Google tight-lipped about co-founder's EC meeting

In today's podcast: Google tight-lipped about co-founder's EC meeting; SAP aims to help microcreditors; and US bill would limit broadband subscriptions based on usage.

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes!

Google was tight-lipped about co-founder Larry Page's Wednesday meeting with Viviane Reding, European commissioner for the information society, but was very forthcoming about the rest of his visit to the European Union's capital city. The European Commission declined to comment on the meeting beyond describing it as "informal". Unlike most meet-and-greet visits to commissioners by well known people from the business world, the Commission's satellite news service Europe by Satellite was instructed not to film Reding with Page, at Google's request.

SAP hopes to help lower the cost of managing loan portfolios for organizations offering microcredits as part of a partnership announced Wednesday with French nonprofit group PlaNet Finance. Microcredits, or very small loans, were pioneered by Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh as a way of helping the rural poor to start up economic activities with which to earn their way out of poverty. PlaNet Finance supports a number of microfinance institutions around the world, providing them with consulting services and loan portfolio management software to help them run more efficiently. SAP will contribute software, expertise and a little bit of cash to PlaNet Finance's work

A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would require large broadband providers to get permission from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission before rolling out broadband subscription fees based on bandwidth use. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act, introduced Wednesday by Representative Eric Massa, would prohibit volume usage plans if the FTC determines that the fees are "unreasonable or discriminatory," and it would require public hearings when broadband providers plan to introduce volume-based pricing. The bill was prompted by Time Warner Cable's announcement in April that the provider would charging customers in upstate New York based on bandwidth use. For some Time Warner customers, the monthly price for cable-based broadband would rise from US$50 to $150 a month under the plan.

IBM is expanding work on applications for use in Chinese hospitals after spotting an opportunity in the country's massive spending plan for health-care reform. It plans to work with China to provide hospitals with platforms for collaboration and information sharing designed at the company's new health-care product lab in Beijing. Among the applications being worked on at the lab are those that display electronic health records shared between hospitals, allow virtual conferences between doctors and interpret terms used in traditional Chinese medicine for digital classification. China this year announced plans to spend 850 billion yuan (US$125 billion) to achieve universal health care.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.