Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) at the Bottom of Pyramid (BOP) level is still not too common. Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala accompanied by a LIRNEasia team made a visit to Mahawilachchiya to have a close look at the first (still emerging) rural BPO there recently. On the same day, The Economic Times of India quoted Prof. Jhunjhunwala saying: ““Like manufacturing grew in China, services and manufacturing should grow in rural India.
BBC News | Technology As part of a UN programme to tackle poverty in rural Africa, 79 villages across 10 African countries will be hooked up to cellular networks. It is hoped that the connections will help improve healthcare and education, as well as boosting the local economy. A 2005 study showed that an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people could increase GDP growth by 0.6%. “This is a technology that is remarkably empowering, especially for remote areas where the ability to communicate is vital,” Dr Jeffery Sachs, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, told the BBC News website.
On Friday, September 7, 2007, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights (MDMHR), with the support of LIRNEasia, held a meeting on “The Role of Telecom Operators and Broadcasters in a National Public Warning System” with a six of the eight major telecom operators, as well as several disaster management-related government agencies (NBRO, Irrigation Dept., Meteorology Dept., CCP, etc.), UNDP, and a few technical institutes. Mr.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tsunami concern for Bay of Bengal Now, Phil Cummins, lead author on the Nature paper and a geologist at Geoscience Australia, believes this is not the case.He said: “I reviewed the geological literature and found the evidence for a lack of tectonic activity along the Myanmar coast was not compelling.” Historical evidence Recent GPS data, he said, suggested that the plate boundary was at sea in this area, hidden below thick layers of sediment.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka has dropped a controversial fixed levy from mobile phones which would have hit the poorest phone users the hardest, but slapped a 7.5 percent tax on calls, telecom minister Rauf Hakeem told parliament Thursday.The government initially proposed a fixed 50 rupee charge which would have hit the poorest or ‘bottom of the pyramid’ users hardest, as well as tripling a usage based charge from 2.5 percent to 7.5 percent.
Just like the late 1990s when 3G was deployed, billions are being spent to deploy systems capable of delivering video to mobile devices. In-Stat, however, reports that “mobile” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “cellular.” New technologies and business models are now under development that may threaten mobile operators’ ability to profit from video content, the high-tech market research firm says. Read more…
…in the Philippines: The Manila Times REGULATORS are unlikely to support mobile- phone number portability, as the proposal to allow consumers to maintain their existing numbers when shifting from one service provider to another is too costly. “At this time, based on our study the number portability is costly and it’s not financially viable, but technically feasible,” Edgardo Cabarrios, National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) chief for common carriers authorization, told reporters. Under the proposed number portability plan, a subscriber can switch among different service providers while retaining his existing mobile-phone number. This means the subscriber no longer has to buy a new SIM (subscriber identification module) card for every switch. Powered by ScribeFire.
World now has 4b phone lines, says UN | Sep 05, 2007 | telecomasia.net (Associated Press via NewsEdge) Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide, according to a report from the UN telecommunications agency.
This colloquium was conducted by Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara on a forecasting methodology for mobile penetration for years up to 2012 for Sri Lanka and Pakistan that is being developed. This method employs a simple mathematical process with less computational consumption. The analysis was performed using historical teledensity figures together with T@BOP data and demographic data for each country. A logistic curve was fit for each country’s data after estimating an upper bound for the mobile teledensity. The question was raised as to whether it possible to assume that people at the BOP own more than 1 SIM?
South Asia Broadband Congress and Expo – Panel: Broadband Communication Regulation and Policy in South Asia Powered by ScribeFire. Rohan Samarajiva made a presentation on ‘Performance indicators for effective policy and regulation.’ Presentation slides
Anjana SAMARASINGHE The Daily News, 3 September 2007 | See Print version Sri Lanka needs to focus special attention on broadband connectivity as it is becoming more important for the development of businesses in the country.
Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was the talk of the town in Harbin at the ISCRAM-CHINA workshop, which took place August 26-27, 2007. The event was jointly organized by the ISCRAM-Community and the School of Economics and Management – Harbin Engineering University. The workshop was a post-conference meeting to the International Disaster Reduction Conference (IDRC), which took place 21-25 August, 2007. LIRNEasia project manager, Nuwan Waidyanatha, was 1 of 2 Sri Lankan delegates invited to present a research paper and the other was Chamindra De Silva of Lanka Software Foundation – Sahana Project. LIRNEasia presentation titled “Common Alerting Protocol Message Broker for Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: An Essential Component” was 1 of 115 papers published in the workshop proceedings.
Gadget Maker or Service Provider? Firms Start to Overlap – New York Times “Devices alone are not enough anymore,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said last week in London as the company announced plans for a digital music store, a game service, social networking links and other mobile Internet initiatives, grouped under a new brand, Ovi. “People want more; they want the complete experience.” Meanwhile, a Google spokesman declined to comment on reports that a “Google phone,” or “G-phone,” was imminent. Such a device would take the Internet company into a business that has long been dominated by Nokia, but that has been shaken up by the recent introduction of a high-profile newcomer, Apple’s iPhone.
Close on the heels of Hutch’s mobile-to-mobile payment service and Dialog’s EZ Pay solution, comes a platform-independent solution from the bank which introduced ATMs to Sri Lanka in the 1980s. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka’s Sampath Bank’s has started an electronic cash transfer method lets account holders transfer cash to all mobile brands or CDMA phone, officials said. “This facility will let customers send money to any person with a mobile phone or a CDMA phone without changing SIM cards. All you need is an account with Sampath Bank,” Anil Amarasuriya, managing director of Sampath Bank said. Powered by ScribeFire.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO So this column is in no way an objection to taxes. But it is an objection to certain kinds of counterproductive and unfair taxes: the kinds of taxes that are to be debated in Parliament on the 6th of September, specifically: • The tripling from 2.5 percent to 7.5 percent of the “Cellular Mobile Telephone Subscriber Levy” on the phone charges paid on every one of 5.9 million plus mobile SIM cards in operation; and • The imposition of a regressive, usage-insensitive 50 rupee tax on the above mobiles subscriptions.
On 31 August 2007, Sarvodaya convened a meeting of the Telecenter National Alliance, made up of most of the operators of telecenters in Sri Lanka. The objective of this activity is mutual learning among the telecenter operators. One of the sessions included presentations on the implications of the teleuse @ BOP results for telecenters by Rohan Samarajiva and on the new EZ pay mobile payment service introduced by Dialog and the National Development Bank by Eran Wickramaratne. The basic argument in the T@BOP presentation was that with 41 per cent of BOP households already and likely to reach 70 per cent, if the government’s proposed taxes do not go through, telecenters will have to develop different strategies to attract phone owners and the remaining non-owners.