Monthly Archives: October, 2011
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
This year (2011) mobile device shipments will overtake desktops: Morgan Stanley
We said this would happen. With smartphones, which seem to be surgically attached to the hand of every teenager and many an adult, tablets have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those [...]
Sensors in your body or next to your skin?
A fascinating overview of where ubiquitous computing is headed in the Economist: In their book Messrs Bell and Gemmell predict that people with chronic ailments will one day have sensors embedded directly in their bodies that can transmit data about their vital signs wirelessly to other devices such as their phones. This forecast, which would [...]
Sri Lanka: More than 70 percent of households have a phone in all but two provinces
The government’s 2009-10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey results, based on nationwide representative sample, are just out. I wrote about them in LBO. The ICT related results are: As expected, only 14 percent of Western Province households are without some kind of telephone and only 12 percent are without a TV. The Eastern and Northern [...]
Quantifying the data tsunami
We’ve been talking about the data tsunami for more than a year. Here, the Economist has a number: As mobile, web-connected devices become ubiquitous, the volume of data they produce will soar. Cisco, a technology company, reckons that by 2015 some 6.3 exabytes of mobile data will be flowing each month, or the equivalent of [...]
Wishful thinking on broadband at ECLAC and elsewhere
Several of our Latin American colleagues have written about an increasing and dynamic digital divide. With all respect, much of what they write is wishful thinking. They have some kind of ideal picture of broadband and keep talking about it without mapping out the path from where we are to there. The reason I saw [...]
FCC moves to least-cost-subsidy auctions for universal service
Two years after our research was cited in a presentation by Scott Wallsten to Congress to support his argument that the US should adopt least-cost-subsidy auctions and I condemned the inefficient ways of US universal service fund disbursements at an event attended by senior FCC staff, the change is done: The US will use auctions. [...]
New Taliban tactics of switching off phone towers
When I was visiting Afghanistan in early 2009, operators complained to me that the military and the NATO force would, from time to time, shut down their towers in some remote areas to restrict communications doing a military operation. Now its seems the Taliban themselves have learned the trick. LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Punctually, at [...]
Disruptive innovation in higher education
Stanford, one of the world’ great universities, is poised as the test bed for a disruptive innovation to beat them all. Bringing the costs down to one percent surely qualifies as disruptive. Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer [...]
Is the US Postal Service a broadcast medium?
The right analogy is key to a decision to subsidize. When the main thing USPS does is distribute coupons, what rationale is there for subsidy? The Internet can’t be used to tele-transport packages, of course, and our use of package delivery services, including the Postal Service’s, has grown with e-commerce. But the Postal Service is [...]
Love at the TOP and BOP
So, this NYT opinion piece more or less establishes that the iPhone (or smartphone) is a boyfriend/girlfriend substitute among the rich. That’s not what is relevant for us. Does this love exist only at the TOP? What parts of the brain would be activated if fMRIs were run on the BOP? We wouldn’t know an [...]
Sri Lanka broadband: Glass half full or half empty?
infoDev has released the Sri Lanka broadband study authored by Helani Galpaya. The introduction: Sri Lanka, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean just south of India, has lately experienced an explosion in the use of broadband services. This report, part of the Broadband Strategies Toolkit, explores the various factors that have contributed to [...]
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