LIRNEasia » YouTube

Bandwidth hungry but purchasing-power poor

Rohan Samarajiva — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:51:20 +0000

For some time we have been talking about the scarcity and cost of international bandwidth. Looks like it is going to cost people in our part of the world access to sites such as Facebook and YouTube (full article). It appears that distance does matter. And everyone is not actually as close to everyone else as we were told. Of course, distance can be overcome, with money, not the user’s money but the money of the advertiser who believes that particular audiences are worth paying for.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

One problem that now exists is that the advertisers are in the developed countries; they do not particularly value developing country audiences. Now, what if Youtube and Facebook started advertising different messages to different regions? What if they brought down the transaction costs of placing ads? What if? Readers may wish to develop the argument, or propose their own solutions. What I suggest appears to be the choice for Facebook for now:

Facebook, which says it favors membership growth over profitability for now, is trying to increase revenue overseas by hiring advertising sales staff in countries like Britain, Australia and France.

Wikipedia, SMS and You Tube among best innovations recognized by ‘The Economist’

Chanuka Wattegama — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:51:56 +0000

The Economist annual prizes recognise successful innovators in eight categories. Here are this year’s winners:

Bioscience: Martin Evans, director of the school of biosciences and professor of mammalian genetics at Cardiff University, for his work in stem-cell research and the development of “knockout” mice. Sir Martin performed pioneering research into stem cells, and used them to create mice with a specific genetic disorder. This led to the creation of “knockout” mice, which are used to model human diseases by deactivating a specific gene.

Business Process: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia for the promotion of online public collaboration as a means of content development. Mr Wales co-founded Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia, in 2001. Every entry is a wiki—a special kind of web page that anyone can edit. Today versions of Wikipedia exist in more than 250 languages, containing over 10m articles (2.6m in English), making Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia ever created.

Computing and Telecommunications: Matti Makkonen for the development of Short Message Service (SMS), or text messaging. Mr Makkonen is a Finnish engineer who is credited with inventing SMS, which allows short messages to be sent between mobile phones. He proposed the idea in the 1980s while working at Finland’s telecoms authority. Billions of text messages are now sent every day.

Consumer Products and Services: Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube, for creating an easy way to share video. YouTube, founded in 2005, lets users upload video files via broadband connections. They can then be viewed on YouTube’s own site, or embedded in pages on other sites. Viewers can add comments and ratings. YouTube quickly became a cultural phenomenon and is now the most popular video site on the internet.

Energy and the Environment: Arthur Rosenfeld for his promotion of energy efficiency. Dr Rosenfeld is considered a founding father of the energy-efficiency movement. He established the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and helped to develop more efficient lighting, low-emissivity windows and software to analyse the energy use of buildings.

No Boundaries: Sumio Iijima for the discovery of carbon nanotubes. Dr Iijima discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991 while working as a researcher at NEC. They are the strongest and stiffest materials known, with many unique properties. They are being applied in catalysts, batteries, fuel cells, solar cells and drug delivery.

Social and Economic Innovation: Bill Gates and Melinda Gates for developing of a philanthropic support platform. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000 with a mission to improve lives around the world. As well as applying a rigorous, businesslike approach to philanthropy, it provides an enabling platform for other non-profit organisations. It focuses on improving health, reducing poverty and increasing access to technology in public libraries.

Corporate Innovation: Nokia for its ability to respond to social and technological trends while maintaining its position as the world’s largest handset-maker. The firm makes use of anthropologists and futurologists to steer product design, and recently launched its “Comes With Music” service, hailed as a promising new model for the music industry.

Read the full story here.

Define Canada’s Telecom Future and win a $ 1,500 scholarship

Chanuka Wattegama — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:28:33 +0000

Launched this year, the Future Telecom Leaders Contest asks students to address an important question: “How can Canada become a recognized global leader in telecom in the next 10 years?” Students are invited to submit their ideas in a variety of formats: audio-visual files (like YouTube); audio only (podcasts or MP3 form); or print. Ten winners will be selected from across Canada and invited to attend the 2008 Telecom Laureate Awards Gala and Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies in Ottawa/Gatineau on October 29, 2008, and have exclusive introductions to Canadian telecom senior executives. The top two winners will receive $1,500 scholarships.

“The Future Telecom Leaders contest is a novel and exciting way to engage young minds on the question of Canada’s telecommunications future,” says Lorne Abugov, Founder and Director of Canada’s Telecommunications Hall of Fame. “The industry is looking for the creative ideas and raw talent of entrepreneurial youth to regain some of Canada’s glory in telecom.”

Read the full story in Market Watch here.

Sri Lanka Pornography Regulatory Commission?

