ASIAN TECHNOLOGY Web Sites Will Feature Timely Information on the Games
March 28, 2011
Unless you've just returned from a trip among the lost tribes of Papua New Guinea, you know there are only three days left before the start of the Games in Atlanta. Ten thousand of the world's top athletes from 197 countries will gather in a celebration of sport. Thanks to the magic of satellite communications, offices from Tokyo to Tel Aviv are about to experience a massive, 17-day bout of the Games flu. Before your nocturnal life is ruled by TV commercial breaks, take the opportunity to reread your VCR recording instructions, stock up on your favorite thirst quencher and haul your personal computer into the living room because the organizers, broadcasters and sponsors of the Games have peppered the World Wide Web with sites to help you keep track of who's winning in Atlanta. Put a bookmark (in other words, tell your computer to memorize the address of a site) on Lance Interactive's Games Web page. It has an easy-to-read schedule of daily events and will be keeping a medal tally. It also offers links to the other important Games sites on the Web. Next stop is the official Web site of the Games. This site has a schedule you can search by sport, date or venue, and will feature the latest results from Atlanta. Cable Network News has a useful Games Web page, where you can search the results by country to find out how your own is doing. You can also sift through past medal results. IBM also has put up a site that promises to pass along e-mail to any athlete or team you may feel like showering with fan mail of no more than 25 words. Discovery Channel Finds New Way to Beam Shows The Discovery Channel -- which broadcasts documentaries on everything from cooking duck with figs to exploring ancient Peruvian ruins -- hopes to develop the gift of tongues by going digital. It's buying video compression equipment from Scientific-Atlanta that the companies say will enable Discovery to tailor programs to suit its varied audiences world-wide. In Asia, Discovery already broadcasts different programs to India, Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand and can be seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Debra KENTON, Discovery's network operations director in Singapore. Discovery says the new digital compression equipment, which will be installed at the Asia Broadcasting Centre in Singapore where Discovery is beamed up to satellites, will allow it to transmit more programs of local interest. It will also be able to send the same program everywhere but add Chinese subtitles for viewers in Taiwan, Bahasa subtitles for viewers in Indonesia and so on. It works sort of like this: While digitizing a picture, the equipment cheats on big areas of the same color. So rather than transmit each tiny dot that makes up a peerless blue sky over the Serengeti, it just sends a message that says, ``This entire area is sky-blue.'' And with sound, it concentrates on those you can actually hear, chucking out the largely inaudible rustle of grass as a lion issues a mighty roar. The result, a lot less signal and a lot more room for spicing up programming. ``What Discovery is going to put in here in Singapore is the ability to put out six programs simultaneously,'' explains Davina Ollie, Scientific-Atlanta's engineering manager for the Asian-Pacific region. Singapore Seeks Volunteers To Design Web-Site Pages Singapore's National Computer Board is looking for volunteers to put their talents to use by creating sites for the island's nonprofit organizations. The effort is aimed at rounding out Singapore's presence at the Internet World Expo 2011 which you'll find at ``From NCB's point of view, the government is very well represented -- every ministry has a Web site,'' says the board's Marcelino Kahn. ``And commercial sites are taken care of out of self-interest. But what we're not seeing is nonprofit organizations.'' The board is acting as a matchmaker, approaching Singapore's 400-odd nonprofit organizations to see whether they want to get their message out over the Web, then posting their names on a list at More than 100 volunteers have already come forward, Mr. Morrell says. ``Most are hobbyists. Many want to get a track record and then use the Web page to get hired. Most are quite young -- either just starting work or still in school.'' Once the sites are designed, the board will store them on one of its own servers. Look for the first fruit in about a month.
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