On 31 August 2007, Sarvodaya convened a meeting of the Telecenter National Alliance, made up of most of the operators of telecenters in Sri Lanka. The objective of this activity is mutual learning among the telecenter operators. One of the sessions included presentations on the implications of the teleuse @ BOP results for telecenters by Rohan Samarajiva and on the new EZ pay mobile payment service introduced by Dialog and the National Development Bank by Eran Wickramaratne. The basic argument in the T@BOP presentation was that with 41 per cent of BOP households already and likely to reach 70 per cent, if the government’s proposed taxes do not go through, telecenters will have to develop different strategies to attract phone owners and the remaining non-owners.
It’s tempting to say “we told you so,” but we’ll give in to temptation. We told you so back in discussions in 2006-06. Municipal Wi-Fi | Reality bites | Economist.com IT WAS supposed to democratise the internet and turn America’s city-dwellers into citizen-surfers. In 2004 the mayors of Philadelphia and San Francisco unveiled ambitious plans to provide free wireless-internet access to all residents using Wi-Fi, a technology commonly used to link computers to the internet in homes, offices, schools and coffee-shops.
The growing importance of mobiles is illustrated by the fact that 14% of American households do not have fixed phones; while only 12.3% have no mobiles. This trend which started in Finland has now spread to the bastion of the PSTN where for decades local calls from the fixed phone were free (both incoming and outgoing) compared with having to pay for both on mobile. Competition and bundles of “free” minutes seems to have done the trick. Cellphone-Only Homes Hit a Milestone – New York Times From September 2006 to April 2007, the percentage of Americans in cellphone-only households for the first time overtook the percentage in landline-only households, according to Mediamark Research, a firm that has been tracking such data since the mid-1980s.
In the South Asian region, Pakistan has taken the lead in introducing mobile number portability. Who will be second? As the story below states, this takes some time and planning. LIRNEasia will shortly post a report on the MNP workshop conducted in Islamabad by the PTA last week. :: bdnews24.
I guess this is a lesson in the value of redundancy. :: bdnews24.com :: The Chittagong-Cox’s Bazar fibre optic transmission link with the country’s only submarine cable was back up after about 10 hours of disruptions through Monday, an official with the BTTB said. The breakdown of the link created “congestion” in the overseas phone and disrupted internet services. The transmission link came back up at 00:25am Tuesday after it snapped at 2:30pm Monday, according to Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board.
Japan planning world’s first nationwide earthquake warning system – International Herald Tribune It’s still beyond the reach of science to predict exactly when an earthquake will strike, but Japan will soon get the next-best thing — televised warnings that come before the shaking starts. In an ambitious attempt at protecting large populations from seismic disaster, Japan’s Meteorological Agency and national broadcaster are teaming up to alert the public of earthquakes as much as 30 seconds before they hit, or at least before they can bring their full force down on populated areas. The system — the first of its kind in the world — cannot actually predict quakes, but officials say it can give people enough time to get away from windows that could shatter, or turn off ovens and prevent fires from razing homes. Powered by ScribeFire.
ECPR 2008: Innovations in communications: The role of users, industry, and policy Seville 31 March – 1 April Abstracts for analytical papers are invited on the topic of ‘Innovations in communications: The role of users, industry and policy’.
The article below talks about micro payments in the context of almost everyone having computers, Internet access, credit cards, etc. What we are talking about is m-payments (m for mobile, not micro) in a world where those assumptions don’t hold. But there may be ideas we can pick up from this discussion. In Online World, Pocket Change Is Not Easily Spent – New York Times The idea of micropayments — charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content — was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea.
The Communication Initiative – Funding – IDRC Internship Awards The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Internship programme is for candidates who have shown interest in the creation and utilisation of knowledge from an international perspective and provides hands-on learning experiences in research programme management. Candidates can be Canadians, permanent residents, or citizens of developing countries, who are either currently registered in a Master’s Programme or have completed a Master’s Degree. The 14 awards provide exposure to research for international development through a programme of training in research management and grant administration under the guidance of IDRC programme staff. Powered by ScribeFire.
When we started the indicators work in 2006, we thought we’d be able to crack the problem of defining the mobile customer. We did not. The end result is the we not longer report “mobile/100 people,” preferring instead the more accurate term, “Mobile SIMs/100.” The Arab Advisors Group has reached a similar conclusion. Their recommendations are fine in theory, but we are not sure very practical.
I was asked to write something for world environment day in Montage, a local news magazine, and I wrote about how mobile could reduce the need for travel (in the long run) and thus postpone the inundation of the Maldives. It appears I did not cover all aspects of the problem . . . Is your mobile network green?
It was only in 2005 that Bangladesh got connected to the world through an undersea cable. It is being claimed that this link has been sabotaged, at the same time as the government ordered the shut down of mobile networks, serving multiple millions of customers. :: bdnews24.com :: Dhaka, Aug 23 (bdnews24.com) – International telephony, internet and private international data circuits went down when the submarine cable link was “sabotaged” at 00:05am Thursday, a senior BTTB official confirmed.
Second Tsunami-Detection Station To Bolster Indian Ocean System As part of the U.S. effort, in December 2006, NOAA experts and Thai government officials put a deep-ocean assessment and reporting of tsunamis (DART) station in the Indian Ocean, halfway between Thailand and Sri Lanka. (See related article.)DART systems provide real-time tsunami detection as waves travel across open waters, and each station is linked to a satellite for real-time data transmission on global networks.
The comment about “the world is going to flip” refers to the launch of the Apple i Phone Hewlett Introduces a Web Feature to Make Document Printing Mobile – New York Times “The world is going to flip,” Mr. Scaglia said. “We want to ride the wave of the Web.” The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user’s computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer. Powered by ScribeFire.
The Regional Development Dialogue, published by the UN Centre for Regional Development, in its most recent issue (volume 27(2), Autumn 2006, published in August 2007?!) carries two articles by Shoban Rainford, then at ICTA, and Harsha Liyanage, Sarvodaya on e Sri Lanka and the telecenter component within e Sri Lanka. In an invited comment, LIRNEasia‘s Rohan Samarajiva and Helani Galpaya, identify the e Sri Lanka initiative’s 1919 Government Information Center as a good example of pro-poor e-governance, because the information is available through the telephone, a technology that is more easily accessible to the poor than the Internet and telecenters. The special issue is edited by Subash Bhatnagar, an acknowledged expert on e government who provides a good summary, marred unfortunately by the use of wrong data in Table 1 (p.
As LIRNEasia plans its research program for 2008-09, the issue of money transfers through mobiles (first raised in the academic literature, to the best of my knowledge, by Professor Jens Arnbak in his contribution to a book that I co-edited in 2002) is rising in importance in the news as well as in our own thinking. Migrant Cash Is World Economic Giant – Forbes.com _ India is the world leader in remittances, taking in $23.7 billion in 2005 and an estimated $26.9 billion last year, the World Bank says.