ICTD Corporation's Blog

In the late 1980′s, timeshared computing resources allowed enterprises to gain reliable, high-performing computing services without the overhead of in-house computing infrastructure. Cloud computing targets the same enterprises, however, without the lock-in or inherent “stickyness” that timeshared computing service providers created and benefitted from. The commoditisation of cloud services has been able to go further [...]

This is the third article in a series aimed at the non-technical reader to help demystify ICT for development. This month we explore the concept of “green” ICT. What does it mean in practical terms for us as citizens, businesses and government? The term “green” ICT refers to an ever expanding set of practices, technologies [...]

The three commonly touted benefits to free and open source software (FOSS) in government are: (a) that it is inexpensive and so demonstrates that a government agency is being fiscally responsible and using taxpayer monies frugally, (b) that it avoids a government agency getting “locked in” to a commercial supplier, and (c) that it can [...]

Dr. Yumita, the Executive Engineering Director of NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, in English, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) was a panel member in the last session of the ITU World Telecom 2009 Conference. During the panel discussion he outlined his vision for the next generation of TV currently in development. He explained that Japan is working [...]

Today I experimented with the creation of an application in Python to run on the new Google App Engine (GAE) infrastructure. Things couldn’t have been easier. I whipped up a .yaml file, created a couple of Python classes, a simple CSS stylesheet and HTML form (to give the application a face) then ran a single [...]