Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha recently completed an action research project on how local-language voice communication can be used in early warning and other disaster management tasks. A 10 mt video has just been released.
Our sister organization RIA has been pushing hard for lower termination rates in South Africa. Now in the context of a retail price war, a small operator has joined the call. This nicely refutes the claim that mobile termination rates have nothing to do with retail prices. In a move that will no doubt irk MTN and Vodacom, