Skype Connects U.S. Soldier To Live Home Birth

Story from Skype News

Darvin Butler may be thousands of miles away from his wife while serving in the U.S. military in Afghanistan. But he won’t miss out on the birth of the couple’s new baby in the states, thanks to Skype, an online videoconferencing service.

Under a technological partnership between CompUSA and Forgotten Soldiers Outreach, Butler and his wife, Vanesia, will the technology, developed by CompUSA and FSO to be together at the time of the birth virtually.

Vanesia Butler will use of the free service to make video and voice calls to her husband from a laptop. Just in time to go online and watch his daughter's birth, Darvin Butler will receive the second laptop in the next few weeks.

Since preparing for the birth of their child, Butler, who is six-months pregnant, knew that her husband’s duties would keep him away. But now, Butler is thrilled at the prospect of her husband listening to the first cries of the baby.

“We are honored to be a part of a worthwhile organization like FSO, which inspires soldiers with hope, strength and courage,” said Gilbert Fiorentino, chief executive of Systemax Technology Group, which includes CompUSA, in a statement. “We wish Vanesia and her husband only the best.”

Butler’s place of business, located in Coral Springs, Fla. has already received two Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) ProBook 4510s with built-in Webcams from a team of CompUSA technology experts. The team showed Vanesia how to make video and voice calls usingSkype ( News - Alert). CompUSA and CA, a leading independent IT management software company, will also donate a $10,000 scholarship for the Butler family to open a college savings account for their new baby.

Recently, the company selected Activant Solutions's Activant Eagle software solution to be its business management and point-of-sale platform. Activant Solutions said that the storewide internet in Afghanistan connectivity, which makes the product and price information available to both customers and CompUSA team members, is central to the Retail 2.0 concept and will be enabled by the Activant Eagle solution.

You Can't Stop The Signal

Story from Strategy Page

June 15, 2009: Bowing to growing pressure from the troops, the U.S. Army has unblocked access to Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Vimeo and Twitter at 81 bases in the United States. It was only two years ago, that the Department of Defense blocked access to YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, live365, and Photobucket. Since then, other sites, like Twitter, were added to the blocked list. This means that anyone using a computer connected to Department of Defense network (NIPRNET), was no longer able to reach the banned sites.

The reason for the ban was quite practical. All those video and audio clips were jamming up the network, and making it difficult to get official business done. This is a problem university networks began to encounter in the 1990s, and solved by a combination of expanding capacity, and restricting how much students could use the network for downloading large files. The Department of Defense is in a slightly different situation, because many of its users overseas depend on satellites for their Internet connection. Land based fiber-optic lines can provide a lot more capacity, but in combat zones satellite is often all that's available.

But that made the Internet available as well, and the troops loved it. Aside from the obvious popularity of email and use of messaging systems, the Internet also provided access to social networking systems (MySpace, with 125 million users, and Facebook with 220 million). These gradually became a popular way for American troops overseas to keep in touch with the folks back home, and with each other. The ease-of-use that has made these sites so popular with civilians, was equally attractive to troops who don't have much time to spend on the Internet. Most troops have access to the internet in Iraq and the internet in Afghanistan, but often via the equivalent of a dial-up connection. So MySpace and Facebook are convenient enough for troops to quickly post messages, pictures and short videos.

The brass were not happy with all this social networking, but were reluctant to attempt a crackdown. The suspect troops can be hard to identify, if they want to be, and have proved to be very responsible when it comes to OPSEC (Operational Security, not giving out info that can help the enemy). The brass have also learned that taking away Internet access would cause a serious morale problem.

Facebook is eclipsing MySpace as the social networking site everyone, including the troops, wants to be on. Twitter has become popular with commanders and technical team leaders, for keeping in touch with their subordinates. Flickr is where everyone keeps their photos. So, for the moment, the military will scrounge up the bandwidth to make some social networking sites available.

Afghanistan Experiences Communication Explosion

Originally Posted to Eureka Street

Before 2001 Afghans had only the Taliban's Radio Sharia. So they depended on transistor radios tuned to external services, primarily the BBC Persian service, for independent information.

In that light the explosion of media in Afghanistan following the end of Taliban rule in 2001 is a success story. But Afghan journalists are being killed on the security frontline, jailed or silenced. The government and parliament are in conflict over the country's media law, and journalistic professionalism is in its infancy.

The current diverse clutch of Afghan media owners include the Australian-Afghan Mohseni brothers, wannabe politicians who lives overseas, mullahs with links to Iran and powerful provincial warlords who were cashed up by the US during the 1980s civil war. But they also notably include more than 35 independent, community radio stations across the country. Two are owned and managed by women.

In a country with high illiteracy rates, especially in rural areas, newspapers are struggling but radio is strong. Network and local television are growing, particularly in those regions, like Herat, which have electricity.

Measuring audiences is still an infant science and quantitative and qualitative research is bedevilled by demography and security. But the Mohseni brothers' Tolo TV is probably the most popular television network in Afghanistan. An overwhelmingly young population enjoys its Indian soap operas, racy by conservative Afghan mores. So it is popular with advertisers.

