Mediaboss Marketing

DALLAS, Jan. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- AT&T^[1]*
today announced the selection of Fujitsu as one of its Domain
Suppliers for optical and transport equipment for AT&T's
industry-leading IP-based network.

The multi-year selection covers equipment used to expand and
maintain AT&T's metropolitan and long-haul network
infrastructure.

Financial terms of the supplier agreement are still being
negotiated.

"After an extensive evaluation of multiple optical and
transport equipment suppliers, we are pleased to extend our
relationship with Fujitsu," said Tim Harden, President of
AT&T's Supply Chain and Fleet Operations organization.

AT&T's Domain Supplier program, launched in September 2009,
facilitates a more collaborative relationship with AT&T's
equipment and software suppliers, enabling AT&T to have the
best technologies in place to serve its customers. The program
is also designed to ensure that the company's network
technology investment accelerates AT&T's move toward a
network that is well-equipped for the future.

Domain Suppliers will support AT&T in its continual efforts
to innovate and invest in one of the world's most advanced and
powerful networks. AT&T's IP
backbone network^[2] carries
more than 28.9 petabytes of traffic on an average business day
and includes more than 917,000 route miles of fiber-optic
cable. With continued mobile
broadband^[3] growth and
wired broadband usage, traffic on AT&T's IP backbone
network continues to grow year over year.

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by
subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand
and not by AT&T Inc.

About AT&T
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier
communications holding company and one of the most
honored companies in the world^[4]. Its
subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies –
are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and
around the world. With a powerful array of network resources
that includes the nation's fastest mobile broadband network,
AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed
Internet, voice and cloud-based services. A leader in
mobile
broadband and emerging 4G capabilities, AT&T also
offers the best wireless coverage worldwide of any U.S.
carrier, offering the most wireless phones that work in the
most countries.  It also offers advanced TV services under
the AT&T U-verse^® and AT&T ?DIRECTV brands.
The company's suite of IP-based business communications
services is one of the most advanced in the world. In domestic
markets, AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T
Interactive are known for their leadership in local search and
advertising. 

Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and
services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is
available at http://www.att.com^[5].  This
AT&T news release and other announcements are available at
http://www.att.com/newsroom^[6] and
as part of an RSS feed at http://www.att.com/rss^[7]. Or
follow our news on Twitter at @ATT^[8].

© 2012 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved.
Mobile broadband not available in all areas. AT&T, the
AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are
trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T
affiliated companies.

 

 

 

References

1. ^{^} AT&T
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
2. ^{^} AT&T's IP backbone
   network (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
3. ^{^} mobile broadband
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
4. ^{^} one of the most honored companies
   in the world (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
5. ^{^} http://www.att.com
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
6. ^{^} http://www.att.com/newsroom
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
7. ^{^} http://www.att.com/rss
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)
8. ^{^} @ATT
   (us.lrd.yahoo.com)

In the gentle world behind the polka-dot door, stories were
read, songs were sung, tissue boxes were fashioned into castles
and stuffed toys were earnestly consulted as though, some day,
they might actually answer back. That world was the creation of
long-time children’s television producer and educator Ted
Coneybeare, who died Jan. 16 after a long battle with cancer.
He was 86.

Leo Howard Coneybeare, who created Polka Dot Door for
TV Ontario and produced it from 1971 to 1984, was born to a
farming family in Essex County in 1925. He attended Essex High
School before graduating from the London Normal School with his
teacher’s certificate. He worked briefly with the Armed Forces
in Canada at the end of the Second World War before he took up
his first teaching job in a one-room school house in the hamlet
of Oldcastle, near what is now the Windsor airport. He would
wear his uniform to class on the first day to intimidate the
students. He went on to teach in the Windsor public school
system, increasingly using audio-visual aids and crafts in the
classroom, while continuing his studies in education. He
graduated with a bachelor’s in education from Wayne State
University in 1952, specializing in art education.

After an itinerant career teaching in Toronto, Peterborough and
then in England, he eventually settled in Toronto in the early
sixties and joined the Ontario Ministry of Education’s teacher
education branch, transferring into the new educational
television branch in 1968. The ministry launched TV Ontario,
the country’s first educational channel, in 1970, and
Coneybeare was in on the ground floor: It was as Ontario’s
assistant superintendent of pre-school programming that he
created Polka Dot Door.

In contrast to the brasher tone and aggressively educational
material of Sesame Street, which had been playing on
PBS since 1969, Polka Dot Door took a quiet approach
animated by rotating pairs of hosts, one male and one female,
who chatted with each other and with the stuffed toys in a
vocabulary carefully limited to that of children five and
under.

“I think one of the biggest compliments is that people say,
‘It’s written?’ Yet I cross every T and dot every I,”
Coneybeare told a Globe and Mail reporter in 1984.
“Deliberately, the shows are not that polished – there’s a
hesitation, a naturalness. But it’s designed specifically for
the child, especially the child watching alone.”

That child-centred approach was key, said Jed MacKay, who wrote
scripts for the show under Coneybeare and took over as producer
from 1985 to 1993. The hosts’ chatter with the toys, an element
that was sometimes parodied as the long-running show was picked
up by PBS and provincial broadcasters across the country to
became a fixture in Canadian life, actually replicates the way
a child talks to toys, MacKay pointed out.

“Ted was the best friend that a child every had as far as TV
goes,” he said. “He really got kids. That was the secret of the
success of the show.”

Coneybeare’s talent for visual arts education was also central
to the show’s success, MacKay said.

