Global Call For Nominations of Innovators Using Technology to Benefit Humanity

Nomination Deadline: April 4, 2005
www.techawards.org

The Tech Museum Awards is a unique and prestigious program that honors and awards innovators from around the world who use technology to benefit humanity in the categories of:

Education
Equality
Economic Development
Environment
Health

Reward those making a difference and nominate today. A simple nomination form can be found at www.techawards.org. Self-nominations are accepted and encouraged. Individuals, nonprofit organizations, and companies are all eligible. Program details, including judging criteria, can be found at The Tech Museum Awards website listed above.

Each year, 25 Laureates are honored at a gala dinner, invited to participate in press and media coverage, and introduced to a network of influential advisors. An inspirational and unforgettable event, the black-tie celebration will be held at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, on November 9, 2005. One Laureate in each category will be granted a $50,000 cash prize.

Gillian Caldwell of WITNESS, 2003 Laureate in the Knight Ridder Equality award category and cash prize recipient, called The Tech Museum Awards "...a truly remarkable program that has given WITNESS acclaim for using technology to document human rights abuses. I was deeply honored to be recognized along with 24 other innovators from around the world who are working to improve human life through technology. The exposure generated from receiving this award and the $50,000 cash prize will surely lead to expanded services, awareness, and improved solutions for ending violations of human rights."

We encourage you to forward this email to any contacts you have that may be interested in nominating a candidate for this award.

UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will give a press conference at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France on today November 17 (Room II, at 11.30 a.m.) following the signing of a Cooperation Agreement.

Mr Matsuura has qualified the agreement as “an opportunity for UNESCO to put into practice the international strategic partnership advocated by the United Nations to bridge the digital divide.”

The agreement defines eight areas in which UNESCO and Microsoft will work together, exchanging experience, know-how and developing projects:


Education and learning;

Community access and development;

Cultural and linguistic diversity and preservation;

Digital inclusion and capacity;

Exchange and promotion of best practices on the use of ICT for socio-economic development;

Fostering web-based communities of practice including content development, knowledge sharing and empowerment through participation;

Facilitating exchange of information and of software applications;

Sharing expertise and strategies.

The agreement with Microsoft is part of UNESCO’s cooperation with a growing coalition of private sector stakeholders, such as Intel, l’Oréal, DaimlerChrysler and Hewlett Packard.

Comments:
After stepping up its own patent push, Microsoft is now trying to get its hands on other companies' intellectual property. Doing so will give the company more freedom to develop software in new areas and help the company as it seeks to indemnify its customers against any claims of patent infringement. "If we are able to strike cross-licensing deals with the top 30 technology companies, that alone would provide us access to a vast majority of the patents in areas we care about," David Kaefer, Microsoft's director of intellectual property licensing, told CNET News.com.

Welcome to "WSA 2005" Bangladesh. Within a short time we will start national selection process.

About WSA: The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global initiative for selecting and promoting the World's best e-Contents.The WSA places its emphasis on cultural diversity and identity, the creation of varied information content and the digitalization educational, scientific and
cultural heritage.The project is held in the framework of and in cooperation with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 2003-2005.Please visit www.wsis-award.org for more details.

If you are interested to know/participate/sponsor/jury member/volunteer of WSA-Bangladesh initiative please contact me at akzaman@gmail.com or call 0189 242 110

This should be mentioned that H.E. Begum Khaleda Zia, Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a member of "WSA High Patron" and Science and ICT Ministry of Bangladesh Government is the supporter of this initiative and focal point of WSIS.

List of the WSA 2003 Bangladesh jury board member:

>>Prof. Jamilur Reza Choudhury, VC, Brac University

>>Prof. Dr. Muhammed Zafar Iqbal M.Sc.(DU) Ph.D.(USA)
Head of the Department, Computer Science, Shahjalal University of Science & Technology

>>Dr. A. M. Choudhury, Executive Director, Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC),

>>Dr. Yousuf Mahbubul Islam, Ph.D. Director, Research and Advisory Services, BRAC University.

>>Mr. B.E.M Manjur-E-Khuda, Manager, Information Technology, UNDP Bangladesh

>>Mr. Mustafizur Rahman, IT Specilist, World Health Organization-Bangladesh

>>Mr. Partha Pratim Sarker,International ICT Consultant, UNESCO Asia Pacific

>>Mr. Mridul Chowdhury, International ICT Consultant, National ICT Task Force (SICT Programme),Bangladesh Ministry of Planning

And Member of Adviser was:
>> President, BASIS >>President, ISPAB >>President, BIJF

Your support and kind contribution will be highly appreciate.

Sincerely,
Md. Akteruzzaman
Co-ordinator,World Summit Award in Bangladesh
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Md. Akteruzzaman
Founder President, Bangladesh Youth Forum on ICT (www.byfbd.tk) Email: info@byfbd.tk
President, Bangladesh Multimedia Association (www.bmabd.org) Email: info@bmabd.org
Grand Jury, UN World Summit Award 2003-2005 (www.wsis-award.org)
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Visit my home page at www.akzaman.tk
Email: akzaman@gmail.com
Tel: + 00 88 0189 242110
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Google engineers must have breathed a sigh of relief Thursday when rival Microsoft Corp. rolled out a new search engine that proved glitchy and failed to wow reviewers.

The mighty software maker quickly solved the technical problems that briefly served up "temporarily unavailable" messages instead of search results. It's unclear, however, how the company will address the missing "wow" factor.

Our tests of the new MSN Search's trial version (beta.search.msn.com) suggest that it's not as accurate as Google. While both sites do fine on many queries, our comparison of roughly two dozen search phrases gave the edge to Google at least two out of three times.

In response to a search on "history of photography," for example, Google yielded as its top result a site deep with resources about photographic history. MSN's top find was the personal site of a "natural history photographer." A more specific query, "death toll at Gettysburg," brought up the total body count of that Civil War battle in the second result on Google, an excerpt of a Forbes article, while none of MSN's top results spotlighted this figure. Typing in "wife of John Adams" at Google brought up Abigail Adams's official biography on the White House Web site as the first result; MSN showed her husband's official biography from the same site as its No. 1 find.

MSN's new search service has some useful features, particularly a "near me" button that finds information, people or places in your neck of the woods. It works by reading the Internet protocol address of your Web browser or any additional data, such as Zip codes, that you may enter in your personal settings. It also analyzes text on all the Web pages it crawls and indexes geographic data, including city and regional names.

But this feature can return flawed results, especially since computers can't understand regional names as easily as people. When we typed "book store" and clicked "near me," for example, it brought up two pages about a store in Seattle.

Other additions to MSN include the ability to look up facts in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia, hear song samples from the MSN Music site, filter out sexually explicit material and find images -- it indexes about 400 million Web photos. A built-in calculator provides answers to math equations.

While the home page for MSN's new search is simple and easy to use, its "Search Builder" may confuse people. Clicking on this button displays an annoying pop-down box, stuffed with too many ways to revise your query. The first choice, "search terms," fails to spell out how it would refine your existing search. Clicking on a "learn more" link only brought up a baffling, verbose page of instructions.

The five other Search Builder options are a tad simpler. They let you limit a search to particular countries, to particular Web sites and to certain categories of Web addresses. You can also control variables such as whether you want Web sites that are static or change frequently, and whether you want Web sites considered popular or unpopular.

For now, Microsoft is running its fledgling Web search engine at a stand-alone test site, while MSN's main search page (search.msn.com) still shows results licensed from Yahoo. MSN search manager Justin Osmer said Microsoft won't replace Yahoo's results with its own until it feels the technology is ready for use by the general public, likely next year. Moreover, MSN will release additional search software next month, including a new program to locate files on a user's own computer.

Asked if he thought the new service to be as good as Google, Osmer said, "It is a start for us. We know we have got a long way to go."

Google engineers must have breathed a sigh of relief Thursday when rival Microsoft Corp. rolled out a new search engine that proved glitchy and failed to wow reviewers.

The mighty software maker quickly solved the technical problems that briefly served up "temporarily unavailable" messages instead of search results. It's unclear, however, how the company will address the missing "wow" factor.

Our tests of the new MSN Search's trial version (beta.search.msn.com) suggest that it's not as accurate as Google. While both sites do fine on many queries, our comparison of roughly two dozen search phrases gave the edge to Google at least two out of three times.

In response to a search on "history of photography," for example, Google yielded as its top result a site deep with resources about photographic history. MSN's top find was the personal site of a "natural history photographer." A more specific query, "death toll at Gettysburg," brought up the total body count of that Civil War battle in the second result on Google, an excerpt of a Forbes article, while none of MSN's top results spotlighted this figure. Typing in "wife of John Adams" at Google brought up Abigail Adams's official biography on the White House Web site as the first result; MSN showed her husband's official biography from the same site as its No. 1 find.

MSN's new search service has some useful features, particularly a "near me" button that finds information, people or places in your neck of the woods. It works by reading the Internet protocol address of your Web browser or any additional data, such as Zip codes, that you may enter in your personal settings. It also analyzes text on all the Web pages it crawls and indexes geographic data, including city and regional names.

But this feature can return flawed results, especially since computers can't understand regional names as easily as people. When we typed "book store" and clicked "near me," for example, it brought up two pages about a store in Seattle.

Other additions to MSN include the ability to look up facts in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia, hear song samples from the MSN Music site, filter out sexually explicit material and find images -- it indexes about 400 million Web photos. A built-in calculator provides answers to math equations.

While the home page for MSN's new search is simple and easy to use, its "Search Builder" may confuse people. Clicking on this button displays an annoying pop-down box, stuffed with too many ways to revise your query. The first choice, "search terms," fails to spell out how it would refine your existing search. Clicking on a "learn more" link only brought up a baffling, verbose page of instructions.

The five other Search Builder options are a tad simpler. They let you limit a search to particular countries, to particular Web sites and to certain categories of Web addresses. You can also control variables such as whether you want Web sites that are static or change frequently, and whether you want Web sites considered popular or unpopular.

For now, Microsoft is running its fledgling Web search engine at a stand-alone test site, while MSN's main search page (search.msn.com) still shows results licensed from Yahoo. MSN search manager Justin Osmer said Microsoft won't replace Yahoo's results with its own until it feels the technology is ready for use by the general public, likely next year. Moreover, MSN will release additional search software next month, including a new program to locate files on a user's own computer.

Asked if he thought the new service to be as good as Google, Osmer said, "It is a start for us. We know we have got a long way to go."