in Kenya the National Health Insurance Fund reduced its administrative costs from 60% to 32% by automating its claims processing, accessing real-time data and tracking payment processes
www.rackspace.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads/involve/user_all/Rackspace_Cloud_Report_Economic_IT_Skills_FINAL.pdf
Survey of 1,300 organizations in the UK and the U.S., including 1,000 SME’s and 300 enterprises with 1,000 employees or more found that: 64% SMEs / 74% of large enterprises agree that
cloud computing has reduced their IT costs; 58% of SMEs / 66% large businesses said that they can focus more on strategy and innovation as a result of not needing a dedicated IT team
The paper, Growth in a Time of Debt, was written by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and published in 2010…. The link it draws between high levels of debt and negative average economic growth has been used by right-leaning politicians to justify austerity budgets: slashing government expenditure and reducing budget deficits in a bid to curtail the growth of debt.
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A new paper, however, suggests that the data itself is in error. …
It turns out that the Reinhart and Rogoff spreadsheet contained a simple coding error. The spreadsheet was supposed to calculate average values across twenty countries in rows 30 to 49, but in fact it only calculated values in 15 countries in rows 30 to 44.
— Microsoft Excel: The ruiner of global economies? | Ars Technica Oh my. Here’s why I never just add data to blank rows at the bottom of spreadsheets with formulas but instead insert them midway. I sympathise with the spreadsheet creators though hugely; I only learned to do that after having been caught out by similar mistakes myself, albeit not ones that were quite so public
Mecca Bingo reports that a fifth of the money it now takes is online, rather than in bingo halls
Wi-Fi Posters are exactly what they sound like: posters that are turned into wireless hotspots. The campaign installed Wi-Fi devices on existing movie billboards, enabling users within range of the hotspot to access the network and interact with the movie. The movie Wi-Fi networks popped-up on smartphones like a regular wireless network, and the signal was named after the movie the poster was promoting. When users joined the network, they were taken to the movie’s official webpage and log-in where they could learn about the movie, see promotional events, watch full HD trailers, and buy tickets to see the film.
In 2011 the two developers launched Toca Tea Party. The game is not all that different from a real tea party. The iPad functions almost like a tea table without legs, and the kids have to invent the rest by, for example, seating their own plushies or dolls, one on each side, and then setting the theater in motion. First, choose one of three tablecloths. Then choose plates, cups, and treats. The treats are not what your mom would feed you. They are chocolate cakes, frosted doughnuts, cookies. It’s very easy to spill the tea when you pour or take a sip, a feature added based on kids’ suggestions during a test play (kids love spills, but spilling is something you can’t do all that often at a real tea party, or you’ll get yelled at). At the end, a sink filled with soapy suds appears, and you wash the dishes, which is also part of the fun, and then start again. That’s it. The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it. Ovemar and Jeffery knew that some parents wouldn’t get it, but for kids, the game would be fun every time, because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.
(Flickr has) more than eight billion photos from more than 87 million users, more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily
- YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month... Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
Founded in 2005, Kiva lenders crowdfunded almost $500,000 in loans in the first year. Today, its community of 900,000 lenders crowdfund more than $1.5 million in loans per week.
Google just launched The Peanut Gallery, a new tool for its Chrome browser, which allows users to add their own title cards to clips from classic movies. …No typing involved: just say “Action!” to get your computer’s mic going, and speak the dialogue as you’d like it to appear
Google announced … that it has added a feature to its image search tool that will allow users to search for animated GIFs.
(via Organic advertising | Amsterdam Ad Blog). I’m stunned that spam is now something to be proud of in advertising. Besides the fact that it is only very temporary and for a pointless set of keywords virtually no one would ever use. The value is in the stunt factor I suppose but frankly it doesn’t exactly show the VW brand in a good light that they’d be party to this… Although as it was done by students I’ll give VW the benefit of the doubt they weren’t involved.
