Tag Archives: China
Applications now open for LIRNEasia Young Scholar Tutorials, hosted by NUS, Singapore. Click here for info on how to apply.
CPRsouth5: Call for Abstracts
The 5th Communications Policy Research, South (CPRsouth5) will be held on 6 – 8 December 2010, in Xi’an, China. The conference is organized by LIRNEasia and the Research Centre for Information Industry Development, Xian University of Posts and Telecommunications (XUPT), supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada (IDRC) and the Department for International Development, [...]
Living without Google
The censors among us (they do not live only in China) need to pay attention to the consequences of their actions and how it can alienate the next generation.
“How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district.
China’s Communist leaders have [...]
The Great Firewall of China has holes
Internet censorship exists in several of the countries we work in, ranging from the Maldives to Sri Lanka. While censorship is not our focus, our readers may find this story on how Chinese Internet users tunnel through the great firewall of interest.
The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable.
Just as Mongol invaders could [...]
Withdrawing from the world: ICTs and censorship
LIRNEasia’s focus is infrastructure, so we don’t write much about censorship and such, except when it becomes unavoidable. There are plenty of entities that have censorship as the primary focus, but few who deal with our specialization. Yet, we are increasingly being dragged into this area, as when our book on ICT infrastructure [...]
Coverage of inaugural session of the LIRNEasia@5 conference
Professor Xue Lan of Tsinghua University in Beijing participated in the inaugural session of the La@5 conference through a video link, kindly provided by Tata Communications Lanka. We were worried about this, because he was competing with real people (Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Justice and Law Reforms, Sri Lanka, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center [...]
Productivity driving growth in China and Asia
LIRNEasia’s future work will focus on knowledge-based economies, which makes us very interested in stories like this, which place innovation at the center.
China’s productivity has been lifted by a massive expansion of private enterprise, and a shift of labour out of agricultural work and into more productive jobs in industry. China’s average return on physical [...]
Recession in North, but emerging Asia is expanding – The Economist
Anybody could have guessed this. It is unimaginable that entire world will go through a recession simultaneously. Not everyone can be losers for too long. There should be winners somewhere. For example, what would the US firms that find their human resources costs, logically do? They outsource to Bangalore. So the BPO industry in India [...]
Censorship: the nuclear option
Some governments shut down telecom networks including the Internet to control dissent. Others do not. What are the conditions that give rise to the former action? Why do others not do this? Israel never shuts down telecom networks but Sri Lanka does. Why?
And yet the Twittering goes on. As [...]
Shanzai! One answer to the puzzle of cheap phones
We’ve always wondered how new smart mobile phones, the technological marvels they are, go for so cheap. According to the teleuse@BOP3 study, the average price paid for a new phone by people in SEC groups D and E in Pakistan is USD 47 (down from USD 77 in 2006). The price of [...]
Nokia sales drop, but not too much in Asia
Nokia, the leading mobile handset maker, is experiencing the effects of the global economic crisis. But Asia is showing the lowest declines.
In the three months through March, the company said its profit declined to 122 million euros ($162.3 million) from 1.2 billion euros a year earlier. Sales fell 27 percent, to 9.3 billion euros [...]
Dams and earthquakes
In our work on dam safety, we found there was widespread fear about the big dams of the Mahaveli scheme causing geological instability in the central hills. The following report on the possibility that the weight of water from a Sichuan Province dam caused last year’s earthquake, will fuel those fears.
Nearly nine months after a [...]
One Billion Internet users?
The number of people going online has passed one billion for the first time, according to comScore, an online metrics company. Almost 180m internet users—over one in six of the world’s online population—live in China, more than any other country. Until a few months ago America had most web users, but with 163m people online, [...]
Time for India to get its regulator in order?
A little bit of authoritarianism from a government can sometimes be a good thing – especially if it means getting your country’s telecoms industry in working order.
That sentiment goes against the grain, but when you contrast the telecoms regulations in the region’s megamarkets of China and India, you can hardly help but conclude that the [...]
China’s telecom sector gets 3G licenses
China’s telecommunications supervisor on Wednesday issued long-awaited third-generation (3G) mobile phone licenses to three mobile operators, a move that is expected to lead to billions of dollars being invested in building new networks.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said China’s biggest mobile operator, China Mobile, was awarded a license for TD-SCDMA, the domestically-developed [...]
Sri Lanka: Whither onshore BPOs @BOP?
Recessions are not bad for everybody. Proverbial silver line in the cloud, they bring hope to some. Success of the India BPO industry can partially be attributed to the post 9/11 recession. Tighter the economy, cheaper the solutions business looks for.
How far onshore rural BPOs cater to the needs of their clients? It might not [...]
Recent Comments