FirstCall/ — IBM ( IBM) today announced that it has signed an eight-year agreement with Essex County Council to help the Council deliver enhanced services and savings to achieve its declared vision of providing the best quality of life in Britain for its residents.

As strategic partner, IBM will provide a range of transformation services that may include the design, management and delivery of front-end customer services, back-office and corporate systems; together with business consulting and technology.

As part of the agreement, IBM and Essex also today announced the signing of the first two projects, which are the initial stages of the transformation program and will involve the modernization of the Council’s back-office function and streamlining of procurement.

Brendon Riley, Chief Executive of IBM UK and Ireland said, “Essex County Council is recognized as one of the most innovative councils in the UK. Drawing on IBM expertise, we will work closely with the Council as it moves towards a more efficient, customer-focused organization that delivers first class front-line services.”

Leader of Essex County Council, Lord Hanningfield said, “IBM has demonstrated its ability to help us deliver our vision of providing the very best quality of service for our residents. Working together we will also be able to keep council tax low and deliver real value for money for Essex residents. This is the most ambitious project that the Council has undertaken, and finding the right partner to help us deliver it is a vitally important step.”
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In the beleaguered music industry’s latest bid to generate more money from its content, two top music labels on Tuesday will introduce Vevo, a Web site for music videos.

Vevo is co-owned by the Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and the Abu Dhabi Media Company. Vevo said Monday that it had signed up a third major music label, EMI Music, as a video provider, leaving only one holdout among the big four labels, Warner Music. Vevo said conversations with Warner were continuing.

Videos on Vevo will be hosted and streamed by YouTube, the video site owned by Google.

The site will come online in the United States and Canada on Tuesday evening.

“It will be a higher-quality experience around music and videos than anything else that’s currently out there,” Rio Caraeff, Vevo’s chief executive, said in an interview. Mr. Caraeff said the site would host 30,000 music videos by the end of the year. To underscore the exclusive nature of the Web site, Vevo will also carry original programs by artists for their fans.

The company, which was announced last spring, is similar in some ways to Hulu, the Web site for viewing television owned by a group of TV networks. Vevo will syndicate videos to an array of sites — including YouTube — and promote Vevo.com as a destination of its own.

“Vevo will work to restore the premium luster around music video inventory,” Mr. Caraeff said.

Music companies have licensed their videos to sites like YouTube for years, but have sought higher advertising rates and a greater share of the revenue.

Vevo intends to announce 15 advertising partners on Tuesday.
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Just on 18 months after conceding defeat in the high definition format war, Toshiba has today officially reinforced HD-DVD’s defeat, launching its first Blu-ray player.

Priced at the competitive volume end of the market, the Toshiba BDX2000 is BD-Live compatible; supports enhanced audio formats, including Dolby True HD; includes an SD card slot; and is compatible with Toshiba’s Regza link.

Talking about the release of this Blu-ray player, but not mentioning the war, is Toshiba Australia managing director Mark Whittard.

“Blu-ray technology has matured and is now beginning to establish itself in the local market,” Whittard said. “Toshiba’s extensive innovation in the DVD and home entertainment sector has enabled us to offer a player that we can be proud of and has convinced us that we can hold our ground in the growing Blu-ray Disc market.”

According to the product description, the new player has a faceted design with a “smoked mirror front panel”. To create a streamlined appearance, the primary functions and controls are hidden behind a drop down door.

The only mention of Toshiba’s vanquishing in the format war is a note at the end of the official release. It reads “This product does not play HD DVD discs.”

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We have been talking about liquid batteries back in March, when an MIT announcement stated that they invented one that could store much more than regular batteries can in a simpler and fashionable way by using liquid metals and liquid electrolyte in the middle.

Since then, the same man who had invented the liquid battery, MIT professor Donald Sadoway, has been gathering “some major funding” from the newly founded ARPA-E, who encourages risky projects in the field of energy. The approach is a little different this time. If then, the battery was planned to be used in commercial applications, and to be more specific in mobile applications, such as car batteries, now Sadoway says he wants to play big and help the energy industry by designing batteries powerful enough to hold all the excess wind and solar power. These two sources of energy are complementary to each other, in the sense that wind is powerful at night and the Sun can only provide power during the day.

Back in March, there was everything about a battery that contained antimony, sodium sulfide and magnesium. Because of patenting secrecy, any further public details have not been given, so what we know now of the battery’s components, like then, is that there are two metals and a salt involved.

The working principle is simple: the energy is stored in the liquid metals that want to react with one another but can do so only by transferring ions — electrically charged atoms of one of the metals — across the electrolyte, which results in the flow of electric current out of the battery. When the battery is being charged, some ions migrate through the insulating salt layer to collect at one of the terminals. Then, when the power is being drained from the battery, those ions migrate back through the salt and collect at the opposite terminal.

Sadoway’s new liquid battery’s sizes are huge, he projected a battery bigger than anything existing today: “We’re talking about batteries of a size never seen before,” he says. And the system they develop has to include everything, including control systems and charger electronics on an unprecedented scale.

Likewise, his liquid battery is not destined to the consumers, so money won’t be spent on making it safe or easy to use, but large and to be handled by specially-trained people. Also, the new battery would only function at high temperatures, because, he says: “Solid components in batteries are speed bumps. When you want ultra-high current, you don’t want any solids.”

It’s about time someone thought about investing and inventing in the large currents sector, despite the obvious need to make small and efficient batteries for cars. If the infrastructure won’t be fully developed in the future, when we would expect everyone to charge their vehicle, then either electricity won’t be cheap anymore, or we would have blackouts every evening, because the current system isn’t ready for such a huge power consumption
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