Monthly Archives: December, 2009
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
GupShup, Indian SMS and Advertising App
Chirag Jain, GupShup, India The platform is, to begin with, Yahoo Groups on SMS. All you had to do was create a group, invite your friends and communicate them. The difference was that we sat between and subsidized the cost with advertising. We were able to insert contextual advertising and targeted advertising. The platform is [...]
Coverage of inaugural session of the LIRNEasia@5 conference
Professor Xue Lan of Tsinghua University in Beijing participated in the inaugural session of the La@5 conference through a video link, kindly provided by Tata Communications Lanka. We were worried about this, because he was competing with real people (Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Justice and Law Reforms, Sri Lanka, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center for [...]
CellBazaar – The Craigslist Of Bangladesh
by Ayesha Zainudeen CellBazaar is a classifieds site in Bangladesh. Potential buyers and sellers can search for and post information on goods. If you compare CellBazaar to a developed marketplace like Amazon, Amazon covers the full range of a transaction. The search, payment, feedback, delivery. CellBazaar actually just focuses on the search. You can buy [...]
Mobile Money: Harsha De Silva
Understanding the volatility of cash flow of poor people is important in assessing the mass appeal of Mobile Money. M transfers must be used to smoothen consumption and expense. We need to consider how a poor person who skips meals can use technology to avoid it. The urban poor live in congestion while another group lives [...]
M-Transfers As A Way Out Of Poverty
Harsha de Silva I’m looking at mobile payments from an economics angle. The idea here is to understand the volatility of cash flow of the poor. Then the prevalence of m-commerce to smoothen consumption. Then finally how to increase use of m-commerce solutions. As a logic for this, you’re looking at people with irregular income [...]
Rohan Samarajiva On Regulation From The Business Model
After reading the historical studies of telecom in the United State, my grad student said don’t pay too much attention to interconnection. The standard answer, what are the three priorities of regulation -interconnection, interconnection and interconnection. Now, later, I have to kind of say Divakar was right. This is such a radical statement that the [...]
Timothy Gonsalves On Real Broadband Speeds
Timothy Gonsalves Telecom networks are highly technical and public review is usually cursory. Recommendations primarily come from the industry. In broadband the metrics traditionally come from the industry and there’s a mismatch with the subscribers expectations. Regulators specify last mile access speed, the provider is concerned with the access node, but the subscriber is concerned [...]
New Approaches to Regulation; Creating Better Markets
Adam Smith said that the invisible hand rules the market. That may be true in a world of perfect competition but it doesn’t hold in the world we live in. Markets arise spontaneously from the institutional framework. There are three main transitions that happen when markets change or develop; Feudal to industrial, communist to post-communist, emerging to developed. [...]
New Approaches To Regulation
Chair, Sherille Ismail: I’m with the FCC and here but here in a personal capacity, not representing the FCC. I’d like to start by quoting Adam Smith, who made the argument that there’s an invisible hand that rules markets.I don’t believe that’s true of the world we live in. It’s not enough to destroy what [...]
Video From Session On Research To Policy
This features excerpts from presentations by Rajat Kathuria, Per Hemlersen, and audience question. You can read more by following the live blog posts from that time. Rajat Kathuria On Indonesia Per Helmersen On Speaking To Decision Makers How can researchers speak to the corporate world? Question From Bill Melody On Prediction
Helani Galpaya On Universal Service Funds
In India 5% of gross revenue went into an (undisbursed) fund. This was for reaching the rural poor, but they were already being effectively reached by mobile. LIRNEasia found that many consumers were planning on buying a mobile for their rural connection. LIRNEasia made multiple, evidence-based policy interventions ranging from papers, presentations, Op-Ed articles, etc [...]
Mobile Price Benchmarking Presentation
The presentation on mobile price benchmarking is available for download here. (PowerPoint). There is a considerable amount of data in the presentation and it may be more conducive to download on your personal laptop. The other presentations from this session are also available Alison Gillwald, RIA, South Africa – Gillwald LIRNEasia@5 2009 Helani Galpaya, LIRNEasia – [...]
Three Lessons From Tim Kelly, infoDev, World Bank
How do we get the attention of policy makers? It’s very simple, use national rankings. These are very good at actually grabbing attention. Back in the late 1980s we did some work at the OECD on how to develop performance indicators for public telecom operators. The work we did comparing countries, etc, got the interest [...]
Knowledge To Innovation Session
Sujata Gamage Let me define informal. Glenda talked about knowledge in universities, that’s formal knowledge. Rasheed talked about intermediate organizations that take it to farmers. Maybe we should focus on the informal. Innovation is part of the human condition, we’re always trying to make our life easy. For civilization to progress we want to formalize [...]
Question From Bill Melody On Prediction
Bill Melody: Over the last five years the world has seen the explosion of prepaid cell phones. Neither policy makers nor researchers understood the prepaid model. The development was an unexpected one promoted by poor people. I’d be interested in the panels interpretation. Emmanuel Lallana: In the Philippines that’s the case. They didn’t have any [...]
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