Tag Archives: mobiles
Regional FAO Workshop on the use of Mobile Technologies in Agriculture
At the invitation of FAO, our CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, Research Manager, Nilusha Kapugama and I spent two days (April 3-4, 2012) in Bangkok participating in a regional FAO/ NECTEC workshop on the use of mobile technologies for food security, agriculture and rural development. The workshop brought together representatives from the agriculture ministries/ departments of [...]
Cameras to reduce electoral fraud?
People have been sending me pictures, not of Qaddafi dead, but of people taking pictures of the dead Qaddafi. I was among those who speculated on the role of cameras in moderating the crackdown in Bahrain (before the real crackdown): “Could the ubiquity of cameras be the differentiating factor? Cameras are everywhere in Tripoli and [...]
Mobiles and cancer: No causal link
I was surprised by the response to a recent piece that I wrote on mobilephobia and health. There seems to be a deep well of anxiety on this topic. Siddhartha Mukherjee is an author I greatly admire. I will read his book Emperor of all maladies when they extend the day to 26 hours. He [...]
Mobiles as microscopes
Nuwan Waidyanatha’s RTBP project at LIRNEasia examines how mobiles can be used to communicate epidemiological information from the field for analysis through data mining. Here, the mobile can be used to directly gather data from patients. MICROSCOPES are invaluable tools to identify blood and other cells when screening for diseases like anemia, tuberculosis and malaria. [...]
Continuing saga of SIM overcount in Pakistan
According to a Pakistan telecom website, one man found that while he had only 2 SIMs from Mobilink the database showed 57! There is more. With the successful on going SIM Information System 668 campaign, official sources at PTA have revealed that the cellular phone companies have blocked 12.9 million SIMs in two weeks of [...]
Americans getting excited about multitasking while driving
A big debate seems to be brewing about using mobiles to talk and text while driving at the high speeds possible on American highways. Of course, most of the BOP does not have cars, and in any case it’s only possible to do about 30 kmph on the roads that they use, so this debate [...]
More coverage for Teleuse @ BOP3: phones outnumber radios in continental S Asia
The last burst of dissemination for the teleuse@BOP3 results is yielding good results, this time with an agency story about more BOP homes in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan having phones than radios, a story we had blogged about some time back. Phones are catching up with TVs, and the number of phones being used by [...]
Mobiles, the developing world path to the Internet?
Teleuse@BOP3, LIRNEasia’s six country study has shown that between 2006 and 2008 there has been significant uptake of mobiles by the BOP in emerging Asia. Access to computers on the other hand (see here for numbers) in these countries at the BOP is minimal. Together with the increasing capabilities of mobiles to deliver an array [...]
Better weather info coming up: Opportunity for mobile operators?
With the commoditization of voice, mobile operators need to think about supplying info services over the mobile that people will pay for. Is better, more accurate weather info marketable? In our disaster early warning work we found that while scientists were qualitatively improving detection and monitoring systems (based on buoys too), the weakness was in [...]
Output-based aid for rural telecom in Cambodia; we sincerely hope the lessons of Nepal have been learned
The World Bank has committed USD 2.6 million (or USD 10 per intended beneficiary) in grant funds for rural public access telephones in Cambodia according to a recent news release. The amount is not too steep and the local official in charge is Deputy Minister Chin Bunsean, an alumnus of LIRNEasia’s regulatory training course in [...]
Mobiles and location-based services: We know where you’ve been
There was a time when I worked a lot on privacy, especially privacy issues surrounding transaction-based information (TGI). The last piece of that line of research received good reviews , the quote below being an example. The next step should have been a book; I chose to come to Sri Lanka to set up the [...]
Talking on the phone while driving, hands-free or not, said to be dangerous
Well, the research is coming in on the use of mobiles while driving and it ain’t looking good. Hands-free does not make a difference it seems, it’s the seriousness of the conversation. But does chatting to passengers have the same detrimental effect on driving? An earlier study found that it does not. That research, led [...]
Use of mobiles in the Mumbai attacks
It is always informative to engage in a retrospective assessment of the use of technology in a terrorist atrocity and see what we can do to make their activities more difficult (and prevent knee jerk reactions that only make the lives of law-abiding people more difficult). The first reports on the use of mobiles by [...]
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