Fighting hunger and poverty

Published: 22 September 1999 y., Wednesday
NetAid is many things to many people: a welcome bit of Web-led charity, another chance for rich people to feel good about themselves, a monster site that had to be built in a hurry. KPMG says the NetAid site it developed in just 90 days is capable of handling the 60 million hits per hour it is expected to receive during three televised concerts on Oct. 9. The concerts will benefit the antipoverty efforts of the United Nations Development Programme. NetAid is sponsored by Cisco, KPMG, Akamai Technologies and the U.N. Development Programme, and has attracted a roster of Internet and high-tech supporters. Listed as "key participants" in the project are luminaries as diverse as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers and Wyclef Jean, a member of the band The Fugees. The concerts will be held in New Jersey, London and Geneva, with appearances by acts ranging from Busta_ Rhymes to David Bowie. The secret ingredient that_s supposed to set NetAid apart from celebrity antecedents like Live Aid is the Web, which is meant to create an ongoing community dedicated to fighting hunger and poverty. Beyond its eleemosynary mission, NetAid is a formidable piece of site development carried out by a team of 50 KPMG employees. The site, which will remain up after the concerts to support the ongoing antipoverty effort, is meant to be capable of handling 1,000 e-commerce transactions per second. Key content-delivery technology, crucial for the live streaming of concert footage to Web audiences, was provided by Akamai.
Šaltinis: Inter@ctive Week
Copying, publishing, announcing any information from the News.lt portal without written permission of News.lt editorial office is prohibited.

Facebook Comments

New comment


Captcha

Associated articles

The most popular articles

"A shame for Poland"

Picket against human rights violations in Belarus held in Poland more »

Refugee finds anchor after years adrift

Boat people arriving in Cape Otranto on the eastern coast of Italy more »

The protest

Moldova: Protesters Call For Resignation Of Government more »

Lukashenko Is the `Castro of Europe`

The crowd in a spacious square in Minsk on a crisp autumn day recently was subdued but hardly fearful more »

Serbia faces `tragedy' as elections fail again

Serbians failed for the third time in a year yesterday to elect a president because of low voter turnout, triggering a political crisis in the Balkan republic more »

Schindler plaque unveiled in Poland

Members of the Krakow Jewish community and U.S. college students unveiled a plaque Monday honoring German industrialist Oscar Schindler more »

The Youth Leaders of Baltics are for Free Belarus

The meeting of the leaders of the Baltic youth organizations of the right wing took place on November 1-2 in Piarnu, Estonia more »

Human trafficking finds new ways

Human trafficking finds new ways more »

Favors for direct election of the president

ESTONIANS WANT DIRECT ELECTION OF MORE POWERFUL PRESIDENT more »

Polish, Czech, Slovakian Unemployment May Rise After EU Entry

Unemployment in Eastern European nations that will join the European Union in May, including Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, may rise from their current near-record levels more »