“I came more to learn from you; than to teach” was the message I passed before my two presentations with Sujata. Thanks Fusion/Telecentre.org for the opportunity. The three days spent with 200+ telecenter operators from eight provinces in Sri Lanka was a worthy investment. One does not interact with so many ground level ICT4D practitioners every day. It was a learning experience, for them; and for us.
From what I saw (and heard from others) the workshop, ‘weCAN: Social Enterprise with a Triple Bottom Line’ the second in the series of capacity building workshops of the Telecenter family of Sri Lanka was a grand success. Organized by Fusion/Telecentre.org (and funded by IDRC), we met at MIMT (MAS Institute of Management and Technology), Thulhiriya for four days…
Tags: food, Internet connectivity, Internet facilities, LKR, MAS Institute of Management and Technology, Noel Tharmarathnam, open-source software, operator/technology transition, pirated software, Sri Lanka, SRI LANKA RUN PIRATED PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE, telecenter operator, USD.
There has been much speculation about the strategy that will be adopted by the Indian juggernaut Bharti when it enters the Sri Lankan mobile market as the fifth player. Bharti is offering food for thought, though of course, reality may not always match what is told at news conferences.
LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE - LBO
Bharti Airtel will offer value added services, especially music which has been a big hit in the Indian market.
“We do more music in India than some of the music companies,” Kapoor said.
With broadband and 3G services telecom firms can offer more applications for customers, Kapoor said, adding that they would be “aiming for share of wallet rather than share of telecom.”
New services to be offered include gaming devices, shopping devices, and money transaction…
“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”
A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and
Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet cafe at the North Kenyan camp.
As Mr Sokor’s bemused
London recipient points out, two worlds were colliding. The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been…
Tags: Africa, Caroline Hurford, cellular telephone, Dagahaley, food, food aid, internet cafe, London, mobile phones, Mohammed Sokor, Nairobi, North Kenyan camp, SMS, telephone networks, United Nations, World Food Programme.
Lebanon’s mobile phone provider MTC has launched a benchmark report titled, “Mobility: A Nation Under Siege”. It analyses the vital role played by mobile telecommunications in assisting disaster recovery within
Lebanon during the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in July 2006.
The report contains unique insights in to the reliability of telecoms infrastructure throughout the conflict and examines the reasons why mobile communications played a pivotal role in ensuring that families stayed in touch, the population received food and medical supplies to the correct locations and emergency services could effectively plan their disaster response procedures. The study is at the very bottom of this link.
This article shows that government’s instinct to ban cellphones from conflict zones because of the belief that it will be used by militants/terrorists to further their cause, actually neutralizes one of the security agencies most potent weapons to track subversives. I doubt that the Sri Lankan government will allow cellular service to be available any time soon in the North. But at least it gives the security agencies some food for thought. The Indian government was similarly reluctant to have cellular service in Kashmir, but the Indian security agencies are their biggest proponents now.
————
Troops in Kashmir master new weapon: cell phones
Reuters
By Sheikh MushtaqSun May 21, 1:53 AM ET
Minutes after a bomb exploded recently in Kashmir and wounded Indian soldiers, a senior member of an Islamist…
Tags: cell phone services, cell phones, cellular services, cellular telephone, Colombo, Daya Master, federal government, food, Gyanendra, India, Indian government, Indian intelligence, Islamist, K. Rajindra Kumar, Kashmir, mobile phone services, mobile phones, Nepal, New Delhi, Pakistan, Reuters, satellite phones, Simon Gardner, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan government, V.K. Batra.
From www.timesonline.com
Telecom charity forges links for tsunami victims
by Elizabeth Judge
Vodafone and its industry peers are backing a new kind of aid for
striken areas
AS EARLY images of the Asian tsunami disaster were flashed around
the world, an aircraft loaded with equipment touched down in Sri Lanka
at Colombo international airport.
Within minutes, technicians had set up an emergency
telecommunications centre with satellite phone lines and high-speed
internet connections. Relief organisations were quick to avail
themselves of the service. Satellite lines were made available to
hospitals and to link survivors with the outside world.
The initiative was the work of Télécoms sans Frontières (TSF), a new
charity backed by companies including Vodafone, Cable & Wireless
and Inmarsat. With fixed-line and mobile networks down, the victims in
many of the tsunami-struck regions - as in other disaster zones -…
Tags: Baghdad, Bangkok, Cable & Wireless, Colombo, Colombo international airport, communication networks, electronic equipment, Elizabeth Judge, emergency
telecommunications, food, France, Grenada, Hambontota, high-speed
internet, high-speed
internet connections, high-speed internet
connections, high-speed Internet, Inmarsat, Jean-Franois Cazenove, Kosovo, normal phone networks, Oisin Walton, Pau, Satellite lines, satellite phone, satellite phone lines, satellite phones, Sri Lanka, telecommunications, the Philippines, TSF, Vodafone, www.timesonline.com.
The wind was not held back
Below is a talk given 6 years ago entitled “To hold back the wind.” That was an attempt to get disaster preparedness going. It failed, obviously. The walls of water came in with no warning; thousands died instantaneously; millions are homeless. Parentheses refer to 9/11 in the US for scale: in a few hours on the 26th of December more that 17,900 (3,000) died out of a population of 19 million (280 million). More than a million are homeless (mostly office space was lost). More will die due to epidemics caused by thousands of unburied corpses, bad water, etc. (insignificant). This is just Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia’s immediate focus is the Bay of Bengal region. We have lost over 40,000 people…
Dear friends, well-wishers and partners of LIRNEasia, all members of the LIRNEasia team based in Colombo are safe. Despite the devastation wrought by the tsunami over most of coastal Sri Lanka on Dec 26, our office is functioning.
Sarvodaya is grass-roots organization that has been around for 47 years and is doing an incredible job of getting relief to the tsunami victims. They have an extensive network of volunteers and stations in 34 Sri Lankan towns, including the most heavily damaged. Although they are busy providing temporary shelters, drinking water, food and medicine to tsunami victims, they are also gearing up for medium and long-term rehabilitation that includes reconstructing homes, providing trauma counselling, preventing outbreak of disease and providing a home to the orphaned children. Sarvodaya accepts donation…
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