At LIRNEasia, we have used social media to drive traffic. As people spend more time on social media, they have to spend less time on something else. We were beginning to see the drop in blog readership (could have been caused by other things too). When we started tweeting and using Facebook, traffic picked up again. So we see the efficacy of social media. But the Economist has a point:

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

It is important to think about the line, to worry about it, and to try to stay on the right side. Of course, the safest course is that of eschewing advocacy altogether. That can take two forms. First, just keep writing scholarly articles and books and stay out of the hurly-burly of the policy process altogether. Second, when addressing policy audiences in writing or orally, add every possible qualification that can be found, to ensure scholarly rectitude. You do that a couple of times and the invitation to intervene will dry up.

But from the time I was an untenured assistant professor in the US system (or even before that, while a graduate student in Canada) I believed that my role as a scholar obligated me to effectively intervene in the policy process. That meant not only taking the time to intervene, but to intervene in a form that would be effective, i.e., that had a point of view, that had an emotional component. I am sure Professor Fallon would not approve of some of my interventions.

Would he approve of LIRNEasia’s, such as our most recent rapid response on India’s draft National Telecom Policy? But at least, he can be sure that we do ask the questions about whether we are crossing the line.

The health care brief was just an example of a larger problem, Professor Fallon wrote, one of role confusion between scholarship and advocacy. “Many scholars’ briefs are actually not very scholarly,” he wrote.

In major cases, the Supreme Court receives stacks of friend-of-the-court filings, called amicus briefs. It helps for them to have an angle: The justices may be more likely to read a brief from a group of scholars with specialized expertise than one from, say, a trade group. That, along with an understandable desire by some law professors to help shape the law, may explain the explosion in the filing of such briefs.

In the term that ended in June, the Supreme Court decided about 80 cases after briefing and argument. By Professor Fallon’s count, it received 56 briefs from groups of law professors.

In the term that ended in 1986, by contrast, the court decided twice as many cases, but it received only three such briefs.

The end result was a USD 71 million plus World Bank soft loan to help repair 32 of the most endangered dams. If not for that initiative, one wonders whether things would be worse than today, where we are suffering the effects of multiple small tanks breached, but all the big ones safe, so far.

I wrote about the need to pay more attention to dam safety and maintenance, after the first flood of 2011.

The Dam Safety Project only covers 32 of the 350 large and medium dams; the 12,000 small dams that were the causes of most of the damage in 2011 are outside its scope. They are under the authority of the Department of Agrarian Services, under a different ministry.

There is no systematic effort to assess their safety and to remedy the problems, if any, even as of today. One hopes attention will be paid as a result of the most recent disaster.

Why are all the human-made reservoirs that dot this country not under a single Ministry? What is the rationale for a Mahaveli Ministry, decades after the accelerated construction program was completed? Why is the Department of Agrarian Services, a creature of Philip Gunawardene’s reforms of 1958, still alive and kicking five decades after those forgotten socialist experiments? Why is it in charge of the neglect of village irrigation?

It is heartening to see that the government is taking action to expand the scope of its dam safety work:

Sri Lanka will expand its dam safety program to cover more large reservoirs and will ask for additional funding from the World Bank following recent floods, officials said.

D C S Alakanda, who heads Sri Lanka’s Dam Safety and Water Resources Planning Project said the talks with World Bank to expand the project will begin next week.

The current project funded with a 7,500 million rupee interest free credit from the World Bank covers 32 out of 80 large reservoirs deemed to be most in need of rebuilding or having their safety improved.

Irrigation minister Nimal Siripala de Silva said most of the large dams in the country except for some built in the last three decades were made out of packed earth and they had a life of around 50 years.

The report went on to quote me and refer to LIRNEasia’s 2005 work, but that is not the main point. Everyone who cares about the lives and livelihoods of people who live in the shadow of Sri Lanka’s thousands of reservoirs should support the government and its international donors in their efforts to establish a sustainable system of dam safety and maintenance.

Influence on telecommunications policy reform has been one of the strongest areas of the program’s outcomes, at least in terms of explicit causality, specifically from the work of LIRNEasia.  According to many informants, however, LIRNEasia, is a special case given the organizational culture, the numbers of people devoted to working almost exclusively on policy issues, the specific policy arena in which they work, and the strong personality at the center of the group. While LIRNEasia successes are notable, the external review panel urges the program not to set LIRNEasia as a standard for outcomes, since their achievements would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The quotation has been taken from the Findings Brief, prepared by the IDRC Evaluation Unit, though the same sentiments are also found in the External Review Report.