The Government has tried to censor Tolo and another leading network. The latter bowed to pressure. Tolo refused, more out of respect for its bottom line than for media freedom.

Financial viability is crucial in an industry which has expanded so rapidly, with networks and stations vying for a share of the advertising market which in 2006 was worth up to AUD $31 million.

The International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) is a dominant advertiser. As part of its psychological operations to win hearts and minds, it produces and pays stations to broadcast a range of messages on human rights, health, agriculture and Western development assistance. In some regions military advertising is considerably greater than commercial advertising. This calls into question Afghan media's long-term financial viability.

From ISAF's strategic perspective, to rely on one-way messages in an era of multi-platform, interactive media is curiously old-hat. Mobile phones have leapfrogged even the internet in Afghanistan as a communications channel. Phone-in audience participation — from discussion forums to music requests — is clearly popular.

Television is fine for broadcasting community messages or warnings such as 'don't approach military convoys: you run the risk of being shot'. But its use to persuade locals that Western Coalition forces are in Afghanistan to protect Afghans is problematic. The Afghan rumour mill tells people of the increasing number of civilians being wrongly targetted and killed. So many locals believe foreigners are in Afghanistan to promote their own interests.

Remarkably, the greatest fuss in post-conflict Afghanistan has arguably been the government's resistance to a media law which was ratified by parliament. In September 2008 the parliament ratified a media law which the President refused to have published. Although the law was based on recommendations by an Afghan group, the Government argued that it was influenced by foreigners.

Journalists are left unclear whether they should follow the outdated restrictions of the 2006 law or the new, ratified but not official law. They are also under many other pressures: death on assignment in an insecure area, jailing, or a late-night phone call at home where an unidentified voice suggests they drop a story.

In February this year the daily newspaper, Payman, was closed after its editor was briefly jailed for alleged blasphemy. It had carried a contentious article, downloaded from an Afghan website. The article carried the predictions of a Bulgarian woman which cast doubt on all prophesies, including those of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohamed. The Ulema issued a fatwa against the paper.

Despite Payman acknowledging that it had printed the article in error and frequently apologising for it it, the Ulema threatened national action. The government caved in. The Attorney General stated: 'Our society cannot tolerate anti-Islamic propaganda.'

President Karzai was also under pressure. After his term expires in April, he plans to contend for the position of interim President until national elections are held in August.

Despite the difficulties in developing a professional journalistic culture many heartening stories can be told. At a training course in Kabul, where the journalists came from Taliban country, young men talked about a close shave outside Kandahar.

They had taken a route through dangerous country in their eagerness to do training, 'because we must'. They were stopped and interrogated at a roadside checkpoint by Taliban who, luckily, did not search and discover their journalist ID cards.

If they had the story might have had a different ending: some of their names were on anti-Taliban stories in the local media.

I pin my hopes for an independent Afghan media on this simple story, because I must.

Cellphone Technology in Afghanistan

Cell phones are an example of what is sometimes now called "leapfrog technology," a product that allows developing nations the benefits of a reliable and extensive communications network without the heavy investment in fixed-line phone infrastructure. Mobile phones, along with Internet in Afghanistan and other countries are part of a communications revolution that is helping boost income and stop the spread of disease in emerging economies.

For example, Abdul Wakil owns a dry goods store in the Afghan village of Daw Koo, about 40 kilometers north of Kabul. He says his cell phone has made all the difference.

"We used to go all the way to the city to order products, now it's only a phone call away and the costs are much less," he says.

The International Telecommunication Union says 72 percent of Afghanistan's population is now covered by a cell phone signal. By contrast, fewer than one person in a hundred has a fixed telephone line.

Read Entire Story at Cutting Edge News

The Shareef Don't Like It - A Tech Boom in Afghanistan

KABUL (AP) — Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef is a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He spent almost four years in Guantanamo. He wears a black turban, has a thick beard — and is never without his Apple iPhone.

The ultra-conservative Taliban banned modern technology such as television and the Internet in Afghanistan during its harsh 1996-2001 rule, but those items have boomed in Afghanistan since the regime's 2001 ouster, helping to bring the country into the 21st century.

Zaeef, who reconciled with the Afghan government after being released from U.S. custody, says he uses his iPhone to surf the Internet and find difficult locations, employing the built-in GPS. He even checks his bank account balance online.

"It's easy and modern and I love it," Zaeef said as he pinched and pulled his fingers across the iPhone's touch screen last week. "This is necessary in the world today. People want to progress."

Beyond making life easier, some say the country's embrace of technology could help break the cycle of 30 years of relentless warfare. It puts at the tip of a finger many things that were strictly outlawed by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar — music, movies, pictures of people and games like chess.

Young Afghans see the world differently from older Afghans because of their use of the Internet and mobile phones, and their participation in sports, said Shukria Barakzai, a female lawmaker and former newspaper editor.

Read Entire Associated Press Article