Web site. I know it was a beast and seemed to be interminable. This is in part because I didn’t invest as much time as I could have in planning out the entire migration. And I didn’t do that because I knew I didn’t have to, working with you. You are always responsive, always reliable, and it’s a pleasure and a relief to work with you all as much as we do.

Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access
www.taxpayeraccess.org

ESL English – upgrade to shopping cart software
http://www.eslenglish.ca

Star Global helped ESL English upgrade the website we originally created for them. They had outgrown the simple order form, and wanted to promote their new bookband™ product line which includes the ability for customers to order multiple digital downloads, and self manage the online product catalog details.

During our consultation phase with a client, we decide which solution will fit them best.
We like to choose good quality, widely supported software and it looks like our Drupal users are in good company.

{Original post Dries Buytaert, July 15, 2009}
Emmys using Drupal
Glamour, glitter, and champagne all around because Drupal has gone Hollywood. The Emmys website has just switched to Drupal in preparation for the announcement of nominees tomorrow, and the subsequent annual Emmy award ceremony later this year. The Emmys are annual awards to outstanding television programs and performers.

Emmys.com was previously a static HTML website, with a few custom PHP components. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (the parent organization) migrated to Drupal largely because of the positive experiences various Academy members and other industry leaders have had with using Drupal.

The new Emmys.com is a joint project of volunteers from the Academy’s television industry leadership, its staff, and Emmy magazine — they built the site with the help of Metal Toad Media. In addition to migrating their main website, emmys.com, they’re also in the progress of converting some of their other related properties.

What is Twitter? 69 Percent of Adults Don’t Really Know
July 28th, 2009 | by Adam Ostrow of Mashable

You would think that with an estimated $48 million of free media coverage per month, most people would at least have a pretty good idea about what Twitter is, even if they aren’t users themselves. But according to a new study out today from Harris Interactive, 69 percent of adults don’t know enough about Twitter “to have an opinion about it.”

Of those that do have an opinion of Twitter, 12 percent think it’s poised for exponential growth, another 12 percent think it’s something that will stay relegated to “young people and the media,” while 8 percent think it’s just a passing fad.

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by July 20th, 2009 | by Josh Catone | Mashable

Twitter is immensely useful as a utility for joining in the global conversation and sharing thoughts, opinions, information, and media. But for new users, there’s also a fairly steep learning curve. For many people new to Twitter, the site doesn’t immediately “make sense” and it can be a bit daunting. But there are things those users can do to make the service more useful from the get go.

Below are five steps for new users to take in order to make the Twitter experience more enjoyable from the beginning. New users have both third party services and built-in tools at their disposal to make Twitter work for them, and this post highlights some of the best.

STEP ONE: Find People You Already Know
STEP TWO: Find Like-minded Users
STEP THREE: Find People in the Area
STEP FOUR: Get a Desktop (or Mobile) Client
STEP FIVE: Learn the Ropes

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