Deyata Kirula or “Crown of the Nation” is an annual showcase of the achievements of the Government of Sri Lanka. For the second consecutive year, the Ministry of Skills Development is presenting the skill standard for solid waste operations assistants. In 2012, Deyata Kirula was held in Anuradhapura in the North Central Province. Over 170 solid-waste workers representing the 26 local authorities in the province were awarded for solid-waste operations assistant National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) Level 2 certificates. In 2013, the exhibition will be held in Ampara in the Eastern Province.
Google has released a new version of Chrome fitted with WebRTC. It is a collection of real-time communications protocols that includes everything to turn the browser into a high-end communications system. The browser-based calls will be clearer than mobile phone, as the former is equipped with built-in high-definition audio codecs. Mozilla and Opera are Google’s partners in this open project. Ericsson and Telefonica have already endorsed it.
The pre-auction era of 3G licenses in Europe can be dubbed as the Stone Age of telecoms. Vendors, operators and policymakers launched a notoriously misleading campaign about mobile Internet. Making mobile video calls and watching TV in mobile phones were central to Europe’s 3G hype. It made the governments rich from auctioning the 3G spectrum at billions of dollars. But the industry went broke and innovation was stalled.
After forking out the carriers’ revenue, Skype has launched a business solution for the small entrepreneurs. Skype in the workspace (SITW) will help small businesses to market their products and services and build stronger connections. “Given the number of small companies that use Skype as a communications tool and the number of people that use Skype — more than 280 million connected users per month — the company may be on to something,” said Heather Clancy in ZDnet. Companies can post invitations on SITW to potential customers and partners interested in learning more about their business via Skype sessions. “Users can also share their SITW actions on their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts,” according to PC World.
Now it’s official. ITU’s Secretary-General, Hamadoun I. Touré, explicitly supports the governments’ plan to hijack the Internet. His article titled “U.N.
My comments at the Main Panel session at IGF 2012. Question 1: What does it take to attract investment in infrastructure and encourage innovation and growth of ICT services, including mobile technology and how can these technologies best be employed to address development challenges? Indonesia is a success story in Internet use. In a six-country, representative-sample survey we conducted in 2011, we found the highest use of the Internet among the poor among the six in Java, where the most of the Indonesian population lives. Indonesia is one of the heaviest users of Facebook, in the top five.
My comments at Internet Governance Forum 2012 Workshop 142 on “Inclusive innovation for development: The contribution of Internet and related ICTs.” I run LIRNEasia, a think tank working across the emerging Asia Pacific which seeks to promote policies and regulation conducive to inclusive growth. I think it’s well accepted that broader access to the Internet is very useful, i.e., cheaper Internet is better than more expensive Internet.
Use the embedded frame below or click here to view the story. Empowering Communities with Voice-enabled Technologies for Crisis Management on Prezi
China is a mobile powerhouse. Chinese made Smartphones are spreading fast across Asia and Africa. Yet, where are Chinese developed apps? “The Chinese Internet market is so set apart from other countries that we inside the industry refer to it as the Galápagos Island syndrome,” said Kai Lukoff, the editor of TechRice, a China-focused technology blog based in Beijing. “Domestic Internet products are extremely well adapted to the Chinese market, but they are way out of place for global users.
LIRNEasia has developed an innovative diary method to capture the usage patterns of phone among BOP users who don’t own any phone. Dubbed as “Teleuse@BOP3” we surveyed 9,750 sample representatives across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand during Q4 of 2008. Our researcher Nirmali Sivapragasam has authored, “The Future of the Public Phone: Findings from a six-country Asian study of telecom use at the BOP” in early 2010. Nirmali went for higher studies to Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University in Singapore. There, with a fellow student Juhee Kang, Nirmali further enriched her aforementioned study in 2011.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation has published its 2012 facts and figures on African youth titled, “African Youth: Fulfilling the Potential”. It reveals: Africa is the only continent with a significantly growing youth population. In less than three generations, 41% of the world’s youth will be African. By 2035, Africa’s labor force will be larger than China’s. Africa is keen to reap the benefits from this imminent demographic dividend.
John Kay cites interesting Q&A with a Russian planner who visited the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union: A perhaps apocryphal story tells of a Russian visitor, impressed by the laden shelves in US supermarkets. He asked: “So who is in charge of the supply of bread to New York?” The market economy’s answer – that not only is no one in charge, but it is a criminal offence for anyone to seek that position – is surprising. The essential things like milk, bread and eggs get supplied through obliquity rather than direct central planning. And so has been the Internet, worldwide.
A significant number of base stations (around 20% or lower) in the Hurricane Sandy affected areas are supposed to have gone down, mainly due to electricity problems. I am sure the systems here in South Asia are a lot more robust in this aspect because our baseline expectations of the reliability of the electricity networks is much much lower. So our operators have way more backup capabilities. But anyway, a disaster is an extraordinary event. Bad things happen; all that we can do is minimize risks, not eliminate them.
The City’s Office of Emergency Management has been relying on Sahana software for its shelter management and registration programs since 2007. Sri Lanka also has it. The Sahana Software Foundation is assisting the City of New York in its use of Sahana software to manage its response to Hurricane Sandy. Sahana software foundation is not just an open source software developer but also a global community of volunteers that volunteer their domain knowledge and computing skills at the time of need. Read the situational report, from Mark Prustalis, SSF President & CEO, below.
Fury of Sandy hasn’t spared anything that a modern society survives on. Unlike most of the cities in America, the wooden power poles don’t exist across the downtown of New York and Manhattan. But the underground power cable systems are submerged by stagnant salty water from tidal wave. Barb Darrow posted a chilling account of consequences in Gigaom: As already reported, data center facilities in lower Manhattan suffered a string of outages after flooding and Con Ed cut electrical power. Datagram, the web hosting company that serves the Huffington Post, Gawker, Gizmodo and BuzzFeed, went down Monday evening after flooding caused those sites to go dark.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has been in the trenches of Internet policy from the 1990s. They played a leading role in expanding the debate over the various proposals to extend the ITU’s scope to include the Internet at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) in December 2012. Here in their latest paper, they draw on work including mine, to argue that many of the proposed revisions to the International Telecom Regulations are likely to do more harm than good.