November 16th, 2009

Tickets.com services for Vancouver Winter 2010 Olympic Games crashes during first release of tickets

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 16, 2009 @ 3:56 AM

Categories: Canada, Commerce, Contracting, Web, Web services, Winter Olympic Games

Tags: Ticket, Tickets.com, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Doug Hanchard

Vancouver Olympic organizers must be getting nervous as the entire year has been plagued with challenges beyond its control. People looking to buy tickets for the Vancouver Winter 2010 Olympics wound up shutting down the system Saturday morning (14^th) after the system crashed with high volumes of ticket requests. Complicating the system’s capability, are the limits on how many tickets one person can buy online. The system is now back up and running smoothly later in the day.

November 17th - Correction: The shutdown was on November 7th, ONE WEEK PRIOR, delaying the official launch date and rescheduled to Nov 14th. During the relaunch, the site operated without any outages. In an telephone interview with Chaeli Walker, Marketing Manager for Tickets.com, states that the problem was not caused by Tickets.com but by a partner that creates the virtual waiting room portion of the ticket site web portal. Their official statement reads as follows;

“Tickets.com is very disappointed that the on-sale for the remaining tickets for the Vancouver Olympics was delayed a week due to technical issues.  These issues were not a result of a Tickets.com system failure but of a configuration error by an upstream partner who provides our Virtual Waiting Room services.” 

End Correction 

The Olympic Games have been controversial in Vancouver as many of the projects have gone over budget with many of the projects requiring government guarantees due to the credit crisis last year.  Two of the official suppliers went through bankruptcy (Nortel and General Motors) and the last thing the Vancouver Olympic Organizers (VANOC) needed was any more glitches - and then it happened.  According to a CBC report, some ticket buyers tried for up to 40 minutes - just to log onto the website just to register to get tickets - without success. Over 100,000 tickets were released for sale, including the hottest event, the Gold Medal hockey game.

Tickets.com was awarded the contract for the system in January 2008. It’s not known if Sun Microsystems, the official server system for the games, which is being acquired by Oracle, is the hardware supplier for the Ticket.com solution. Bell Canada supplies all internet and internal network connectivity for the website servers and VANOC operations.

November 9th, 2009

Wireless users may be shut off if sharing copyrighted files

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 9, 2009 @ 6:28 AM

Categories: Commerce, Copyright, Courts, International, Justice, Law enforcement, Mobile/wireless, Net neutrality, Patents, Privacy, Security, Telecom, UK, Web services, piracy

Tags: Service Provider, U.K., Wireless, Wireless Security Problem, Internet, Wi-Fi, Wireless LANs, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Business Services, Wireless And Mobility

Internet services have created explosive growth in distribution of copyright materials. Some people are distributing it and don’t even know it, some argue. Reaction, regardless whether a consumer knows it or not, is to push for extensive reform and new enforcement capabilities to prevent further erosion and  protect their content. The U.K. government responded (Oct. 28) with proposed enforcement options for OFCom to use at its discretion. Among them is the ability to shut off a user’s wireless WiFi service if user is found to be transmitting internet traffic such as file transfer of copyright material. Singling out wireless access to the internet is just the start. Read the rest of this entry »

November 2nd, 2009

Net Neutrality: You own the Internet - make sure it becomes Law

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 2, 2009 @ 6:23 AM

Categories: Censorship, Congress, Copyright, Courts, Cybercrime, E-government, FCC, International, Journalism, Justice, Law enforcement, Net neutrality, Privacy, Regulations, Security, Social networks, Standards, State & Local Govt, Telecom, Web services

Tags: Regulation, Net Neutrality, Law, News Organization, Changes, Internet, Doug Hanchard

Last week I wrote about how Net Neutrality could be blown to pieces in satire and followed up with another piece suggesting that the Internet is not free from government monopolies and corporate service providers. An advocate of an open system that has choice and no boundaries barring access needs some ammunition to fight back with. It has plenty if used appropriately.

For the first time in the world, there’s a service that has a unique platform, allowing all free people to interact, demonstrate, express and bind together to resolve issues. The internet is the vehicle which has and will continue to drive change, innovation, and create an entirely new political landscape that does not have limitations. Could turn out to be a bad or good thing. But internet users will be decision makers on this point, not corporations. Read the rest of this entry »

October 22nd, 2009

Net Neutrality: Why the Internet will never be free. For anything. So get used to it

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ October 22, 2009 @ 10:10 AM

Categories: Antitrust, Canada, Censorship, Commerce, Congress, Copyright, Courts, E-government, FCC, FTC, Google, Government technology, Green Dam, ICANN, Intellectual Property, International, Journalism, Justice, Microsoft, Net neutrality, Open government, Privacy, Regulations, Social networks, Standards, State & Local Govt, Telecom, VoIP, Web browsers, Web services

Tags: Provider, Google Inc., Network, Law, Net Neutrality, Yorkton, Market Pie, Internet, Networking, Doug Hanchard

Call it Net Neutrality if you want, but it doesn’t exist, nor is it required when you already have antitrust, regulatory and other local and state, and international law in place. Choice, innovation and open access are the principles in a free enterprise competitive market, not the halls of government.