The latest issue features an e-interview with LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, but it is not the only reason why we thought of highlighting the issue. The content is interesting and very readable. We publish two e-interviews from July 2010 issue here fully, as they are not available on public domain.

Apart from Samarajiva, This issue carried e-interviews with Alison Gillwald, Indra de Lanerolle, Christoph Stork and Muriuki Mureithi.

If you are interested in future issues please register at http://lists.apc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chakula

The need for competitive research for policy influence
e-interview with Alison Gillwald

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“High quality, rigorous research…is required to compete and complement with each other for policy influence… In mature economies researchers from multiple universities would be debating and refining the positions governments should be taking on everything from regulating next generation networks to demand stimulation for broadband.”
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Alison Gillwald is Executive Director of RIA. She is also Adjunct Professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business, Management of Infrastructure Reform and Regulation, and a member of CPRafrica’s organisation and selection committee.

CHAKULA: You have just held the CPRafrica conference in Cape Town. What are you hoping to achieve through the conference?

ALISON GILLWALD [AG]: There is almost no scholarly research being undertaken in the field of ICT policy and regulation on the continent. A Google scholar search on the subjects throws up around five scholars on the continent who are published in peer reviewed or accredited journals. It is this kind of high quality, rigorous research that is required to compete and complement with each other for policy influence. In mature economies researchers from multiple universities would be debating and refining the positions governments should be taking on everything from regulating next generation networks to demand stimulation for broadband. Although there are pockets of applied research being undertaken there is no tradition of critical intellectual engagement in this area on the continent. The purpose of CPRafrica is to provide a forum for nurturing and showcasing research in the area of ICT policy and regulation on the continent and enhancing its quality through rigorous academic review and debate. The conference is complemented by a young scholars programme to expose young scholars who may be excluded from such peer-review, paper-acceptance-only style conferences without such a category. Some of these are part of the IDRC- [International Development Research Centre] funded PhD programme to encourage doctoral research in ICT policy and regulation. The idea here is to build a cadre of policy intellectuals on the continent able to critically engage government on the basis of relevant research and contribute meaningfully to research and policy excellence. This will further enhance Africa’s standing in international research and governance fora, in which its participation has historically been suboptimal.

CHAKULA: Reviewing some of the papers presented at the conference, it strikes me that there are a couple of threads that are emerging. Two in particular stand out: the notion of “innovation” in the telecommunications space, and the challenges around convergence and policy when two distinct sectors with different ways of doing things are brought into conflict with each other. I also went back to Research ICT Africa’s 2008 M-banking policy paper, which raises similar themes, and I would like to use that as a starting point. First, on the issue of ‘innovation’. In the M-banking paper, the following assertion is made: “Policy-makers and regulators need to ensure that evolving systems serve the broader objectives of economic growth and development as well as protect consumer interests, while creating an environment that encourages and rewards innovation”. In what ways can policy inhibit or encourage innovation in the telecommunication’s sector?

AG: Indeed, providing certainty to investors and operators while retaining the levels of flexibility to enable innovation in a fast-changing environment is one of the most difficult balancing acts that policy-makers and regulators have to perform. I think the linkages and catalysts between technology, market and regulatory innovation are becoming clearer all the time. New technologies and service offerings have prized open markets and the entry into less policy and regulatory constrained markets has made taking certain technologies to market more viable. This has triggered further possibilities across historically distinct platforms, not only between broadcasting and telecommunications, but between fixed and mobile services and even entirely separate sectors such as telecommunications and banking. The challenges to the expansion of such services are really regulatory now rather than technological – and that is not to say that one does not want or need public interest regulation either in the telecommunications or banking sector, but it has to be done in new, innovative ways that enable to extension of these services to those who currently don’t enjoy them. Once these various forces are unleashed they are able to intersect and create new opportunities and innovative ways of doing things that have not been done before.

CHAKULA: Innovation here seems necessarily to be tied to market gain – the objective is to increase or capture market share. In both your M-banking paper, and the case study of the mobile operator One Network in Kenya, preconditions exists that facilitate innovation. With M-banking there are low-income earners who are ‘unbanked’ and who could benefit from some kind of low-cost transactional instrument, and with One Network, there is a significant level of cross-border traffic that makes a seamless network attractive.
AG: It is true that innovation is often driven by market forces and pursuit of profits, and, traditionally, with new technologies have focused on high-end markets. But much of the ICT innovation we are witnessing in developing markets is focused on what has been referred to as the ‘gold at the bottom of the pyramid’ – very profitable turn-over of high volumes of sometimes minuscule margins on products that, by breaking them up or making them available at cost, the masses at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid can enjoy things like pre-paid phone vouchers, or transferable airtime vouchers. And many of these products have been commercialised innovative practices by the poor in order to access and affordably use communications services – such as missed calls, multiple sim card usage that allows for same net rates, or ‘plastic roaming’.

