The total software earnings of USD 294 million are produced by 27,000 people. That is LKR 99,825 per employee per month. Lower than I expected.

On the BPO side, 13,000 people produce USD 98 million. That boils down to LKR 69,103 per employee per month.

Now that does not look too pretty, does it? Taking overheads and marketing into account, the firms in the BPO industry would be lucky to be able to spend LKR 40,000 on compensation per employee per month. That’s an average.

The full column is here. The preceding related column, which pointed out that Sri Lanka seems to short of people with skills is here. The two issues are related. Why we do not have enough people is because we do not pay them enough. Why we do not pay them enough is that the revenue per employee is too low.

One reason we cannot increase revenue per employee is because no one can get 5 nines (99.999) reliability in Sri Lanka. Good KPOs can work around this, but not the standard BPOs. And increasingly people are beginning to assume that video conferencing is possible. But how reliable is that in Sri Lanka?

The last few posts from the previous thread are posted below for continuity.

1. 196 Harsha Purasinghe on Jul 11th, 2006 at 9:08 am edit
   Dharma,I think I have mentioned this in one of my earlier posts. (which is not visible now, beleive it’s archived)The ideal situation for all of us should have been Standard been established long time ago, and technical implementations of the same happened at that time so by now all of us use standardized sinhala on whatever platform each of us use. If somone either Donald, JC, University or a consortium established the Sinhala standard at that time we will not have these arguments (with technical implementations). I am not in a position to answer the delays behind Sinhala standardization.

   Let me repeat this again I am not defending anyone or any masters as we dont work for anyone. But we followed the Sinhala Unicode and technically implemented it for various use of Sinhala in MS & Mobile Platforms. Same thing I beleive people like Linux, MS, IBM, Orcale will be doing.

   The technical implementation of finalized unicode standard was started about 1 – 1/2 years ago, if am not mistaken so it will take some time to see all these things in place in the marketplace. Windows will support this in Vista, Linux already supports, Oracle supports Sinhala Unicode and so does many other technical implementations. Win XP supports Sinhala Unicode through an enabling pack however the best implementation for MS will arrive with VISTA.

   I think the big mistake ICTA is doing is sleeping rather than coming out and showcasing these solutions to what’s available to general public. If they organize a forum and mini-exhibition to showcase all Sinhala Unicode compliant products/services including emailing among platforms, cut & paste to what not, we can invite all these forum members to showcase the same. Perhaps the same forum can be used to arrange a debate/questioning about the Unicode!

   Newspapers
   ————-
   The best people to answer would be people from ANCL, Wijeya, and Upali where there are 2 people from these organizations who were in the Unicode Task Team if am not mistaken. So they should come and highlight why the papers are not Unicode complaint yet. I dont see an issue but beleive it’s all internal matters which they among themselves needs to finalize.

   Dharma for you to see respective Sinhala Unicode based websites in your PC without downloading, you may have to wait for VISTA where you upgrade to it. Even if another standard get’s established there is no way it will just get established in your PC magically. It applies to JC, Donald and whowever who builds another standard, font or way of working in Sinhala. That too has to be technically accomplished.

   Finally, if it was Donald’s standard which is been accepted by ALL (MS, Linux, Oracle, Googls to local acedamia and private software companies to government) sometime ago we would have implemented the same. But everyone agreed and accepted to work on Sinhala Unicode (SLSI1134) hence we too have established the same to ensure inter operability and also since it’s feasible to technically implement.

2. 197 Donald Gaminitillake on Jul 11th, 2006 at 9:39 am edit
   Dear HarshaWhy you always aviod the question. Just going round and round.I have never said UNICODE is wrong but what you registered with unicode consortium is incomplete Sinhala. The whole problem is this.This was pointed out by me and the Sri Lanka association of Printers on the public hearing. 20 odd group incl VKS over ruled us and registered the incomplete set of Sinhala in the UNICODE.(SLSI1134)

   We do have a problem in implementing Sinhala

   Please confirm whther you have a hidden “union” of character table apart from the few characters registered in the unicode = Slsi1134.

   “yes” or “no”

   Even Harsula avoid this question. This was posted last week.(160 and 163 )
   Linux group have proved that there is a”union” .

   Donald Gaminitillake
   Colombo

3. 198 Dharma Gamage on Jul 11th, 2006 at 9:42 am edit
   Harsha,[quote]
   The best people to answer would be people from ANCL, Wijeya, and Upali where there are 2 people from these organizations who were in the Unicode Task Team if am not mistaken. So they should come and highlight why the papers are not Unicode complaint yet.
   [unquote]Yes, the best person to answer this question is Mr. Naveendra Gunaratne from Wijeya Newspapers, who was in the original Sinhala fonts task team and left thoroughly disappointed, because his concerns were never taken seriously by Gihan, Dino and the rest of the team, who had their own agendas. (The ANCL man was only a puppet.)