“Ted was a genius at the art side, the creative side for
children. Any craft we made had to be with things every
household would have: The joke was we were always making
castles from Kleenex boxes,” he said, suggesting Coneybeare’s
childhood on a farm had taught him to improvise with what you
had at hand. “We had great props people who could build
fabulous castles from Kleenex boxes, but we always made sure
when the host did it looked more or less as it would if a child
did it … We always tried to engage with our audience.”

Initially inspired by the long-running British series Play
School, the simple format featured stories, songs and
crafts from the hosts as well as brief educational videos on
topics such as how flax is made into linen or how firefighters
battle fire. The content placed a great emphasis on the child’s
imagination – especially the kind of imagination that could
conjure up a multi-coloured kangaroo-like creature in a muumuu
who only spoke one word: Polkaroo.

Polkaroo appeared one day a week and never when the male host
was present – which has led to many knowing jokes as the
generation raised on Polka Dot Door grew to a less
innocent age yet retained great affection for the iconic
figure. Coneybeare himself was forced to play the role once,
during a photo shoot for a Polka Dot Door album cover,
when the actor who showed up was too large for the costume. To
this day, Polkaroo is TVO’s mascot, although the show itself
went off the air in 1993 as program production was outsourced
to independent producers throughout the TV industry.

Coneybeare received several awards for his work in arts
education and television, culminating with the Gemini Awards in
2010 where Polka Dot Door, the first Canadian
children’s television show ever to go into syndication on a
commercial network in the U.S., was the Masterworks honouree.

Coneybeare officially retired from TVO in 1982 but remained as
producer until 1984 before he took up a life of travel with his
long-time partner Raymond Snell, cooking and playing uncle to a
lifetime of friends and relatives. He and Snell had been
together since the late 1960s but only married in 2007 after
same-sex marriage became legal.

He was predeceased by Snell, his sister Bernice and brothers
Keith and Verne, but leaves his sister-in-law Phyllis
Coneybeare and a large extended family of nieces and nephews,
many still living in the Windsor area.

A memorial service will be held April 27 at 2 p.m. at The
Metropolitan Community Church, 115 Simpson Ave., Toronto.

The Internet proved the only true form of free communication
during the Arab
Spring and yet the West has come to take the freedom it
confers for granted, Google boss Eric Schmidt said Friday.

In a stout defence of Internet freedoms at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Schmidt also said that rather than be
seen as contributing to job losses, the web was a great
opportunity for businesses to grow.

Schmidt told delegates he had just returned from a visit to
Libya after the revolution that toppled Moamer Kadhafi, a trip
which had underlined the value of the Internet in societies
where phones are tapped and media is state-run.

"The thing I learnt most about the Arab Spring is that we take
the Internet for granted here," said Schmidt, Google's
executive chairman.

"When you live in country where censorship is the norm ... the
Internet is your only communications mechanism."

The role of the Internet in the Arab Spring was memorably
illustrated by Wael Ghonim, Google's head of marketing for the
Middle East and North Africa, who administered the Facebook
page that helped spark Egypt's revolution.

Schmidt said an uncensored Internet could ensure the
new generation of Arab leaders does not repeat the same pattern
of corruption of the old regimes.

He proposed it becomes mandatory for politicians running for
office to disclose their assets on the Internet.

Schmidt, whose own firm employs some 30,000 people, also said
the Internet should not be blamed for problems in the labour
market, arguing that: "It's important not to fear technological
innovation and revolution."

He said that governments had to address what he called "a huge
labour shortage for highly educated people" in manufacturing.

"There are plenty of countries, (the) United States and other
countries that I have visited, that are very short of skilled
people," he said.

He said the web worked to the benefit of small business as
"there's no better tool" to find customers, adding: "A
reasonable expectation is that the access to the Internet will
produce a very large number of smaller companies."

Google announced that it is including some new information in
the Webmaster Tools sitemaps feature.

This includes details based on content-type, like stats from
Web, Videos, Images and News featured more prominently.

“This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted
(if any), and for some content types, we also show how many
items have been indexed,” explains^[1]
Webmaster Tools engineer Kamila Primke. “With these
enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps
Labs feature, which will be retired.”

There is also now the ability to test a sitemap. “Unlike an
actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to
Google as it only checks it for errors,” says Primke. “Testing
requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few
seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not
exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors
that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are
not be caught by the test.”

Google also has a new way of displaying errors, which the
company says better exposes what types of issues a sitemap
contains. Rather than repeating the same kind of error numerous
times for one sitemap, Google will group errors and warnings,
giving a few examples.

For sitemap index files, Google aggregates errors and warnings
from the child sitemaps that the sitemap index encloses, so
users won’t have to click through each child one at a time.

The functionality of the delete button has changed as well. It
will now remove the sitemap from Webmaster Tools from both your
account and the accounts of the other owners of a site.

About Chris
Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews^[2] team
and the iEntry Network^[3] of B2B
Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook^[4] or
Twitter^[5].
Twitter: @CCrum237^[6]
StumbleUpon: Crum^[7] Google:
+Chris
Crum^[8]

View all posts by
Chris Crum ?^[9]

References

1. ^{^} explains
   (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)
2. ^{^} WebProNews
   (www.webpronews.com)
3. ^{^} iEntry Network
   (www.ientry.com)
4. ^{^} Facebook
   (www.facebook.com)
5. ^{^} Twitter
   (twitter.com)
6. ^{^} @CCrum237
   (twitter.com)
7. ^{^} Crum
   (www.stumbleupon.com)
8. ^{^} +Chris Crum
   (plus.google.com)
9. ^{^} View all posts by Chris Crum
   ? (www.webpronews.com)