CHAKULA: If we consider Indra de Lanerolle’s fascinating case study on the South African convergence scenario, we see two sectors (broadcast and telecommunications) in conflict with each other because policy decisions are made according to different frameworks: simply put, economic versus public interest. In fact, Indra does seem to suggest that these are in competition with each other, and resolves this in an interesting way. It feels hard to believe that ‘consumer interest’ is the same as ‘public interest’?

AG: I think with the shift from public utilities to competitive markets many of the public interest objectives of delivery and service are met through serving the consumer interest. Nevertheless there is public interest regulation that is required to improve wider and collective consumer welfare – to provide access to ‘uneconomic areas’ for example – though with new more cost-effective, rapidly deployable wireless services, this concept in markets that enable competitive entry is regularly not proving to be the case. But as long as we have the large number of poor that we do, we will need some level of social regulation – even though a lot of the current pent-up demand could be met with greater market efficiency (more competitive markets offering better prices). And then there are the more traditional content regulation issues either to restrict certain ‘harmful’ content or activities or to enable it, such as local content regulation. That too may be found to be highly profitable, but may need either protection or encouragement.

CHAKULA: Indra’s paper, like your M-banking policy paper, shows that regulating convergence is tricky because of the ‘convergence’ of two or even more sectors; whether broadcast/telecommunications or telecommunications/banking etc. What are some of the key challenges that policy-makers can expect to face in Africa?

AG: The key challenge for African regulators is that they are still trying to deal with legacy regulation around first and second-generation infrastructure and access. At the same time, if they do not want the agenda to be set for them in international fora, they need to deal with next-generation issues, not only of converged IP [internet protocol] networks and services and the next-generation regulation issues of network and service-neutral regimes, but of cross-cutting issues of electronic commerce frameworks, intellectual copyright rights, security and privacy issues, and so on. And you have to do it all or be left behind…

CHAKULA: One frustration is that when one reads a good paper that seems to offer a solution to a problem, one is also met with the feeling that those with decision-making powers are probably not going to read that paper, or seriously consider its arguments. Do you feel the same? If so, how do you think CPRafrica picks up on this challenge? Is it just a case of repeating issues until policy-makers take them on board?

AG: No. CPRafrica is one of several strategic strands towards having evidence-based ICT policy on the continent. This is about organic and indigenous knowledge creation and contribution, at the national level, at the level of regional association and continentally, and also about global engagement and influence. For too long have the solutions come from the developed world. Of course, there are lessons to be learnt and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we also have different challenges and Africa has demonstrated remarkably innovative responses to these when they are informed by sound policy, effective regulation or thorough and appropriate business plans. The indicator research done by RIA and its analysis in order to assess policy and regulatory outcomes is fed into several initiatives, globally and locally. RIA provides the only comprehensive public domain demand-side data on ICT access and usage on the continent. This is used in national, regional and continental meetings on ICTs, and in the database and reports of multilateral agencies such as the OECD and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to better inform their understanding of developments in Africa. It is true that sometime decision-makers do not like to hear of the widespread policy and institutional failure on the continent, but many do – especially those that are rapidly improving and beginning to see the rewards of their reforms. This research is also used to develop training curricula that address the needs of policy and regulators in a developing country context. So, for example, as part of the global research and training collaborative LIRNE.net we conduct a professional development course on alternative regulatory strategies at the UCT Graduate School of Business Infrastructure Reform and Regulation Programme to build institutional capacity on the continent. So CPRafrica is just one arm of a multi-pronged strategy of research and education, institutional capacity building and technical assistance and dissemination and advocacy, through our website database, policy papers and workshop and public presentations.

CHAKULA: What is the way forward for the conference? Will there be more?

AG: Yes, in order to build and sustain this much-needed capacity we will have to find a way for CPRafrica to become an annual institution.

Related links:

M-Banking the Unbanked: RIA Policy Paper No. 4:

http://www.researchictafrica.net/new/images/uploads/RIA_Mobile-banking.pdf

CPRafrica conference details: http://www.researchictafrica.net/index.php/news/38-cprafrica-looking-back-at-a-decade-of-communications-reform-looking-forward-to-2020
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Innovation through competition: the budget telecom network model
e-interview with Rohan Samarajiva

Paper link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1564529

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“The status quo must be unbearable.”
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Rohan Samarajiva is the Chair and CEO of Lirnasia. His paper, “How the developing world may participate in the global Internet Economy: Innovation driven by competition” was presented at a workshop organised by the OECD and InfoDev in Paris, 10-11 September 2009.

CHAKULA: In your paper, you talk about the Budget Telecom Network Model (BTNM), which is brought about by competition allowing operators to reduce the transaction costs of low-end clients. This, as you point out, is different to the standard Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) model. How does it make the ARPU model redundant?

Rohan Samarajiva [RS]: ARPU is a short-hand that outside observers use to see if the firm is doing well, whether its prospects are good, etc. It is, like any indicator, imperfect. You get it by taking total revenue (preferably without extras like roaming) and dividing by number of subscribers. Of course no one really knows what a subscriber is any more, with even poor people holding up to five SIMs, foreigners having SIMs, no agreement on what an active SIM is and so on. You can get better results by looking at revenue per minute. Take total revenue (less roaming and other stuff) and divide by Average Minutes of Usage per User per Month (MOU). This is a better indicator. But investment analysts are still not used to this and it would require disclosing MOUs to calculate.

CHAKULA: Can ARPU be used as a business model?

[RS]: Operators do not actually do much with the ARPU. It is not a business model as such, just an indicator. But getting more from each subscriber (if this is known) is not a bad idea. Just that it does not predict whether the company will make money or not. The best indicator for that is EBITDA [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization] margin. Sri Lanka in 2007 had an operator with LKR311 (approximately USD3 at the time) ARPU making close to 50% EBITDA margin. In the end, the success of a business model lies in whether it generates profit.

CHAKULA: What is your understanding of ‘innovation’ in the telecommunications space? You talk of “business innovation”, rather than, say, technological innovation?

[RS]: Tech innovation is important, but it is not the only thing. Pure tech innovation is done by manufacturers of network equipment and handsets. That is good. Business process innovations (e.g. lowering the costs of base stations through software) are done by operators. These include technical aspects, but are not limited to them. Shifting from one business model to another (discovering the latter) is also innovation, but it may or may not not have a tech aspect at all.

CHAKULA: What are the preconditions for innovation, do you think?

[RS]: The status quo must be unbearable. The BTNM innovation occurred when competition got so intense that there was no way to gain market share or even survive without doing something new.

CHAKULA: Does BTNM have implications for increased access to broadband internet for the majority of people on a continent like Africa?

[RS]: Yes. The latter part of the paper is entirely on the extension of BTNM to broadband. Some headlines are that operators must have enough money from voice that can be invested in the 3G plus networks. Once the overlay network is built out the operators have to offer low prices. Prepaid sachet pricing is best, where one buys packages of connectivity in minutes or in capacity. Here, because of lower transaction costs and prices there should be an influx of new customers. This is already on offer in Asia. Africa has to lower prices. Access will be over mobile networks, using dongles or built in modems, for laptops and other devices, including phones. ADSL will be a niche product. Wireless access is the future.

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TRAI Chair Dr J.S. Sarma, Principal Advisor Mr N. Parameswaran and Advisor (Convergence) Mr S.K. Gupta visited the LIRNEasia office today. Despite our many interactions with regulators, this was the first time a regulator had actually asked to visit our office. Dr Sarma was very interested in the research that the team members were doing and informally interacted with them, in addition to going over some findings on price benchmarks, teleuse@BOP, broadband QoSE, and Telecom Regulatory Environment. We were impressed by the fact that he knew some of our findings (how much those at the BOP were willing to spend on telecom per month) which were not in the slides that we were using!

India is the largest market that we work in and we consider TRAI to be one of the leading regulatory agencies in the world. We were happy to welcome the Chairman and his advisors and look forward to a productive relationship that builds on the good relations that have existed since the beginning of LIRNEasia.

How it applies to Internet and broadband is what Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO, LIRNEasia explained in his keynote speech at the workshop ‘Expanding access to the Internet and broadband for development’ on November 16, 2009, at the Internet Governance forum 2009.  His presentation entitled, ‘How the developing world may participate in the global Internet Economy:  Innovation driven by competition’, can be downloaded here.