Chanuka Wattegama — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:08:34 +0000

In one of the two websites it runs, Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) gives its mission statement – which is cut and pasted below:

“To create the optimum conditions for the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka by serving the public interest in terms of quality, choice and value for money; the service providers with equitable access to spectrum and other common resources; and the nation in its drive for socio-economic advancement through a skilled and ethical workforce.”

We are surprised to see pornography not mentioned – considering the latest task TRCSL has been assigned – blocking porno. Lankadeepa reports only about blocking pornographic movies and video clips, not images. Assumed strict enforcement, this can lead to the ban of not just YouTube but Gmail and Yahoomail also, because pornography videos can easily be distributed via e-mail.

For the record, except for few countries including Cuba and North Korea, which had restricted Internet access in full (not just porno sites) no country in general blocks porno sites. Most countries that impose Internet censorship aim blocking political content – not porn. At least three Asian countries Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia blocked YouTube recently for limited periods but have later revised their decisions.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Imagination par excellence

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:32:57 +0000

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, resident of Sri Lanka, citizen of the United Kingdom, and man of the universe, passed away on the morning of the 19th of March. His was a life well lived. He will be remembered.

Sir Arthur imagined what the world could be. In some cases, such as the geostationary orbit that was named after him, he even did the mathematics to substantiate his imagination. But the mathematics was not the true achievement: it was that he imagined this wondrous idea of a specific orbit where satellites would be stationary in relation to the earth and could therefore serve as very tall towers for wireless transmissions with line of sight covering one third of the surface of the globe; it was that he imagined it a decade before anything had been sent that far into space and before the rockets with power had been designed.

His was a creative mind until the end. I recall him saying that we should consider a single time zone for the world at a video conference that we participated in back in 1998. I remember then laughing and telling him off camera that only he could get away with such outlandish and impractical claims. Yet, as I saw young people working in BPOs in Bangalore and Manila and then Colombo running to world time, I began to see his point.

I recall him forwarding me an e-mail from BT labs around 2000 asking what could be done on Giga Bit network. I, cautious quasi-bureaucrat, talked about the dangers of supply-side push. But Sir Arthur was all imagination. Today, when the YouTube site consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000, I realize the incredible ability of that wonderful mind.

Satellites for arms control. He thought it first. And then Ronald Reagan said, famously, “doveryai, no proveryai” (trust but verify).

He also imagined Sri Lankan living in peace. With Sir Arthur’s track record, may be we stand a chance.

A generous man and a kind man. It was easy to be generous with money when you plenty. But he was generous with time, the scarcest of all commodities. I was an underling at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies in 1985-86, tasked with connecting Sri Lanka to the inchoate Internet, then Arpanet. He paid attention to my project, invited me to play with his lifetime CompuServe subscription from his home at a time when international calls were like gold. It was rarely that he declined an invitation or refused an appointment for a visitor wanting an autograph and a photograph.

He cared. I recall one of the early “Internet to your home” programs I was helping with at the government TV channel in 1999. In the run up to the millennium, we had cooked up this idea of asking significant people to name five people who had made the most important contributions to the dying 20^th century, and then doing live web searches about the named individuals to demonstrate the power of the Internet. Few hours before the first show was to air, I got a desperate call. They did not have the person to answer the question lined up.

Sir Arthur to the rescue. I called him from the studio live. He spoke on speaker phone and I translated his list and rationale. I still recall the thought he had given to his list and rationale. The inventor of the jet engine was on his list, beyond the usual suspects.

The show went on for all of 1999. I recall how often Sri Lankans of significance who were asked to give their lists included Sir Arthur among the five. There he was, in the company of Gandhi and Mandela.

We were fortunate to have him live here in Sri Lanka with us. Over the last thirty years, not much good news has come out of this country. War, refugees, riots, tsunami. It gets kind of tiresome when you’re at lunch with a bunch of foreigners, someone asks where you’re from, and then a pall of gloom descends on the table because the talk is of war and suicide bombers.

I used to say I was from Sri Lanka, where Arthur Clarke lived. And then, we’d have a pleasant lunch-time conversation about the literary license he had taken to move Sri Lanka south to the equator so that the space elevators could be located there (Fountains of Paradise, 1979) or his claim that the oceans surrounding Sri Lanka were the closest he could get to outer space in his life time.

Thank you, Sir Arthur.

This was written for Montage, the monthly news magazine.

The big picture on broadband QOS

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:21:05 +0000

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam – New York Times

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

Pakistan is not the only country that blocks Internet

Chanuka Wattegama — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:37:56 +0000

The Economist is not correct saying ‘No Evidence’ of Internet blocking in Sri Lanka, and in Laos and Cambodia the Internet usage is low so blocking does not make any difference.

