Travel scholarships are available on a competitive basis.

Click here for more information.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically at www[dot]cprsouth[dot]org on or before 25 April 2010. Full papers have to be submitted for final review by 01 August 2010.

Click here for more information on the conference and how to apply.

Chief among its goals, the F.C.C. wants future broadband investment to be focused on the areas where gaps in service remain. It will direct this investment in part through the Universal Service Fund, a program for telephone and Internet access, costing $8 billion annually, paid through a phone bill surcharge. Over time, the subsidies for Internet will increase and those for phone will dissipate, with the knowledge that people can make online calls.

“Some of the details are lacking, particularly on Universal Service Fund reform,” said Dan Mitchell, a vice president for the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, a group that represents rural providers and worries that the proposals to change phone carrier costs will curtail the providers’ abilities to expand infrastructure.

Facebook’s trajectory suggests that it will soar ahead of Google.com in the coming months. However, social networking sites have fallen in the past. Google.com had led since September 2007, when it overtook MySpace.com. Internet users worldwide spent more than five-and-a-half hours a month on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82 per cent increase over the previous year, according to the Nielsen Company research firm. Read more.

These health workers (few of them are in the photo with their backs to you) were given training and mobilized with the mHealthSurvey, mobile phone application, for submitting patient disease/syndrome data for the surveillance of epidemiological events. Data that used to take over 15 days to relay up to the paper chain, but was not subject to any detection analysis (i.e. just reporting), now takes several seconds. Moreover, the RTBP collects all communicable and non-communicable diseases along witht their syndrome opposed to a handful of diseases (i.e. Integrated Disease Surveillance Program S and P list of diseases). Each Primary Health Center sends over 100 patient records (probable, suspected, and confirmed cases) a day that is now subject to, RTBP introduced, real-time health event detection analysis. Although there were some errors due to misspelling at the begining, once they were asked to be cautious and were made aware of the consequences of the errors resulting in false statistics that may lead to false alarms of disease outbreaks, they have reduced the error rates to almost zero.

Dr. Ganesan M., (Senior Program Officer, RTBI – extreme left seated at head table, facing you, talking the Health Workers in the photo), present the paper titled: Real-Time Bio-Surveillance Program: Field Experiences from Tamil Nadu, India at the 7th Indian Association for Social Sciences and Health (IASSH) conference on Health, Poverty and Human Development held at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi from 5th to 7th March 2010. Dr. Ganesan is part of the research team at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) conducting the RTBP action research in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

View the conference presentation slides

Read a brief on the conference participation

The FCC is asking broadband and smartphone users in USA to use their broadband testing tools to help the feds and consumers know what speeds are actually available, not just promised by the nations’ telecoms, reports wired.com. Starting yesterday (March 11), netizens can go to the FCC’s Broadband.gov site, enter their address and test their broadband speed using one of two testing tools.

Broadband connection testing isn’t new, and is freely available online, but this might mark the first time that individual tests help to lead to informed policy making, says the writer Ryan Singel.

That is not correct Mr. Singel, as nothing is new here. LIRNEasia has been doing it for at least one and half years.

Broadband users in Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka and New Delhi could have used our own broadband test application AT-Tester, from www.broadbandasia.info the same way now the US broadband users will do. They could even enter that information to our central database, which can be then analysed.

That’s not all. Just read the following para from the same report. Don’t you find anything familiar?

Crowdsourcing this data is a brilliant move, given that telecoms have long fought against telling federal regulators what areas they cover and at what speed, arguing that information will be used by competitors to poach their customers. The data can also be used as a way to prevent telecoms from over-promising and under-delivering on upload and download speeds. If you listen closely you might actually hear the telecom companies hitting the backspace key to revise the speed numbers on their promotional fliers.

Isn’t this exactly what we have been doing?

FCC,  welcome to the club!

Read the full story in wired.com here.

Here are few more news reports on FCC’s move.

FCC releases Internet speed test tool – Reuters

FCC Unveils Speed Test - Bloomberg Business Week

FCC Launches Broadband Test Site for Consumers – PC World

A consortium has been set up to explore an open, common user interface platform for mobile devices, to make them easier to use for disadvantaged populations around the world. The group is made up of IBM, the National Institute of Design (NID) of India and Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo (RCAST). Full report.

Starting in around 2013, points Rohan Samarajiva, Bangladesh will enter the best period for realising the demographic dividend, with the lowest levels of combined child and adult dependency in its history. It will be the closest to the ‘pot’ shape. This golden period will last until around 2033 when the more burdensome adult dependency (ratio of adults over 65 years of age to the working population aged 15-65 years) reaches significant proportions.