The session was chaired by Dimitri Ypsilanti, Head of Information, Communication and Consumer Policy Division, OECD. The discussants were Tim Kelly, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, infoDev – World Bank, Olfat A. Monsef, Vice President of National Telecommunication Regulator, Telecom Services, Egypt, Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director, Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and Virat Bhatia, President – External Affairs, AT&T, South Asia will be the discussants.

The workshop is jointly organized by OECD and infoDev.

This was LIRNEasia’s first formal interaction with Mongolia, outside the realm of capacity building. We hope the multiple contacts that were established, with researchers, with government entities, and with media will lead to deeper relations in the future.

The experts see business sense around sachet pricing, especially for a low income group subscriber in the villages of India, who is mostly a prepaid user and does not have a big budget to spend. They say sachet pricing can yield results not only for Inetrnet penetration, but other services other than voice.

Rohan Samarajiva, CEO, LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy and regulation research and capacity building organization, says for addressing the needs of Internet functionalities for the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) users, one need to understand one crucial thing that mobile and PCs are the best vehicle for IT-delivered services to rural India. He says the flat rate model does not fit the prepaid user. The operator should look at giving the user an opportunity to use Internet components at a low cost.

Amit Sinha, AVP, One97 Communications approves sachet pricing for increasing adoption VAS by subscribers in the rural areas. For a subscriber who does not have a very high balance on his prepaid account may not be comfortable subscribing for a particular value-added service for a monthly subscription.The adoption trends have been quite interesting. Reducing the sachet price from Rs 30 to Rs 10 can affect the VAS adoption by about 35-45%, he says.

None of them had the benefit of the teleuse@BOP results. Back in October 2008, 25 percent of mobile owners at the Pakistan BOP had multiple SIMs. Why did they go for multiple SIMs if they had the benefit of MNP? Why do they go through the contortions of switching SIMs, described in the ToI article that quotes our qualitative research, if they have the benefit of MNP? What relevance do issues such as cost of redoing business cards and letterhead have to the 90 percent plus prepaid customers of most mobile operators in the region? Is MNP another concept that makes sense in the postpaid worlds inhabited by Western consultants, but makes no sense at all in the predominantly prepaid worlds we live in?

Good research is supposed to make people rethink what is taken as common wisdom. I also partook in the common wisdom on MNP. But questions such as the above have started a rethinking process, caught (bad spelling and all) by a journalist who called to ask about something else:

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is increasingly becoming useless in the current Sri Lankan context, a telecom industry expert in the country said.

“I don’t see a need for number portability because most of the mobile phone users currently are using multiple sim cards” Professor Rohan Smarajeewa, Executive Director of Lirneasia told The Nation Economist.
As he pointed out, the price war among the telcos during the last year or so has created this situation.
“After the entrance of Bharti Airtel to the local market as the fifth mobile operator 25 to 30 % of mobile users became multiple sim card users” Samarajeewa added.

According to telecom analysts the arrival of dual sim card handsets also has contributed towards this.
“There are dual sim handsets in the local market made in China at amasingly low prices. These handsets have become very handy for multiple sim card users” an analyst said.

He also said that the ample availability of pre-paid sim cards throughout the country, hassle free connection and amasingly cheap tariffs by all the five mobile operators within each ones network have given the incentive for people to buy more than one sim card.

The award honors one person each year whose work has had a demonstrable impact on practice outside the academy, with clear benefits to the community.

The award was presented to him by Patrice M. Buzzanell, President of the International Communication Association.

At the ceremony a brief statement about his accomplishments and the ways his work has had sustainable social benefits was presented by the ICA:

“Dr. Rohan Samarajiva has co-edited a volume, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, that exemplifies the intention of this award, i.e., to show ways in which a significant engagement with research can influence communication change. This work highlights a very important but often under-researched region focusing on five Aisan countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka… A central thread underpinning all the viewpoints provided in the book is that technology itself cannot improve access to ICTs; policy and regulatory reform is critical. In providing data that challenges the vested and frequently dysfunctional interests which have underpinned past and present governance structures, this important research becomes in itself a significant marker of ways to work towards policy and regulatory reform.”

The 2009 conference of the ICA, themed “Keywords in Communication” took place from 21-25 May 2009 in Chicago, USA. The ICA is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication. The ICA is over 50 years old, beginning as a small association of U.S. researchers and is now an international association with more than 4,300 members in 70 countries. The ICA includes 24 divisions and interest groups, each representing a special subfield of communication processes and phenomena

Voice is getting commodified and profits are declining. People are not taking up more-than-voice services because they do not have money and see mobile as a consumption good. If, on the other hand, it is seen as a production good, something that puts money in the pocket, is it not realistic to think that it will be better for the operators?

