World Cup: Clever Ideas Accompany Clever Players

Wed, June 14, 2006

Germany is using the World Cup games to show that the country hasn’t only produced some clever soccer players like the iconic Franz Beckenbauer, but also some brilliant minds, including Albert Einstein.

"Germany—The Land of Ideas" is a government-sponsored program designed to encourage the millions of international fans pouring into the country to use some of their free time to learn more about innovation made in Germany, of which there is plenty.

The computer, fax machine and MP3 audio compression algorithm are among the many inventions attributed to Germans. Even today, the country still claims nearly 19 percent of the world’s patents, second only to the United States.

Visitors to Berlin, when they leave the city’s new train station and head to the sprawling government complex on the Spree River nearby, will see a large sculpture of an aspirin, paying tribute to the country’s pharmaceutical and other medical achievements (including the X-ray, heart catheters and dialysis). Nearby are two large soccer shoes, in recognition of the Dassler family, which founded the Adidas and Puma athletic shoemakers.

In addition to these sculptures, the "Walk of Ideas" includes a several meter-high stack of books to commemorate not only German writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller, but also the inventor of modern book printing, Johannes Gutenberg.

In front of the Brandenburg Gate is a huge automobile sculpture. Germany—home to automobile manufacturing heavyweights BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Porsche and Volkswagen—claims not only to have invented the automobile, but also many automotive parts, such as the diesel motor, antilock break system (ABS), airbags and aluminium bodywork. The country is also attributed with inventing the motorcycle, motorboat and magnetic levitation railway. Today, German engineers are at the forefront in efforts to develop hydrogen and fuel cell technologies to power vehicles in the future.

During the World Cup championship, which end July 9, fans touring the 12 cities with stadiums and other cities are welcome to view a number of presentations. Additional information is available here.

-John Blau, IDG News Service (Dusseldorf Bureau)

Related Links:

World Cup: Firms Threatened With Fines over Web Broadcasts
Security Watch at the 2006 World Cup (CSOonline.com)

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.

You are here: Technology Topics » Web 2.0 » News Feature

Most Recent Web 2.0 Stories

White Papers »

Why Business Ethernet Services?

Everybody's heard the cliché, "the network is your business." But that's not going to help you choose the best wide area networking service to meet your diverse needs

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Webcasts »

Fraser Milner Casgrain: A Success Story in Search-Powered Content Delivery

Too much information can be just as limiting as too little information if users can't get what they want when they want it. Find out how the IT leaders at one of Canada's leading law firms, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, implemented Recommind's next-generation content delivery and search platform within their SharePoint portal to enable timely and effortless access to the information users need.

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter