Tag Archives: USA
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LIRNEasia lead economist at int’l conference on mobile communication and social policy
Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s lead economist, presented a paper co-authored with Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Ayesha Zainudeen entitled, “Social Influence in Mobile Phone Adoption: Evidence from the Bottom of Pyramid in Emerging Asia” at an International Conference on Mobile Communication and Social Policy. The conference was held at the Centre for Mobile Communications Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 9-11 October 2009. The paper is based on findings from the Teleuse@BOP3 study.
A working paper is available here.
Parental-control phones
In the context of the debates about banning mobiles for school children, the issue of phones that constrain use has become relevant. The NYT has done a full survey of the options available to parents in the US, an excerpt of which is given below. Why doesn’t someone do a similar survey for India, Sri Lanka, etc.?
Now for some real cellphones. The new LG Rumor from Kajeet (kajeet.com) is a texting phone for children, and it includes interesting features that everyone can appreciate.
First and foremost, Kajeet offers parental controls to prevent unauthorized incoming or outgoing calls. The service also includes a WalletManager system that allows parents to add talk time to the service weekly, like an allowance, as well as TimeManager, which limits calls to certain people at certain times. The phone also includes GPS mapping so parents can track children on the go.
The phone costs $180, and unlimited texting and 150 minutes of talk time costs $20 a month. A basic plan costs $5 a month for 10 minutes of talk time a month.
Another wireless carrier, Sprint, also offers a similar family-locator plan. The service works for all Sprint and Nextel mobile phones and allows ..read more
ICTs not by themselves, but to improve other things
Except for the last of the three items described below, the proposed stimulus package now before the US Congress seeks to apply the intelligence of ICTs to improve other things. This is the way to go.
The $825 billion stimulus plan presented this month by House Democrats called for $37 billion in spending in three high-tech areas: $20 billion to computerize medical records, $11 billion to create smarter electrical grids and $6 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in rural and underserved communities.
A study published this month, which was prepared for the Obama transition team, concluded that putting $30 billion into those three fields could produce more than 900,000 jobs in the first year. The mix of proposed spending is different in the House plan, but the results would be similar, said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which did the study.
The full report is here.
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