An interesting study about where in the world has the fastest Internet speeds was reported and Peter Wolchak recently wrote this article about it:

If you want to live in a city with really fast Internet, get ready for a long flight because you’re heading to South Korea. Akamai’s The State of the Internet study concluded that the cities of Taegu and Taejon had world-leading average bandwidth of a little better than 20 Mbps in the third quarter of 2011. San Jose, Calif., is the top city in the U.S. but 13th globally, with Amsterdam leading the European pack at number 33.

The DAM profession includes a wide variety of participants from active practitioners, students, systems integrators, analysts, vendors, designers, marketers and experienced consultants all working with DAM and contributing to its value and ROI.

Overall, cities in the Asia Pacific region held 65 of the top 100 spots.

Two Canadian cities made the list: Victoria, B.C., is at 82nd place with an average speed of 7.6 Mbps and Oakville, Ont., squeaked in at 97th place with 7.2 Mbps.

To view the article on Backbone Magazine, please click here.

In his recent article, John does a great job of answering the following questions:

What is DAM?
How did it come about?
Why is DAM Needed and Who is Doing it?
Where is DAM Headed?

Here are a few tid bits:

What is DAM?
DAM is the business process of managing digital multi-media assets for strategic use, re-use and future access as directed by the business. DAM controls every aspect of a digital asset’s life cycle through its ingestion into the system, application of security rules, cataloging, storage, retrieval and distribution.

These digital assets may well include digital photographs, animations, videos, graphics, music, 3D Models or even documents as is needed by the business and its objectives.

How Did It Come About?
DAM started as a practice in the 1990s born out of the printing and photography industries in tandem with the explosive rise of the Internet and digital communications. “Assets” flowing into feeding into Content Management (CM) systems for the web — images, graphics, documents, video — were not being managed effectively.

There was a need for technological solutions facilitating workflow for enterprise-wide image and graphic libraries and to share those assets both internally and externally for use and reuse.

DAM effectiveness was eventually enhanced by the application of XMP technology in addition to existing IPTC standards for managing information so that users would be able to identify assets with accuracy and authenticity. The road was set for DAM.

Why is DAM Needed and Who is Doing It?
Using DAM can deliver explicit knowledge and measurable cost savings, as well as other tangible benefits for the enterprise and senior marketing and production management, such as:

• "Brand” identity
• Improved workflows
• Cost reduction