CERTIFICATION AND BRANDING

Whether you know it or not, you're not only surrounded by standards, but by certified standards-compliant products as well. Which is as it should be.

More and more standards of all types (technical, professional, ethical and environmental) are supported by voluntary participation certification programs. These programs not only provide a nimble and cost-effective alternative to government regulation, but offer an increasingly important means to confront global challenges like global warming, environmental degradation, and achieving sustainable use of renewable resources as well.

The ICT sector is particularly dependent on achieving interoperability through compliance with appropriate standards, and on maintaining end-user trust in compliance.  But developing robust compliance tests is expensive, and the number of products to test is usually too small to permit third party certification companies to recover their development costs.  The result has been the evolution of a ...

Microsoft has long refused to support ODF in its Office productivity suite, but this month it announced that it would support an open source project to develop an Office to ODF converter. Just about everyone has an opinion about what it all means. Including me.

Would it surprise you to learn that 8 out of 10 Americans would give up their iPod before they would sacrifice their WiFi router? It shouldn't. The iPod/iTunes system is proprietary and limited to what Apple wants to give you. But the WiFi standard is open, and is being implemented everywhere, by everyone, and on every device imaginable. The result? We ...