Rohan Samarajiva, Author at LIRNEasia — Page 12 of 182


As I was thinking about how to explain the silliness of charging LKR 200,000 (USD 1,300) per antenna tower per month as proposed by Sri Lanka’s 2018 Budget, I came across this piece on how African governments were shooting themselves in the foot by following the Willie Sutton doctrine: Unfortunately, instead of seizing such opportunities, many African governments are energetically discouraging the spread of technology. Many ban genetically modified crops, refusing even to accept them as food aid when their people are starving. Almost all invest far too little in science and research, and have byzantine visa systems that discourage skilled immigration. And they tax mobile phone and internet companies at punitive rates. In 2015 mobile-phone operators in 12 African countries paid taxes and other fees equivalent to 35% of their turnover, says the GSMA, an industry lobby.

Looking beyond the smartphone

Posted on November 9, 2017  /  0 Comments

We had the good fortune to develop a proposal on training app developers before smartphone started dominating the markets we care about. We did not get the money; they gave it to some Pakistani government outfit that could not even start the work, but that aside, we benefited from the exercise. It forced us to stretch our thinking. In the same way, this article which is about Alexa and its variants is useful in stretching our thinking beyond the smartphone. Modern smartphone platforms have become a minefield of distractions, dominated by social media apps whose primary goal is to occupy ever more time.

Vision and implementation

Posted on November 5, 2017  /  0 Comments

In much of what we do, we have to deal with visions/strategies/roadmaps/plans/etc. and of course implementation. This vision I was asked to discuss is not about ICTs per se, but about a whole country. I tried to provide a structure to the discussion. Here are the slides that will be the basis of the talk I will give tomorrow for the Association of Sri Lankan Sociologists at the Sri Lanka Foundation at 1430.
Most people think platforms and transformative ICT companies are best described by the acronym GAFA. Some add Microsoft to make it five. But living in Asia, we know better. There’s Baidu, Alibaba and TenCent. Alibaba has become one of the most highly valued technology companies in the world, and its recent string of strong financial results has signaled the continued rise of China’s internet industry and the heartiness of its hundreds of millions of online shoppers.
Most of the organizations that were given time at the First Session of the Steering Committee meeting used the time to advertise themselves. I chose instead to present our broad range of contributions to AP-IS in the form of a short presentation of work done under the Project on Myanmar as an Inclusive Information Society. I briefly described some findings from the baseline and endline surveys, pointing out that much of what came out from the ITU on Internet users was worthless. We are not expecting to do such surveys again, though there is value in surveys being done periodically. My second point was on the need to develop an understanding of broadband quality of service experience.
I’ve always had this fascination with the cellar dwellers. Those days, Myanmar was firmly ensconced in the second to last place, kept from the honor of being the least connected place by St Helena. But the 4,000 plus inhabitants have had mobile telephony since 2015. As of two weeks ago scheduled flights are landing in their brand new airport. And they are about to be connected to SAEx soon.
A confluence is the junction of two rivers, especially rivers of approximately equal width. My session at SAARC Law 2017 is entitled Confluence of Law and Technology. The way I see it, there is no alternative but to relax the requirement that the metaphorical rivers be of equal width. Unless, of course, we define law in the Lessig manner, East Coast Code being old style ink on paper interpreted by judges law and West Coast Code being self-enforcing rules built into hardware and software. So, anyway, I worked up a set of slides being from the tech side of the world.
When I was working for the government of Bangladesh I was given a free Teletalk SIM. I wanted to use it. Who doesn’t like free stuff? I tried. Since I spent a lot of time at the Secretariat, I managed to actually make some calls.
We’ve been saying for long that voice will be just another app. Reliance Jio has made it so. Therefore, we should take statements from the senior managers of that company seriously: Spectrum allocation will be the most critical element in adoption of fifth-generation or 5G mobile networks in India, Reliance Jio Infocomm president Mathew Oommen has said. The comment comes in the wake of the government last month setting up a high-level panel with a corpus of Rs 500 crore for research and development to facilitate rolling out of 5G-based services by 2020. “The government has set its focus on 5G.

What is the cloud?

Posted on October 22, 2017  /  1 Comments

I was reading this report on a flight. The flight attendant was highly amused by the title: A cloud for doing good. What a weird title she said. Well, here is an answer from David Pogue to the question of what is the cloud? You may have encountered the Cloud as a synchronizing service.
In the course of our policy work related to big data, we discussed first-degree price discrimination: At a more abstract level, the problem is one of first-degree price discrimination. First-degree price discrimination, or person-specific pricing, has not been practiced or observed because it was not possible to discern reservation values. This constraint may be in the process of being overcome now that capabilities exist to analyze individual behavior as recorded in multiple transaction-generated data sets (Shiller, 2014). Big data and electronic commerce have reduced the costs of targeting and first-degree price discrimination. It is argued that the increased availability of behavioral data may encourage a shift from third-degree price discrimination towards personalized pricing (Executive Office of the President of the United States, 2015).
In 2016 LIRNEasia went to Jaffna for fun. Finally there was a hotel big enough to house our large group so we decided on Jaffna as the location of our annual trip. Many interactions followed, for example on our work on online freelancing. This longer piece was first published in Tamil in Thinakkural. It is interesting that the Tamil paper carried the data tables, but the Financial Times chose to delete them (correction: deleted only in the online version).
I was asked to say a few words on how to use social media at a meeting of government information officers. I anchored my comments around what had occurred in the last few years to make me change my thinking on whether government could effectively use social media. Government organizations provide a range of services to citizens and non-citizens (e.g., foreign investors, visitors).
The NYT piece suffers from peculiar worldview of American and European journalists who think all good innovations come from their part of the world (Singapore pioneered congestion pricing for road use in 1975), but let’s focus on the positive: the drawing out of lessons from Thaler and Springsteen about the need to address hardwired perceptions of fairness: Technology is making “variable” or “dynamic” pricing — the same strategies that ensure a seat on an airplane, a hotel room or an Uber car are almost always available if you’re willing to pay the price — more plausible in areas with huge social consequences. Dynamic pricing of electricity could help bring down pollution, reduce energy costs and make renewable energy more viable. Constantly adjusting prices for access to highways and congested downtowns could make traffic jams, with all the resulting wasted time and excess emissions, a thing of the past. Any sector where supplies tend to be fixed but demand fluctuates — the water supply, health care — would seem like prime candidates for variable pricing.
The secret of success is how bad things are. And things are not very good with regard to banking and financial services in the country with the second lowest population density in Asia: In Myanmar cash is king. Fewer than one in ten of its 53m people has a bank account. But an explosion in smartphone use means rudimentary financial offerings are appearing where even roads are rare. After the end of the state’s mobile-phone monopoly four years ago, mobile penetration jumped from 7% to 89% now.
When I was studying economics in the 1980s, it was quite vulnerable to the criticism that the entire edifice was built on a shaky assumption: homo economicus. But now that Kahnemann, Thaler et al. have slain h.e., economics is that much stronger.