LBO has carried an interesting piece based on the exchanges at the LIRNEasia presentation to industry on March 4th. Perhaps the readers have more to say?

Sri Lankans low income customers of mobile communications, used phones least for business related activities in the region, potentially opening up a new marketing opportunity for celcos, a new study has found.

The so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) mobile customers in Bangladesh used phones most for business, financial or work related activities a new study by the policy think tank, LirneAsia has found.

“Sri Lanka is at the lowest end where only 21 percent people said they used the phone daily for business related transactions” said Harsha de Silva, lead economist of LIRNEasia said.

“Whereas in case of Bangladesh where we heard so about phones and using phones as ways of getting out of poverty. And micro finance entrepreneur use was very high, whereas in Sri Lanka it was very low.”

At Sri Lanka’s largest agricultural market a large projection screen overlooks 12 acres of stalls brimming with produce.

Traders at the Dambulla market consult the screen to receive up-to-the-minute pricing information on produce being sold in the market.

This information helps them negotiate fair prices at any of the market’s 144 booths, says Harsha de Silva, head economist at Sri Lanka-based LIRNEasia, a non-profit organization and IDRC partner that aims to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the lives of Asia’s people.

In the case of the Dambulla market traders, de Silva says farmers can negotiate from a stronger position because information is accessible.

Such information is vital to ensuring agricultural markets work efficiently because it helps farmers reduce their transaction costs, according to de Silva.

But most research in developing countries has focused on helping farmers access information at the end of the production cycle — like the Dambulla market price screen, says de Silva. “We always focus on the selling stage… prices are important, but what about the information that comes before the point of selling?”

He says farmers can use information available at the market to negotiate a better price for eggplant, but if there was more information available before planting crops, they might decide that onions would be a more profitable choice. This type of price projection information — common in developed countries via the Internet — is not readily available to rural farmers in developing countries, says de Silva.

Read the full story by Angela Pereira at IDRC.ca here.

In the end, Microsoft’s best intentions may not satisfy what locals want. The company surveyed 8,000 people in emerging markets and found their most pressing needs for technology often revolved around entertainment and surfing the Internet.

“It reinforced for us that the emerging middle classes are sort of like the middle classes here except they don’t have as much money,” Mr. Toyama said. “It’s sometimes easy for us to get caught up in things and forget we are serving the needs of real people.”

The above comes from a story on Microsoft’s social research unit in Bangalore, an organization LIRNEasia has had many interactions with, and hopes to work with in the future as well.

We were under the impression that they did mostly qualitative research, and that we were the only people doing quantitative research in the region, but the story refers to an 8,000 person survey. Well, you learn something new everyday.

Not that we are offended. Cloud computing is not our religion – it is just an experiment – part of our research. We may be proved wrong – but at least not so far. We are glad we use the model.

Here is how we, at LIRNEasia, use ‘CLOUD’ Computing:

This blog itself is in the CLOUD (WordPress, to be specific)

All our documents are in the CLOUD (Scribd)

All our photos are in the CLOUD (Flickr)

All our video clips are in the CLOUD (You Tube)

All our databases are in the CLOUD (Here is one: http://www.asianict.lirneasia.org)

Then, we plan to go further in this research cycle by contributing more to:

(a) Wikipedia, a CLOUD (One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service_experience) and
(b) Others’ blogs – another CLOUD

In short, LIRNEasia is an organization that runs – on CLOUD – without a single central physical server. All what we have are our laptops which we use to directly access the CLOUD. (ie. without going through a Local Area Network) So whatever we do; eat, sleep and dance we do it in the CLOUD.

Why LIRNEasia takes CLOUD COMPUTING so seriously?

We saw the potential at very begining. It is the only way a regional research organization without a large IT budget could survive, let alone operate. We were proved correct. (Out IT budget is only for our laptops and three broadband connections. Why three? – Redundancy. When CLOUD is everything for us, better not take chances)

Perhaps RMS might want to have a look at our Virtual Organisation Report which we did to share our experience with similar organisations. Dated April 2008, it is bit outdated now – we have come a long way since then. (Yes, many things can happen in five months, like increasing the hit rate of our site by 50%) Still it is a document worth reading.

We proudly recommend it for anyone who does not want to spend dollars on proprietary hardware to get rid of proprietary software! Thanks RMS, for the opportunity!