What does this mean to Bangladesh? How can that be exploited?

It is here that information and communication technologies can make a difference. In the past, only agricultural and manufacturing goods could be exported. Now, thanks to telecom, even services can be exported. Bangladesh is currently said to have 30,000 persons working in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.

In 2005-06, it was estimated that India created 1.3 million direct jobs in the IT and IT enabled services sector, with another 3 million jobs created indirectly, to serve the industry. The proportionate numbers for Bangladesh, which has one-seventh the Indian population will be 182,000 direct jobs and 421,000 indirect jobs.

Read the full article in The Daily Star.

Finally the consumers are being given an explicit choice at the behest of the European Commission, and they are taking it.

Rivals of Microsoft’s market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch.

Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is the strongest competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer worldwide, said that more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox via a “choice screen” that has been popping up on Windows-equipped computers in Europe since the end of last month. The screen displays links to a dozen browsers, including Explorer, Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera.

Opera Software, based in Oslo, said downloads of its browser in Belgium, France, Britain, Poland and Spain had tripled since the screen began to appear.

“It’s definitely being taken up, so consumers are paying attention and taking advantage of the choice being offered to them,” said Thomas Vinje, legal counsel to the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a lobbying group based in Brussels whose members include Opera.

Full story.

Here below is a discussion of network effects in Face Book, that is among other things, causing us to place advertisements on it.

For an individual member, the most powerful network effects may be indirect ones that come from the huge number of unknown other people in the Facebook world. Their mass attracts, in turn, suppliers of complementary products and services.

For Windows, the enormous installed base attracted third-party software developers, which in turn drew more users. Apple’s iPhone has had a similar virtuous cycle. So, too, on Facebook, developers of applications like FamilyLink, Marketplace and iLike’s Music create a software universe with seemingly infinite choices. And that attracts more users — and still more developers.

Facebook’s decision to open its site to outside developers in May 2007 was a “transformative moment,” said Charlene Li,founder of the Altimeter Group, a strategy consulting firm.

“Because Facebook allows developers on their site, the people who would have developed the next social networking site are now working with Facebook,” she said.

Nick O’Neill, founder of AllFacebook.com, a site with Facebook-related news and statistics, said, “Games are the killer app for Facebook.” Because of their social nature, popular Facebook games produce direct network effects. The dedicated farmers of the FarmVille game — it attracts 83 million users a month — nudge friends to play and become virtual neighbors, enhancing their own game experience. (That pull gives Facebook an advantage Windows lacked; its signature game was Solitaire.)

Businesses, nonprofits, government offices and celebrities use Facebook pages to disseminate information, thus forming an ever-growing simulacrum of the Web within Facebook’s walls. Network effects are at work here, too: users attract well-known names, which, in turn, draw more users to Facebook.

Full story.

Etisalat’s new Sri Lankan mobile subsidiary is in talks with banks to offer financial services on mobile phones, such as money transfers for migrant workers in the Middle East, a senior company official said.

Riyaaz Rasheed deputy chief executive of Etisalat Lanka said the mobile operator is seeking to tie-up with banks to offer the financial services. “We’re already talking to two of the biggest banks in Sri Lanka,” he told LBO. Rasheed declined to identify the banks, citing non-disclosure agreements signed with them.

Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates-based telecom firm, acquired 100 percent of the Sri Lanka operation called Tigo from Millicom International in October 2009 and has renamed it Etisalat Lanka.

Full story.

Objectives: To share LIRNEasia’s Mobile 2.0 (i.e., the second wave of mobile use –beyond voice applications) research results among regulators, operators, policy makers and researchers of SAARC and ASEAN countries to: obtain feedback from key stakeholders on improving the research outputs, create a dialogue on policy and regulatory processes affecting Mobile 2.0 and explore replication opportunities for good practices

Click here for the draft agenda.

Mobile 2.0 is a term used to describe the use of mobiles for “more-than-voice”. Mobiles are increasingly becoming payment devices which can also send/process/receive voice, text and images; it is envisaged that in the next few years, they will also be capable of information-retrieval and publishing functions, normally associated with the internet.

The Mobile 2.0 @ BOP project consists of thirteen studies, researched in terms of ‘horizontal’ issues and ‘vertical’ aspects.  The horizontal studies explores the basic competitive and regulatory conditions that affect the emergence of Mobile 2.0@BOP. The vertical studies  explores  and explain how a particular aspect such as in-depth micro-payments and remittances, agriculture applications, voting applications, e-government services etc is taking shape and form among countries in the developing world.

For more information on the Mobile 2.0 project, click here.

Click here for more information on the event and how to apply.