   However, I do not see any logical reason why any newspaper company should shift to Unicode compatible platform.

   As I said before, if the Unicode supporters want to make Unicode Sinhala, a standard they should first have enough applications to attract users. As long as they do not, the newspapers will use what will bring them better results. The business leaders take decisions based on market.

   Newspapers do not use Oracle or Linux. All they wanted is good font sets to be used in the publishing environment and perhaps relevant applications.

   You cannot force anybody to use Unicode compatible Sinhala fonts sets, if that does not given any advantage over the rest. You cannot hold a gun at the head of a press baron and threaten him to use Unicode.

   Finally, have you seen anywhere that VISTA will support Sinhala? I have not and given what had happened in the past, I have strong doubts about that.

4. 199 Donald Gaminitillake on Jul 11th, 2006 at 12:26 pm edit
   Dear DharmaThe problem is what Sri Lanka registered with Unicode was a limited set of Sinhala characters.The first person in Sri Lanka who made a Sinhala font is Mr Ravi Peiris now at Ingrin

   Since there is no set of full Sinhala characters registered either in SLSI or in Unicode the software developers are deprived to make any software for sinhala.

   Only I have done and published this document with code points. Since this was done by me in private capacity I do have the copyrights and a patent is pending.

   The code points which are outside the unicode registered area is kept under a blanket called a “UNION” and this list was never published. The content in this “union” differ from one font maker to the other.

   As I have previously mentioned in 178
   Quote
   Only a part is registered balance kept inside a unpublished “union”. Who ever hid these codepoints may had a commercial venure –a monopoly — in the mind or deprive the people in lanka of Sinhala IT education. IT only open for the english speaking group.
   Unquote

   Donald Gaminitillake
   Colombo

5. 200 Dharma Gamage on Jul 11th, 2006 at 2:39 pm edit
   Donald/JC,What I cannot understand is, if these guys are so sure about Unicode and SLS 1134, why they waste their time in this forum arguing with you people.Why they have to sell Unicode/SLS 1134 so hard if that is the only solution, as they claim?

Tamil and Sinhala SMS are offered in Sri Lanka by Dialog Telekom and Celltel Lanka.

The service is based on a key-entry system enabling a customer to type the SMS as fast as in English and “a one touch function guiding them using the key pad to type Tamil letters”, according to Airtel. “The subscriber needs to download the application free of charge from ‘Airtel Live’ on to their handsets. Those receiving the Tamil SMS also need to download the application in order to read it in Tamil. In the event of the recipient not downloading it, the message is automatically transliterated and the Tamil words can be read using English letters.”

This news may be of interest to our readers who have been engaging in lively debate on standardizing Sinhala for IT applications.

The GSM Association recently announced that its Emerging Markets Handset program is exceeding expectations: mobile operators in Bangladesh, China, India, and Russia have already purchased 12 million of its Ultra Low Cost Handsets (ULCH). But will the initiative reach the rest of the three billion unconnected peoples in emerging markets? Under current cost models that is unlikely.

The problem is that even at US$30 the ULCH’s price is too high for at least a billion of this population.

The annual gross per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa is just US$371. It is unrealistic to expect people there to spend 10% of their annual income on a mobile phone. So semiconductor vendors, such as Texas Instruments, Freescale, Philips, and Infineon are continuing to reduce the Bill-of-Materials for ULCH even further, heading towards US$20 and US$15 in the next few years.

But will ULCH markets stall before a low enough price is reached? Alan Varghese, Principal Analyst, Wireless, at ABI Research doesn’t think so. “We may see trends similar to those for the conventional handset in the developed world. In the early years, it was purchased primarily to transact business; it was only when prices had dropped that handsets penetrated the mass market.”

Something similar is starting to happen in the developing world. In South Africa, software vendor Sharedphone enables the use of the ULCH as a mobile payphone. Local entrepreneurs buy this phone and sell airtime at the roadside. For such a “service provider,” the $30 price is not prohibitive; it is far cheaper than setting up a conventional payphone.

Because per-minute call charges are high, most calls are short and businesslike: Where can I get the best price? Is my order ready? Meet me tomorrow. The “mobile payphone” is facilitating commerce even in regions otherwise lacking in high technology.

What does this mean to handset vendors such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, and LG Electronics?

Varghese says, “They have to think about how they can further enable varied uses such as the ‘mobile payphone.’ They could add value, for example, with software to manage the whole transaction: making the call, presenting the consumer with a summary of call-times and charges, and keeping track of repeat customers in order to offer discounts.”