The first thing that’s noticeable about the image is the amount of red on the continents. This is due to the fact that there are four wavelengths being used to make the image: three are in the visible light rage and one is infrared, which causes heavily vegetated areas to appear red, according to Radio Free Europe.

The photos taken by the Russian meteorological satellite, EleKtro-L 1, which has been in geostationary orbit since early 2011. The satellite is set up to take extremely hi-res pictures (1 km per pixel) of cloud patterns every 30 minutes, and the Russian space agency posts the the archives online along with some beautiful time lapses.

The website Gigapan has made one of these photos into an extremely zoomable image. The zooming ability is reminiscent of various satellite maps, which  just makes it that much more impressive as it is made from one image as opposed to the thousands stitched together to make up Google’s.

For more information, Gizmodo has a pretty good feature on the satellite and the ways that its images differ from NASA’s Blue Marble.

A decision from the National Television and Radio Council to ban foreign soap operas beginning 1 May has made the channel Space TV nervous. Known as a channel with one of the lowest number of viewers it has struggled to get advertisement, but the Indian TV show, “Don’t Be Born in a Cruel World” has been a boon in gaining of viewers for the network.

The soap opera has been so popular among some generations that many chaikhanas (or, tea houses) have been named after Amaji, the hero of the film. Space TV ran a special talk show about the soap opera on the first day of the ban.  The program itself was about which of two female leads in the show to support: the authoritarian, criminal, and old Amaji or her daughter-in-law, Sia, who is the new ruler of the Indian community in the program. The show was nonsense, but many people participated in this “serious debate”. The channel even offered a special SMS line where people could send an SMS to vote for a side, which cost one euro per text.

The issue of how Space TV has used this soap opera has made online users angry. Video of the show was posted to many websites – including social networks – and received mainly negative feedback. I think one of reason that has made younger people crazy about show is that Amaji, who is generally a negative character got more SMSes than the more positive Sia.

But the main issue, of course, is that the problems of modern Azerbaijan are not shown on Space TV while such “fictional” issues are treated so seriously and used for citizen participation programs.

That’s because Usmanov, who is Russia’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, is set to make a pretty penny when he and his partners sell of a large number of stocks after Facebook goes public, according to Ira Iosebashvili, a blogger for The Wall Street Journal‘s ”Emerging Europe“.

Usmanov and his partners at Mail.ru Group invested $300 million in Facebook in 2009, but they could net up to $2 billion at the IPO.

“Today these investment have shown the highest possible effectiveness, and we are very satisfied,” he said on Russian TV last week, according to Iosebashvili.

On 4 May CERN chose a Budapest physics laboratory to host its blindingly fast new data processing center and help search for the fundamental building blocks of matter, The Wall Street Journal’s Emerging Europe blog reports.

The center will be built at the Wigner Research Center for Physics in Budapest, named for Hungarian-American Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. The center will cost 8.5 billion euros, an institute press release said.

When finished in 2013, the center will have at its disposal more broadband capacity than the rest of Hungary combined, Emerging Europe’s blogger, Gergo Racz, notes.

(Photo: Torkild Retvedt/Flickr)

According to the founders of the site, an NGO called the Society for Literacy Development, the aim of borani.org is to connect those who live beneath the poverty line and those who are able to support them, as well as promote charitable activities in Georgia. The word “borani” means “ferry”, as in to ferry a group of people from poverty to decent life.

As with similar platforms, site visitors can also submit their own projects for funding. The project was launched by Simon Janashia, a professor of Ilia State University (Iliauni), and Levan Gambashidze, a lecturer of Iliauni. The number of supporters, the amount of money, the people need and the project explaining photos are available on the website.

As a result of donations, 17 families were able to buy the necessary equipment for their houses. Here are some examples of how Georgians have used the platform:

Aksana Saparova is a young, unemployed, and divorced mother who lives with her mother.  Due to a pregnancy, she lost a job as seller in a market. And now the family’s only income is her mother’s pension. On average, a pension in Georgia is about 100 GEL (60$). With the help of the site and more than 20 individual donors, she was able to purchase the refrigerator for her family.

An injured hand has left Maia Tsiknadze, a single mother of two children, unable to wash the clothes, and because the income of the family is little, they could not allow themselves to buy a washing machine. Borani.org users contributed about 600 GEL (360$) for the family to buy it.

Following is the video of Borani.org’s first ad. In it, men are asked: what do women like in men. The men’s answers are: appearance, car, and successful career.  Later women are asked the same question and all answers are the same: charity.

First, the mobile version will be translated as a significant number of Uzbek users–about 1.55 million of 2 million–access the site through mobile devices. In fact, about 20 percent of the whole mobile audience of Odnoklassniki is Uzbek.