As shown, even in Asia the attitude of officialdom varies when it comes to filtering content of a social nature. In many places agreements are set with service providers to block nasty stuff such as child pornography. In a few countries intervention is stronger, up to the level of pervasive censorship. This week Pakistan’s block on YouTube accidentally caused an international outage for that website. Iran and Saudi Arabia have also prevented their citizens from accessing the video-sharing site.

Source: The Economist, Chart Gallery

Pakistan Lifts Ban on YouTube Web Site

Chanuka Wattegama — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:24:49 +0000

Pakistani officials have lifted a ban on the YouTube video-sharing Web site, saying that material deemed offensive to Islam has been removed.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered Internet providers to unblock the site Tuesday.

In a statement Tuesday, YouTube confirmed the Web site was again accessible in Pakistan. Company spokesman Ricardo Reyes says YouTube took down the particular link on Saturday, after receiving flags from the YouTube community and determining the content violated the Web site’s terms of use.

Read the full story in ‘VOA News’ here.

HazInfo video positively reviewed

Rohan Samarajiva — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:04:18 +0000

humanitarian.info » The Long Last Mile

Courtesy of Nuwan on the humanitarian-ict mailing list, I just watched “The Long Last Mile” on YouTube. Produced by Television for Education – Asia Pacific, it describes the project by LIRNEasia to evaluate Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination. Some useful points in an accessible format – redundancy in communication technologies, identification of key responders, community engagement in the process, the importance of simulation exercises for learning, and so on. Only 12 minutes long, it’s definitely worth watching. Plus, YouTube! Web2.0! Etc, etc.

The Great Firewall of China and its Sri Lanka equivalent

Rohan Samarajiva — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 10:09:30 +0000

It is well known that China polices the Internet content that its citizens can access. The story below talks about a growing movement within China that seeks to challenge these arbitrary restrictions on simple information retrieval and publishing actions. A 17-year old girl’s comment “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” seems particularly powerful to me and motivated me to write this post.

Several months ago, the government of Sri Lanka blocked access to Tamil Net, a website used by many, including almost all the important journalists, to find out the other side of our one-sided news stories on the war. Of course, this was easily circumvented by those who wanted to. But I now regret that I did not speak out against it at that time. When the government shut down phone networks in the North and the East, I posted the facts, but did not explicitly protest. Few others did.

The lack of strong opposition to their censorious actions has now led the government to take another step: to shut down SMS use on Independence morning. Censorship is coming close to home.

Mobile or fixed phones (the million plus CDMA phones can also for this while people are moving around) can be used to convey messages and coordinate actions. So can SMS. If the government believes that SMS poses a security threat, it should come out and tell us exactly what that threat is, before shutting down a service we have paid for and are entitled to use.

The Telecommunications Act lays down specific provisions for these kinds of actions. I want to know whether these lawful provisions were followed. Were these provisions followed when the phone networks were shut down for long periods in the North and the East?

If not, the actions taken last night to shut down SMS were unlawful. The shutting down of the phone networks in the North and East were illegal. I believe that it is necessary to protest these unlawful and arbitrary actions if we are to prevent the extension of the Great Firewall to this country as well. Otherwise we will not end up like China; our fate will be that of Burma.

Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels – New York Times

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a historical allusion to mock his country’s censorship system.

“Many people don’t know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an invisible great wall,” he wrote. “Can blocking really work? Kangxi knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are needed to guard those thousands of miles.”

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall’s restrictions, was no less philosophical. “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. “I don’t want to be silent, even if everyone else shuts up.”

“The Long Last Mile” Now Available Online

Udu-gama — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:56:21 +0000

The “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination” (HazInfo) project full-length video documentary, “The Long Last Mile”, is now available on YouTube. TVE Asia Pacific, a HazInfo partner, has also published an article on the premiere of the video in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

More coverage of the Dhaka HazInfo Dissemination Workshop event on 25 October can be found at the Bangladesh Network Office for Urban Safety of BUET.

The new new thing in WiFi

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 08:26:38 +0000

A Wi-Fi Express Lane – New York Times

IT’S axiomatic in the computer world that nothing is ever fast enough. And so it goes with popular wireless Wi-Fi networks, which already seem overcrowded and slow. The growing interest in video sites like YouTube and streaming TV programs online has served to underscore the problem. Naturally, the wireless manufacturers are happy to step into the breach with a new, faster Wi-Fi standard. Well, almost.

Under the technical rubric 802.11n, the new Wi-Fi routers and adapters for desktops and laptops are based not on a completed specification but on a draft version of the specification that is before the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standards body. The institute standard is not expected to be ratified until early in 2008.