Monthly Archives: July, 2009
BANNED! BANNED! BANNED! No mobile phones in Sri Lankan schools
Priyantha Kariyapperuma, Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, is in ‘banning’ mode these days. Having ‘banned’ twelve sex sites on the initiation of IGP, now he plans to ban the mobile phones at private schools. For government schools, Susil Premajayantha, Education Minister has taken a similar move. Minister Premajayantha said that he has taken [...]
Rohan Samarajiva presents at seminar on national transport policy
Rohan Samarajiva made a presentation entitled, “Improving transport and transportation policy: lessons from telecom” at the recently concluded Seminar on the Draft National Transport Policy of the Ministry of Transport. Held on 23rd of July, the seminar was organized by the Pathfinder Foundation in collaboration with The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. Drawing on the similarities [...]
Bangladesh: Lowest in call charges and highest in broadband
A JICA study on investment climate has come up with some interesting findings, according to a news report. It reflects what LIRNEasia found through its benchmarking work. Bangladesh did demonstrate herself as competitive in eight components, including lowest rates among all the countries surveyed with regards to monthly telephone charge and monthly gas charge. However, [...]
Harsha de Silva, Eisenhower Fellow
LIRNEasia’s lead economist Dr Harsha de Silva has been selected for the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship. Our warm congratulations to Harsha on this high recognition of his potential as a decisive actor in public policy. The focus on potential for future contributions is evidenced by the fact that all Eisenhower fellows have to submit a proposal [...]
Sri Lanka bans local sex sites; but keeps international porn open
Said a blogger sometime back: Sri Lankans are patriotic even when it comes to pornography. They google not merely for ‘porn’, but for ‘Sri Lankan porn’. Perhaps they know the difference. After all, “Siyarata De – Siri Sepa De” (Local Products are Heavenly) was the slogan during the 1970-77 protectionist regime. Alas. Such patriotism is [...]
Sri Lanka: Central Environmental Authority and Dialog venture into M- waste Management
We have always emphasised the role the operators can play in removing so called ‘mobile-waste’ (only a tiny faction of e-waste) without additional burden to the users. Good to know the Ministry of environment accepts this role officially. According to the Daily Mirror report dated July 23, ‘even though electronic and mobile waste have been [...]
Colloquium: Freedom of Expression in Mobile Content: Pakistan
The presentation was made Hina Sarfaraz. The colloquium started with the looking at Governance of ICT with the definitions: Defined as Freedom of Expression(FoE): information which might annoy, disturb, terrorise or disgust, or, would engage, educate, inform and uplift. Role of Government in ensuring FoE and basic right to know is taken as a role [...]
Americans getting excited about multitasking while driving
A big debate seems to be brewing about using mobiles to talk and text while driving at the high speeds possible on American highways. Of course, most of the BOP does not have cars, and in any case it’s only possible to do about 30 kmph on the roads that they use, so this debate [...]
AM radio on mobile phones
The teleuse@BOP finding that mobiles have overtaken radios at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh continues to resonate. In coverage of this story the leading Indian magazine in the IT space Voice and Data reveals that even AM reception is being offered in some Indian phones, in addition to the standard [...]
Mobiles afflicted with Galapagos syndrome
What does mobile handset design and Darwin’s theory of evolution have in common. Read the full article for an answer. At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators. Competition is fierce in the relatively small Japanese cellphone [...]
More debate on cloud computing
There was some debate on cloud computing on this site some time back. Now here is a reflective piece, arguing again, that cloud computing is inferior to the present model of keeping most data and programs on personal computers: This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much [...]
T@BOP3 missed call findings in the media
An interesting article in the Times of India, documents the varied use of missed calls among mobile phone users in India, based on LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 findings for 2008. Although the title of the article is slightly misleading (missed call use was, in fact, prevalent in all the countries studied; see here for more information), it [...]
Harsha de Silva presents paper at first ICT for agriculture conference in LK
LIRNEasia lead economist Harsha de Silva presented a paper on “ICT Policy for Agriculture in Sri Lanka: An Economic Perspective” at the first ever information technology in agriculture conference jointly organized by the IT Department of the University of Moratuwa and the Agriculture Department of the University of Ruhuna. Harsha argued for mobile-centric, demand-driven, value-chain [...]
ICTs to address the language barrier?
Today, Rohan Samarajiva delivered a speech at TEDx Colombo held at the Punchi Theater, entitled “Government services: Anytime, anywhere, any official language, now.” Much emphasis was laid on the usage of ICT in order to help trilingual government service delivery. Using the T@BOP data he illustrated the popularity of mobiles among the Sri Lankan BOP, [...]
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