Obama Swearing President Inauration -2

I.Silverlight to Stream Obama's Inauguration

Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden are due to be sworn in and deliver inauguration speeches next Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Both events will be streamed live on the PIC site using Silverlight, a cross-browser technology for delivering live and on-demand video over the Web.

The PIC will also stream video of an event with Obama and Biden in Baltimore on Saturday as part of their "Whistle Stop Tour," which will take them from Philadelphia to Washington for the inaugural ceremony and celebrations.

Obama was elected on Nov. 4 as the first African-American U.S. president, giving Tuesday's inauguration particular historical significance.

IStreamPlanet, an online content-delivery company in Las Vegas, Nevada, is working with Microsoft to stream the event, Microsoft said.

The inaugural event is the latest high-profile use of Silverlight, which was first released in April 2007 as a rival to Adobe Flash. The technology comprises a tool for developing and designing Internet applications and a media player for delivering content.

It wasn't until the release of Silverlight 2 in October, however, that the technology became a viable alternative to Flash for building rich Internet applications (RIAs), developers said.

"Silverlight 1.0 was a glorified media player," said Ben Dewey, a senior software developer for IT consulting firm twentysix New York, who has worked with Silverlight. "The release of Silverlight 2 is when it really took off."

While Silverlight 2 was in beta in August, the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee used it to stream proceedings from the convention, including Obama's acceptance speech to more than 80,000 people at an outdoor stadium in Denver.

Microsoft also teamed up with U.S. television network NBC that month to deliver thousands of hours of both live and on-demand coverage from the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Silverlight has had its bumps in the road, however. The first high-profile user, Major League Baseball Advanced Media's MLB.com site, dropped the technology in November and signed a two-year deal to use Adobe Flash for streaming live baseball games.


II.Bush declares a 'state of emergency' in Washington as cost of Obama's swearing-in ceremony soars to £110m

Barack Obama's inauguration is set to cost more than £100m making it the most expensive swearing-in ceremony in US history.

The President-elect will take less than a minute to recite the oath of office in front of an estimated two million people in the US capital next week.

But by the time the final dance has been held at one of the many inaugural balls the costs for the day will be a staggering £110m.

The cost was revealed as Mr Obama scrambled to answer questions about the nomination of Treasury Secretary pick Timothy Geithner.

Geithner - the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank whose selection by Obama as Treasury chief in November - is facing questions about an 'illegal' housekeeper whose work papers lapsed while she was employed by his family, and about several years when Geithner did not pay £35,000 of Social Security and Medicare taxes for himself.

Obama's White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement that Geithner had committed honest mistakes that he quickly addressed upon learning of them.

'He made a common mistake on his taxes, and was unaware that his part-time housekeeper's work authorization expired for the last three months of her employment.