We were flattered to see the highest authority for telecom in India use an image from our Teleuse@BOP research, unacknowledged, on the front page of its website. The image appears to have been taken from a post from our partner on this project, Nalaka Gunawardene. We have more good images. We’d happy to share them with an entity as prestigious as the DoT. Just ask.
LIRNEasia and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority co-hosted an event titled “What can telecommunications do for Agriculture?” in Islamabad on 3rd July 2012. The event was intended to stimulate cross-sectoral conversations between the telecommunications and agriculture sectors in Pakistan and was the first event of its kind in Pakistan. The presentations from the event are given below: Welcome note by Dr Muhammad Yaseen, Chairman PTA Session 1: Information needs and ICT access by the poor Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia How the poor use ICTs: Findings from multi-country studies of Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid Ms.
Interesting, but perhaps not fully accurate, first read of the emerging cloud-centric model from the NYT. We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud. “We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.
I was pleased to read that detection devices for nuclear hazards are to be set up in Sri Lanka, even if it was from a foreign publication. I have been one of the few to point out that Sri Lanka lives in the shadow of nuclear reactors, while getting none of the benefits. This announcement indicates that someone in authority is paying attention. Following the request of AEA, International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) decided to help Sri Lanka set up seven early warning detectors and provide equipment worth 72,000 Euros, said Warnakulasuriya. “With nuclear leakage at Fukushima in Japan last year the region felt the need for nuclear disaster warning systems.
Al Jazeera reports that a lot of server farms got knocked out by bad weather in the US. Instead of making us rethink the cloud, this suggests that we need more redundancy, preferably with server farms on the other side of the world. Sean Ludwig, from VentureBeat, wrote in a blog post, “The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers.” The outages on Amazon’s cloud server come two weeks after a similar incident when a number of popular websites hosted by Amazon went down. A report into the incident by Amazon found that a configuration error was made during a routine upgrade.
WSJ has a piece on big data. “It’s not unlike a microscope—taking something you can’t see and bringing it into the scale of perception,” Aaron Koblin, 30, told me at lunch in Google’s San Francisco office. He’s head of the company’s Data Arts Team. Mr. Koblin’s work sits right on the line between art and information.
Google is entering the cloud services market. Cloud computing just got a lot bigger. On Thursday Google announced that it would offer computing as a service accessible over the Internet, much like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. Google said its prices would be about 50 percent below those of current market rates. Urs Hölzle, the Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said Google was drawing off its own long history of managing millions of servers around the world.
Earlier this month, I visited Papua New Guinea, the biggest country in the Pacific with a population of over six million and having 462,840 square km of land.
PNG is an amazing and culturally diverse place on earth. It is estimated that more th...
Earlier this month, I visited Papua New Guinea, the biggest country in the Pacific with a population of over six million and having 462,840 square km of land.
PNG is an amazing and culturally diverse place on earth. It is estimated that more th...
LIRNEasia and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority are jointly organizing an event on the role of telecommunications in agriculture at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad on 3rd July 2012. The event aims to increase cross-sectoral conversations and work in promoting the use of ICT applications in agriculture. LIRNEasaia is being represented by our CEO Rohan Samarajiva and research managers Sriganesh Lokanathan and Nilusha Kapugama More details to follow later.
The Sri Lanka Medical Association is organizing a Symposium on eHealth Opportunities and Challenges in Sri Lanka, July 6th 2012 at BMICH, Colombo. Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha is one of the invited speakers at the session on e health initiatives: Current e health initiative in Sri Lanka 1.15 am eIMMR Dr N.C. Kariyawasam, MBBS, MSc Medical Officer (Health Informatics) Ministry of Health & Dr B.
One of the things that LIRNEasia tries to do in the region is to maintain good working relationships where possible with high-quality universities in the region. The Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) has been on our radar from the start (with one of its faculty Dr Joseph Wilson working with us as a Research Fellow from the start). However, the return to Pakistan of Professor Adil Najam to assume duties as the Vice Chancellor of LUMS resulted in the interest moving up a level. Therefore we took the opportunity afforded by our agricultural applications event in Islamabad to arrange a visit. It is our hope that this will result in at the minimum a greater involvement by LUMS in CPRsouth and hopefully some joint proposal writing to support research.
The ITU homepage announces the death of former Secretary General (1983-89) Richard Butler. Dick Butler had many achievements to his credit, the most well known being the successful outcome of the crucial and difficult World Administrative Telephone and Telegraph Conference (WATTC) held in Melbourne in 1988 at which new rules governing the conduct of international telecommunications services were approved in a fraught environment. There is value in looking at that achievement today, especially in light of the upcoming WCIT in Dubai, that will seek to revisit the International Telecommunication Regulations adopted in Melbourne during Dick Butler’s watch. What we’d like to emphasize is that Dick Butler was a forward looking man. Having been in the ITU for over two decades prior to becoming Secretary General, he could have acted to reinforce the existing dysfunctional status quo.
We’ve been taking the position that flat-rate pricing (all you can eat) is not what will work in the context of the Budget Telecom Network. Some of our past comments are were in the Indian media and simply blogposts. But now it looks like the big boys in the US are moving away from flat rate. Usage-based billing is seen by some as a fairer alternative to broadband caps, a term most closely associated with Comcast, which had been enforcing a limit of 250 gigabytes per Internet customer per month. Although only a small minority of customers ever exceeded the cap, it became a lightning rod for competitors like Netflix, which accused Comcast of unfairly favoring its own services.
BDnews24.com reports that The minimum tax of Tk 3,000 was endorsed by the MPs, barring those from the boycotting opposition, while the Minister withdrew his proposal to impose tax at source on mobile phone bill.
Less than a month ago, we expressed an opinion on the Bangladesh Finance Minister’s proposal to pile on more taxes on mobile use. Obviously, we could not have been the only people who objected, but looks like it has worked. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has given to pressure from exporters as she asked Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Wednesday to cut the proposed export tax to 0.8 percent at source. Speaking on the proposed budget for the next fiscal beginning on July 1, she also wanted the planned 2 percent tax at source on mobile phone bills altogether waived.