The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented diffusion of network technologies into developing countries. The technological discourse attending this diffusion has presented the new media as a utopian, egalitarian and empowering tool with the potential of ushering in a new era of development, democracy, and positive cultural change. This paper examines the economic, cultural, and political eff...

The Internet has been successful beyond even the most optimistic expectations. It permeates and intertwines with almost all aspects of our society and economy. The success of the Internet has created a dependency on communication as many of the processes underpinning the foundations of modern society would grind to a halt should communication become unavailable. However, much to our dismay, the...

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification documents corpus spans three decades of Internet standards production. This chapter summarizes the results of an exploratory study on this corpus for understanding how this system of standards and its production have evolved in time. This study takes an alternative perspective, which considers a system like IETF as an organization itself,...

The third wave of IT outsourcing has reached small, medium-sized, but also large organisations, with a storm of interest via the Internet, in form of application service provision. Application service providers (ASPs) offer multiple users a subscription-based access model via the Internet or a virtual private network to centrally managed applications. The appeal of ASPs are the per-user-pricing...

Highly scalable wavelet video codec is proposed for Internet video streaming applications based on the simplified JPEG-2000 compression core. Most of existing video solutions are utilizing fixed temporal grouping structure, resulting in quality degradation due to structural mismatch with inherent motion and scene change. Thus, by adopting the adaptive frame grouping based on the fast scene chan...

The Internet has been successful beyond even the most optimistic expectations. It permeates and intertwines with almost all aspects of our society and economy. The success of the Internet has created a dependency on communication as many of the processes underpinning the foundations of modern society would grind to a halt should communication become unavailable. However, much to our dismay, the...