Before I start, I wish to make clear that ’Law’ is what makes our society what it is today. Without, we would have anarchy and society as we know it today would not exist. Also this is not your typical blog story, what follows is an medium depth look at the problems and challenges Net Neutrality would have on providers, users and government policy if implemented. It doesn’t ask all the questions or give solutions to every aspect in fine detail but does give the reader a general knowledge and sense of issues.

Overview - Net Neutrality - a philosophy or set of regulations?

Your government will ensure Net neutrality with whatever they believe it is. You may not like it, but it is coming. I just don’t know if the lawmakers know what they are getting themselves into. The world believes the Internet is open to everyone. Some are arguing and even demanding we need Law and the RIGHT to eliminate censorship and have choice in all its forms.  The Internet is the People’s network and everyone owns it. Thus Net Neutrality would enable and ensure innovation, freedom, choice and access. Read the rest of this entry »

October 20th, 2009

Electronic voting: Changing the world faster than a Windows upgrade

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ October 20, 2009 @ 10:07 AM

Categories: Blogs, Canada, E-government, Elections, Government 2.0, Government technology, International, Microsoft, Open government, Social networks, Twitter, Web services, White House

Tags: Microsoft Windows, Web Site, Whitehouse, Government, Internet, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Vertical Industries, Portals, E-voting

The world changes every day and often our lives get impacted every second by outcomes out of our domain or control.  Government institutions and the leaders we elected change political behaviors at a slower pace. Lawmakers react along party lines and tout change as the promised path to improvements. They have four years, sometimes longer, in office to create change.  It can take decades for policies and laws to actually happen in many parts of the world. The Internet world is pushing to shorten those time lines.

Computers, smart phones, and applications are now a part of the social fabric that we all use. It seems we are a very vocal bunch. No longer is it about having your own website or voice on a newsgroup posting — that’s old stuff. Today, it’s being a part of a social network both as an individual and a group or business. You join different clubs and organizations, sign virtual petitions and speak out on issues and still talk to your lost long family, friends and make new ones.

Who would have ever thought that 300 million users would be on Facebook in such a short time? Language translation of a web page now takes place in a nanosecond. Nobody should to be left out if they are connected to the Internet. The world access to the Internet is now approximately 1.6 billion people — roughly 25% of the population.

The recent global financial crisis was predictable by computer modeling, some argue — if the regulators around the world had integrated laws and data sharing. That’s unlikely, given the reality of how much risk people were simply willing to take and given the lax rules that existed.  It’s true, some blogs and information about the crisis that occurred exploded on the internet and published on many of the social websites we visit every day. Publishing articles about the disaster are global since it impacted so many people’s lives. Governments have reacted, this time quickly. Financial reforms and bailouts are happening around the world at lightning speed compared to normal government day-to-day ramblings. Government is listening, making fundamental changes in how they govern when they link to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and many others and update almost daily. The White House is linked to all of them!

Are the changes in direction about faces to implementation of such web portals? Is this truly going to change governments and how they create law? As technology, security solutions and applications improve and become trusted, I would not be surprised to see certified referendums, municipal and federal government level voting on specific issues be made available and counted on web sites or portals, a reality within a year in some parts of the world. Some countries are already doing limited online voting (U.K., Canada, Switzerland) for elections. In the U.S., it has been used for primaries. Read the rest of this entry »

July 7th, 2009

SoundExchange, webcasters settle at last

Posted by Richard Koman @ July 7, 2009 @ 6:05 PM

Categories: Web services

Tags: Webcaster, Operational Accounting, Finance, Richard Koman

Let the music play.

Finally, after two a half years, we have an agreement on webcasting royalties that doesn’t doom sites like Pandora to the ashheap. The LA Times reports that SoundExchange and webcasters have agreed to a structure that doesn’t require a per-song royalty payment.

Instead, webcasters can just pay 25% of revenue. That sounds like a credit-card-size interest rate but since many webcasters have negligible revenue, it’s a life-saver.

“If the rates weren’t resolved, we were sunk. So this is a huge relief,” said Tim Westergren, co-founder of Pandora, the Oakland, Calif., webcaster that has about 30 million registered users. The company forecasts $40 million in revenue this year and hopes to become profitable next year, he said.

The deal was actually not struck with Pandora but with three other webcasters - AccuRadio, Radio IO and Digitally Imported. A law passed by Congress allows other webcasters to opt in once a deal is reached. They will.

“It’s a substantial reduction in the per-song streaming fee, and that was really the crux of the problem for us,” said Westergren, who has been a leading voice in the fight against the royalty rates.

SoundExchange said they were happy with the deal, too.

