It is important that the government-owned telcos modernize their management in the face of competition by well-endowed modern companies such as Ooredoo and Telenor. If they do not, their fate will be the same as those of BTCL in Bangladesh and BSNL in India. Cash negative, if not for propping up by government using tax payer money. But it appears that KDDI is not willing to absorb all the MPT staff. For a big country like Myanmar, 11,000 does not seem too high a number.
As we prepare for the IOTX events that start on the 16th of June in Negombo, I was reminded of the first expert consultation we conducted, exactly one month after the tsunami. That was a productive meeting, catalyzing, among other things, the USD 71 million plus dam safety project that has made large swaths of our country safe from inland tsunamis. Thank you to all who worked with us along the way.
Since we run the DRR lecture on a shoestring, there will be no paid media ads. We are grateful for publicity. If forewarned is forearmed and you are in the NGO sector specifically in DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) there’s a lecture on Disaster Risk Reduction Public Lecture: Regional Readiness. Disaster risk reduction is the concept and practice of reducing disaster risks through systematic efforts to analyse and reduce the causal factors of disasters. Reducing exposure to hazards, lessening vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment and improving preparedness and early warning for adverse events are all examples of disaster risk reduction.
LIRNEasia Research Manager Roshanthi Lucas Gunaratne presented the National Broadband Initiatives of India, Malaysia and Indonesia during the International Broadband Round table session at the CPR LATAM (http://www.cprlatam.org/) in Bogota on 30th May 2014. The purpose of this conference was to bring together scholars, members from the private sector and regulators to learn from the studies and experiences that all of them have encountered as they work in the field of ICT policy in the Latin American Region. Other National Broadband Initiatives presented during the International Broadband Roundtable were Australia and New Zealand (Fernando Beltran – University of New Zealand), South Africa (Alison Gillwald – Research ICT Africa), Mexico (Judith Mariscal – CIDE, Mexico) and Argentina and Brazil (Hernán Galperin – Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina).
As part of electricity work LIRNEasia has made recommendations on the importance of DSM in Sri Lanka. Effective DSM is not possible without smart meters and that was an important part of the message, when we were invited by the Colombo Electricity Board (CEB) to share our research with their senior management. So it was with great interest that I perused the research of one of the winning finalists from a Big Data Challenge conducted by Telecom Italia (and partners) with data pertaining to the territories of Milan and of the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy. The datasets covered telecommunications, energy, weather, public and private transport, social networks and events. The researchers utilized smart meter data and behavioral data extracted from the Telecom Italia’s transaction generated data to predict peak daily energy consumption and also the average daily energy consumption for each line through the electrical grid of the Trentino Province.
So it’s not just the companies that actually purchase capacity from cloud service companies. Everyone. Google has a big cloud, too. You’re on it if you use any sort of Google service like email and photo editing. Seventy million Nigerians recently registered for local elections on Google’s cloud and millions more people study on Google’s cloud through the online educational service Khan Academy.
We flagged this as a critical issue in our contribution to the UNCTAD Information Economy Report, written before Snowden. Now the rubber is hitting the road and billions of revenue are at stake. The Snowden leaks and the view that American tech companies were too cooperative with the United States government have hurt the prospects for American tech companies abroad. Earlier estimates of potential lost sales over the next few years have ranged as high as $180 billion, or 25 percent of industry revenue, according to Forrester Research. To address those concerns, the companies are building more data centers abroad.
Cisco predicts that tablets, smartphones, etc will contribute more than half the IP traffic, up from today’s 33 percent. For the first time in the history of the internet, mobile and portable devices will generate more than half of global IP traffic by 2018. That’s one of the headline findings of Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index (VNI), which forecasts global IP traffic for fixed and mobile connections between 2013 and 2018. Cisco finds 33 per cent of all IP traffic originated with non-PC devices in 2013. By 2018, however, that figure shoots up to 57 per cent.
When talking about the preconditions for the success of the Internet, I have talked about the need to develop an an ecosystem, with trust as one element. These issues were also explored in the work on e commerce. The Chinese solution to the problem of trust in virtual transactions is quite interesting. Almost makes one wish we had enough time to monitor Chinese developments in Chinese. The ubiquity of counterfeits points to a serious problem in China today: an absence of good faith.
The policy statement of the new government headed by Narendra Modi promises to continue the NOFN initiative. It makes specific mention of the use of social media for more closely engaging the people. 22. E-governance brings empowerment, equity and efficiency. It has the power to transform peoples’ lives.
Today’s LBO Choices column was the second to be based on LIRNEasia’s 2012-14 inclusive information society research. The basic idea was to see how ICTs could be used to improve the customer experience in important government or government-sanctioned service delivery activities. Other questions included what lessons could be learned from the mobile success story for other government services. When LIRNEasia conducted quantitative and qualitative research on poor micro entrepreneurs in Colombo and secondary cities in Wayamba, it was clear that there was significant interest in managing their energy bills. Sixty one percent had already changed to energy-efficient lighting; over 15 percent were switching off/disconnecting appliance and lights.
LIRNEasia CEO Helani Galpaya recently made a presentation on the use of mobile phones by low-income micro-entrepreneurs in selected cities in Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh at the International Conference on Mobile Business 2014 held in London on the 4-5 June 2014. The presentation was based on a paper by Shazna Zuhyle and Roshanthi Lucas Gunaratne. The research was carried out in selected cities in Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh where supply-side and demand side studies (quantitative survey and a qualitative study) were carried out. The sample of low-income micro-entrepreneurs was selected from urban locations (based on the definition of the respective National Statistic Offices) with 0-9 employees. Framed on LIRNEasia research, it is a descriptive paper of the study that provides recommendations to bridge the gap in service delivery to the under-served population.
“Sadly, role of think tanks has not increased to provide critical inputs to policy making. Universities must also play a big role in this.” This was a tweet from @narendramodi It’s refreshing to get tweets of substance from the leader of the largest democracy. But let’s unpack the tweet. [Knowledge] inputs are critical to [effective] policy making.
Academic publication moves at a snail’s pace. A chapter that I wrote for a futures book that came out in 2013 was actually written in 2010. This is what I said about agriculture: The move to a knowledge-based economy did not mean the end of agriculture, but the blending of agriculture and knowledge. The massive computing power agglomerated in the region enabled a solution to the water crisis that had threatened to turn the bread basket of the Punjab into an arid desert and to start another war between Pakistan and India. The inefficient water-use practices on both sides of the border had driven down the water table and made the great Indus a mere trickle.
The prospects of breakthrough changes in electricity dominated a number of my recent conversations. Could be because we were disseminating our 2012-14 research results to electricity audiences, or because we just finished teaching an introductory course on electricity regulation. But, it’s also possible that the prospects of a step change are imminent, driven by the increasing demand for reliable, universal electricity access by the neo middle classes (to use the terminology of the victorious BJP), and also the technological possibilities opened up by the application of ICTs to electricity networks. But is the development community beginning to look at electricity? One indicator is that electricity papers are being read at ICT4D conferences.
The rise of social media hammered the readership of our blog. So there have been times when I have wondered whether it’s worth the time and effort. Today is not one such day. I was reading the Reforms Chapter of the recently released Annual Report 2013 of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Finance and Planning, when my eyes were snagged by somewhat familiar language: Although Sri Lanka and India have dropped in their rankings: Sri Lanka from 69th place to 76th, a fall of seven places, being overtaken by countries such as South Africa, Indonesia and Thailand: India has dropped from 68th to 83rd place. Philippines, which is a BPO powerhouse has advanced from 86th place to 78th, ahead of India, but behind Sri Lanka.