Category Archives: Noteworthy
LIRNEasia Research Fellow wins Humphrey Award
Research Fellow and Knowledge Management Specialist Dilini Wijeweera is the sole Sri Lankan to be awarded a Hubert H. Humphrey fellowship for 2012-13. She will spend an academic year at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle. We wish her well.
Ford Foundation supports LIRNEasia
The Ford Foundation has made a grant to LIRNEasia for facilitating and enriching policy discourse in India on increasing broadband access by the poor. The work will cover documentation and archiving of key texts from India and elsewhere, the conduct of several short courses to improve the ability of civil society groups to participate in [...]
Tsunami risk reduction in the age of twitter
A few days back, on April 11th 2012, a powerful earthquake occurred not too far from Aceh. Naturally, fears of a tsunami were uppermost in people’s minds. It’s been some time since we at LIRNEasia did funded disaster-related research, but within minutes, I was receiving requests for analysis on the lines of the post-mortems we’ve [...]
Media coverage for FAO workshop
Several journalists attended the FAO workshop on mobiles and agriculture in Bangkok. The reports are coming in. The latest was Sri Lanka mobile phone use rising among poor: study. Others were Sri Lanka mobile phone ranking system coming for farmers and Sri Lanka rubber producer gains seen from traceability system
Interview with Freedom Fone
“From a global perspective, in our parts of the world people are vocal. We do business with voice. We don’t write big memos, we don’t write big e-mails, you just pick up the phone and you make a call, you talk to the person and you do your business. From that perspective Freedom Fone positions [...]
FCC suspends Text-To-Speech for Emergency Alerting
Our findings from the recently concluded Interactive Voice-enabled alerting and situational reporting pilot revealed that Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech were impossible to apply with audio over low quality transmission networks (listen to this audio to get a sense how bad it can be). One could sample at much higher frequencies then that produces an extremely large [...]
Transforming government services delivery: Kerala deliberations
There was a small but high profile Government Transformation Forum organized in Kovalam, Kerala, Feb 5-6, 2012. The Kerala Chief Minister and the Minister in charge of IT made appearances and the high-profile MP of the area, Dr Shashi Tharoor, delivered the keynote address and showed deep engagement. I chaired the session on international and [...]
Thai media reports Teleuse@BOP4
It took a little time, but a comprehensive report on the Bangkok launch of teleuse@BOP4 results has been published in the Nation (Thailand). The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere. Most of the phones they bought had radio [...]
Coverage for Teleuse@BOP4 findings on more-than-voice service awareness
According to LBO’s second write up on our teleuse results, the higher awareness of health information services in Sri Lanka can be explained by two factors: the mismatch between supply and demand in the government health-services sector and the existence since around 2000 of e Channeling, a multi-modal service that allows people to make appointments [...]
Nepali coverage of Teleuse@BOP4 emphasizes reasons for multi-SIM use
It is not every day that our research gets covered in the Nepali media. That makes it special, when we do get covered. When LIRNEasia started, we fully intended to work in Nepal, a South Asian country with great unrealized potential. We did too, in the first cycle. But even for us, the internal strife [...]
Pacific ICT Regulatory Resource Center launched
The office of the Pacific ICT Regulatory Resource Centre (PIRRC) was officially opened for business on 10 November 2011 on the campus of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva by Ms. Elizabeth Powell, Permanent Secretary for Public Enterprises, Communications, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Government of Fiji. Earlier this year, LIRNEasia won the [...]
Interactive Voice is Useful and Easy-to-use in managing Crises
We conducted controlled-exercises, with Lanka Jathika Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya (Sarvodaya) Hazard Information Hub (HIH) Operators and Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members. The HIH data center is in Moratuwa. The study using interactive voice, field tested the technology in Colombo, Matara, Nuwara-eliya, and Ratnapura Districts. Figure to the left shows an average ease-of-use of 3.95 [...]
Extending the reach of LIRNEasia research: Broadband QoSE results in a popular blog
A good value-added blogpost drawing from LIRNEasia research Helani Galpaya’s work: These are only a few graphs and download speeds are only one measure. What’s nice is that we can now quite confidently say Sri Lanka’s Internet and not be talking about a niche product. There are at least 280,000 fixed subscribers (including dial-up, ADSL [...]
Travails of providing policy input: The case of India’s National Telecom Policy draft
India’s government culture is among the most open to consultation in the region. Consultation is a legal requirement for TRAI. There is no equivalent of the Administrative Procedures Act, but nevertheless the Department of Telecom has given a month for comments to be submitted on the National Telecom Policy 2011 draft. All good. The problem [...]
Bangladesh media coverage for LIRNEasia comments on VAS licensing move
The Financial Express has carried a story, based on the public-domain comments we submitted to the Ministry of Post and Telecom. Other than calling and sending text messages, the mobile phone operators offer series of services like downloading of music, ringtone, wallpaper and many others. These are generally known as VAS and being offered as [...]