The next step will be translating the web version of the site as well as applications for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

In Uzbekistan, Odnoklsassniki is the leading social network. About a quarter of the 7.5 million users access the website daily, while only about 129,000 people have Facebook accounts.

A local Uzbek social network Muloqot, created with the support of the state telecom monopoly in August 2011 is still far from catching up with the Russian giant. Muloqot, or “dialogue”, “conversation” has a little over 22,500 users today. The launching of the website was considered by some activists as the first step to ban Facebook in the country. Despite government attempts to crackdown, Internet use in Uzbekistan continues to grow.

(Front page image courtesy Wikicommons user Stomac)

Federal Security Service (FSB) deputy director Sergei Smirnov has called for an Internet crackdown, arguing that society has to defend itself against “dirty technology.” Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Russian security council, has cited China and the United States as models for regulating the Internet.  While Internet experts say it may be too late for Russia’s security services to institute a Chinese-style firewall, the FSB has begun to increase their harassment of opposition figures online.

President Dmitry Medvedev has dismissed these fears, claiming that online censorship is impossible. Despite these assurances, Russia has a mixed record on Internet freedom. Freedom House has raised concerns over the Russian government’s use of anti-extremism laws to target political opponents, most famously in the case of blogger and journalist Irek Murtazin, who was sentenced to nearly two years in jail for defamation. The “anti-extremism” law has been used to shut down nearly 1,000 websites already, ranging from actual extremist websites to websites critical of the government.

Russia, which is on Reporters Without Borders’ “under surveillance” list, is not the only country in the region to censor the Internet. Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are all listed as “enemies of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders. Their activities include shutting down websites critical of the government, blocking social networks, and surveillance of their citizens.

(Image courtesy Freedom House)

In former Soviet countries, problems of development are most often connected with surprisingly simple issues that are not always open to outsiders. Those problems are not mentioned in reports of international organizations, media or in blogs.

The question of new media in Azerbaijani education is on this list. According to official reports the number of users is increasing, but content on the Internet is still just taking ant steps.

The reason is not connected to “cultural” stuff, as many try to show. This is mainly an issue of low financial spending. Internet providers don’t advertise their prices, outside of a few hand-size ads in the Baku subway. Media organizations are not involved in creating real money-making online projects. Few get grants to build websites for issues–issues in which a large part of society is not interested anyway. And those who do get money don’t do enough advertising to really get their message out.

Online media that are already sustainable are able to get very little funding since they are not known. This strange situation, when money is not available for the most active and successful organizations, kills the future of local content.

Another issue is university education in the field of new media. Many foreigners don’t know and will not understand that university professors sometimes aren’t paid enough to even cover the cost of transportation to and from the university. For example, the highest paid teachers of new media (as well as others) receive less than 5 euros per class. In best case scenarios, there are only four hours a week offered. So what kind of education can students expect on the views, democracy and sustainability of new technologies from such a low-paid teacher. Of course most of these teachers are volunteering. In addition, the majority of those who really know the issue don’t stay in universities. And the problem is not culture, low interest in teaching, or “generational views”, but payment. In a market economy everything has its own price. I don’t think that good education should cost so little.

In fact, the main problem of online media is money. But changing this situation is connected to solving other problems in society such as: corruption, monopolization, salaries, etc.

(Image courtesy Flickr user webtreats)

Originally, Piano started off with $390,000 in seed funding to launch their project first in Slovakia, then Slovenia.  Even before this recent announcement, Piano had said they had planned to expand to 19 more markets by 2014. Certainly this will help them speed that process. “This deal represents the next step in Piano’s growth; helping speed our expansion, recruit top talent, ramp up our marketing, broaden our sales channels and keep improving our software,” the company’s CEO said in the statement.

Nick Clayton, at the WSJ’s TechEurope blog, points out that Piano’s success in the future could potentially be a significant argument in favor of the paywall model for media outlets, especially if Piano can continue to wrangle typically competitive media organizations into one bundle and convince them to put more than just a small percentage of their content behind the paywall.

In the last three months, Armenia has seen its number of registered Facebook users increase by nearly 18 percent (to 282,700), according to the international social media databank Socialbakers.com; the second highest increase in the South Caucasus, after Azerbaijan at 27.02 percent.

The social network has “solved” the problem of “the information blockade” about real life in Armenia that characterized the 2008 parliamentary election, commented one youth activist who bore the Facebook banner at a 30 March campaign rally in Yerevan for the Armenian National Congress, Armenia’s largest opposition coalition.

“I brought the Facebook flag to the rally to show the government that now there is a unique, reliable alternative [for information] to be used by everyone,” said 24-year-old Areg Gevorgian.

Continue reading the article here.

(by Marianna Grigoryan, From EurasiaNet.org.)