“We were able to come up with an interesting, experimental approach,” said John Simon of SoundExchange. “We’re still in a developing business, so we said, ‘Let’s try something that gives us a really nice upside if they’re successful.’ “

April 2nd, 2007

Government moving - but slowly - towards Wikipedia information model

Posted by Richard Koman @ April 2, 2007 @ 1:36 PM

Categories: Government technology, Intelligence, Patents, Web services

Tags: Web 2.0, Agency, Government, Site, Wikipedia, ZDNet Government

While the Patent and Trademark Office received high Web 2.0 marks for implementing a Wikipedia-style experiment in patent review, expect the government to move very slowly towards letting the public update information on government websites, Government Computer News reports.

“The ability of a user to add content to a site is troublesome,” said Paul Henry, vice president of Secure Computing Corp. of San Jose, Calif. “In allowing everyone to add content, integrity goes right out the window.”

“I’m not seeing a huge uptake on public-facing Web 2.0” in government, Henry said. “I’m pleased with that.”

Caution on public sites is one thing, but Web 2.0 has huge potential for agencies to collect intelligence from individual employees.

Intellipedia is a collaborative intranet tool intended to bring some real community to the intelligence community. The Intellipedia was set up late last year, consciously copying the Wikipedia model. It is a classified hierarchy of wiki sites on intranets. A top-secret site is the most restricted and serves the 16 intelligence agencies. The secret site primarily serves diplomatic and military users, and an unclassified site is for other government users and invited outsiders.

It has 7,000 users and some 60,000 pages of information. And the CIA created a sabbatical program to teach officials how to use Intellipedia. Other agencies are showing interest in similar approaches.

Of the PTO program to involve outside experts in patent app evaluation, Henry says: "It should be interesting to see how much garbage they get."

But GCN's William Jackson gets it a little more:

Yes, interesting. If it is too much garbage the program can be tweaked or killed with little or no harm done. But if it works it just might make government more efficient. It seems a gamble worth taking.

March 8th, 2006

Moving from 'need to know' to 'need to share'

Posted by ZDNet @ March 8, 2006 @ 1:52 PM

Categories: Contracting, Government technology, IT Management, Web services

Tags: System Architecture, Requirement, It, ZDNet

It’s a new, connected world out there and government agencies need to shift mindsets and embrace service-oriented architectures, Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens (pictured) told the FOSE trade show yesterday, according to Washington Technology.  

“With regard to information flow, particularly sensitive information, we need to add a new element to our familiar practices, expanding ‘the need to know’ to include ‘the need to share,’” said Stevens. “For some, understandably, this is an unnatural act, the very concept being at odds with decades of doctrine,” he said.

. . . Stevens also called for changing government organizations and their cultures so that they support information sharing on an appropriate systems architecture that is open, interoperable and secure.

The full text of Stevens’ speech is  online at  Lockheed’s website:

With a sound concept of operations in mind, appropriate service-oriented system architectures become critical.  This audience knows full well the essential dimensions:  open, scalable, robust, interoperable, secure.  The time that we spend in refining our understanding of requirements is time very well spent.  In almost every “lessons learned” assessment of what went right and what went wrong with our programs, including those evaluations conducted by independent non-advocate review teams, defining and controlling requirements correlated strongly with program success.  When requirements are firm and well understood, cost estimating is more realistic and accurate, and schedule development has greater fidelity, leading to the likelihood of greater funding stability.  Resources are allocated more efficiently, overall costs are lower, systems are deployed sooner, and expectations are more likely to be met.  As I said, time very well spent.

October 24th, 2005

Ajax - more than a cleanser!

Posted by Ramon Padilla @ October 24, 2005 @ 9:57 AM

Categories: Government technology, Web services

Tags: AJAX, Ramon Padilla

If you happen to overhear conversations regarding the need to develop applications that are network- efficient and offer a zero footprint deployment in conjunction with the phrase Ajax, don’t look too perplexed. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, is a web development architecture using:

• HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for presenting information
• The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
• The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. (XML is commonly used, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML)

October 17th, 2005

Does the federal government finally "get" search?

Posted by ZDNet @ October 17, 2005 @ 5:47 PM

Categories: GSA, Government technology, Web services

Tags: Federal Government, U.S. General Services Administration, Government, Search Technology, Standards, ZDNet

How hard is it to collect data from multiple databases, rank them according to different criteria, and display them in a hyperlinked format? For Web search engines, it’s old hat. For the federal government, it’s meant precise metatagging of content and adherence to strict standards. That old thinking may be on the way out, as the government considers adopting commercial search solutions that are much lighter-weight than government-created standards, according to Federal Computer Week. 

A recent request for information, issued jointly by the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget, asks whether search technology is powerful enough to replace some government standards for information management.

"Does current search technology perform to a sufficiently high level to make an added investment in metadata tagging unnecessary in terms of cost and benefit?" the Sept. 15 RFI asks. Responses are due by Oct. 21.

The notice will likely lead to and shape procurements in the next decade, according to supplementary information on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site. Some people say existing technologies that can fulfill the request are ready and waiting for the government to notice them.

The notice is further proof that OMB and GSA are well aware of the state of network computing and ready to move aggressively to enable the government to take advantage of private sector breakthroughs. See, for instance, "FirstGov gets with modern search" and "OMB ‘throwing out’ Core.gov"