For some time, I was thinking to have a PIRRC blog to share and comment on some interesting worldwide ICT news and developments with my colleagues in the Pacific. It was not urgent so I carefully placed it in my New Year resolutions basket. The basket ...
We’ve been interested in traceability since Harsha attended a conference in Cairo and then we got IDRC to fund our first agriculture research. And from bar codes, we got interested in QR codes too. At 8.01 a.m.
The awaited end of rapacious money making from international calls is nigh, according to Telegeography. International long distance traffic growth is slowing rapidly. According to new data from TeleGeography, international long distance traffic grew four percent in 2011, to 438 billion minutes. This growth rate was less than one-third of the industry’s long-run historical average of 13 percent annual growth. Because telcos must rely on strong volume growth to offset inevitable price declines, slowing traffic growth is making life ever more difficult for international service providers.
The story now is about Samsung’s rise and HTC’s decline. But the silence is more interesting: no talk about Chinese manufacturers. The US 100 computer handset is Huawei’s. Let’s see how this story gets written next year. HTC was the first company to make a big bet on Android.
Some countries chafe at the fact that their largest investor, employer and/or tax payer is foreign. In many developing countries, this is a mobile operator who came in under the radar to a small and unimportant sector and by growing rapidly became the largest entity before the nationalists could stop them. Such was the case with Digicel in Haiti. But according to a report, it looks like win-win for the company and the country and for the rest of us too, because Digicel seems to be pioneering a new model for managing disaster recovery. Digicel, on the other hand, is the country’s largest employer and taxpayer.
We’ve been seen as an ICT shop, wrongly. To us ICT is a domain. We apply the tools of economics, law and public-policy analysis to various domains. In the past it has been primarily ICTs. But agriculture is a domain we have been active in for some time, with the engagement increasing qualitatively in recent times.
We have yet to see the actual questions, but this is very satisfying news. If the questions are good, it justifies our continued engagement with National Statistical Organizations since 2006. If we are still working on indicators, we’ll do our best to spread the word on Sri Lankan good practice. Sri Lanka will collect information about areas like internet access in the first nation-wide household and population census to be conducted in over 30 years, an official said. The census which is to conducted from February 27 to March 21 will have 80,000 ‘enumerators’ visiting every house in the country to count the population and also questions about amenities in the house.
LIRNEasia CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, presented the findings from the six-country study of teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid on 9th December 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand. The presentation took place on the first day of the CPRsouth conference to an audience of about 75 people that included senior-mid level academics and media personnel. Presentation slides can be found here. Some of the media coverage received from Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The Financial Express (Phones a bare essential for bottom of pyramid: Study) The Daily Star (Talk business on mobile) The Hindu Business Line (More poor people own mobile phones, but productive use still a far cry) Lanka Business Online (Mobile momentum) The Bottom Line (Productive use of mobiles needed – LIRNEasia survey) Republica (Low call charges within each network major reason for owning multiple-SIM)
We had the pleasure of participating in the 3rd Joint National Conference on Information Technology in Agriculture at the University of Ruhuna, Mapalana Campus, on the 29th of December 2011. Papers were presented by scholars in ICT (primarily from U of Moratuwa) addressing agriculture problems and by scholars in agriculture (primarily from U of Ruhuna) that had ICT either as the instrument (e.g., sensing technologies) or as object of study (e.g.
Sangamitra Ramachander, PhD, won the best paper competition at the sixth Communication Policy Research South (CPRsouth6) conference while Faheem Hussain, PhD, was judged as the runner up. Sangamitra, currently attached to the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK, presented the paper titled, “The Price Sensitivity of Mobile Use Among Low Income Households in Six Countries of Asia”. The paper analysed data from the six country survey, Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid (T@BOP), conducted by LIRNEasia in 2008. Sangamitra first participated at CPRsouth1 as a young scholar. She then engaged with CPRsouth as a paper presenter at CPRsouth3, 4 and 6 where she presented chapters of her PhD thesis relevant to communication policy.
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.