Category Archives: General
Imagining the Internet: No wallets by 2020
According to this overview, m-money is the future. The survey, released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project along with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, asked just over 1,000 technologists and social scientists to opine on the future of the wallet in 2020. Nearly two-thirds agreed that “cash [...]
Mobile apps and government: Oil and water?
I was at dinner with some people who advise governments earlier today. One said they had identified the top four apps for government. I asked who would develop them? And who decided? Without being rude, I said that innovation is like throwing 100 things at a wall and seeing what four things stick. That it [...]
Idealism and realism in spectrum policy
An international treaty document, the Reference Paper that is part of the Fourth Protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services, states that spectrum is a scarce resource. It is scarce only because (a) exclusive use of most frequencies is the norm (WiFi is an exception), and (b) the bands for which cheap equipment [...]
The evolution of telecommunications policy-making: comparative analysis of China and India- Chun Liu, Krishna Jayakar
Taking a page from the new institutionalism school of thought, this article argues that institutions matter and that understanding institutions- both formal and informal- is crucial in understanding policy outcomes especially in the field of telecom policy making in India and China. The authors analysed telecom policy making in India and China using 2 specific [...]
Mythbuster: RIA clarifies importance of reducing mobile termination charges
Our sister organization Research ICT Africa has issued an interesting document called mythbuster on the contentious issues of high mobile termination charges and their contribution to giving South Africa mobile prices that are three times those of neighboring Namibia. More strength to your arm RIA. Mythbuster is a great idea. We should see if we [...]
Low cost roaming in Bangladesh & Sri Lanka for Indian Airtel customers, but not vice versa
It’s been several years since we publicized the Zain innovation that brought down roaming prices in East Africa. No one picked up the inelegant workaround. Until now, when Airtel has sort of started the process. Indians traveling to Sri Lanka or Bangladesh will have one thing less to worry about. Airtel, which has operations in [...]
War or no war, terrestrial cable across Iraq provides redundancy for Asia-Europe traffic
Led by Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan we’ve been saying that Asia needs a terrestrial cable system to back up the submarine cables. By the time international government organizations get organized, the private workarounds will be fully operational. Like traders plying the ancient Silk Road, telecommunications operators routing bits and bytes from Asia to [...]
Price benchmarking by RIA applies pressure on regulator and policy makers in South Africa
The quote below comes from one of many media reports that carried the results of RIA benchmarking of mobile prices across Africa. SA’s prepaid cellphone pricing is three times more expensive than Namibia’s, making SA among the most expensive countries in Africa despite an intervention to regulate the tariffs, according to a study released this [...]
Do a million mobiles change the political environment?
North Korea was, until recently, the country with the least mobile phones. Then it gave a license (3G no less) to Orascom. Now it has a million plus mobiles connections. The New York Times speculates that the presence of a million mobiles has made the big blatant lie no longer a viable option for the [...]
Why big data now?
I wrote about consumer transaction-generated information in the 1990s. Companies collected and analyzed data from sales points and loyalty programs. But it became sexy only recently. Why? It should not be too surprising that a Google-created entity should have this bent. Google, along with Web pioneers like Yahoo and Amazon, was crucial to the creation [...]
Mobile apps attract 10% of total venture capital investments in 2011 Q4
Rarely do I do two posts off one story, but this story seems to deserve more than one. Venture capitalists are eager to get in on the mobile trend. According to the research firm CB Insights, mobile apps and companies attracted 10 percent of the total investment dollars from American venture capital firms in last [...]
Instagram’s 1 billion valuation focuses attention on mobile apps
We’ve been thinking about mobile apps for over a year, thanks to infoDev whose Call for Proposals we bid on. But 1 billion? That still came as a surprise. Is it that the days of thinking about m apps as things that could be worked up in garages is over? Now, at a time when [...]
As phones get smart, they get stolen more
Pakistan was early in trying to deal with this problem. And now the US is getting in on the act. Over the last year, roughly one out of three robberies nationwide have involved the theft of a cellphone, according to an F.C.C. summary of the new plan. The thefts have grown most rapidly in urban [...]
Microsoft’s weakness in mobile apps: An opportunity for developing-country developers?
For the thousands of young people in emerging Asia wanting to break into the apps market, perhaps an opportunity? But the hundreds of thousands of apps that run on Apple and Android devices will not work on phones like the Lumia 900 that use Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. And many developers are reluctant to funnel [...]
Big data equivalent of ego surfing
First there was searching. Then there was ego surfing, where one spent time and energy looking to see how big a profile one had on the web. Of course, there was help, with Google alerts and such. Now, as we venture into big data (also known as business analytics), it is no surprise that the [...]
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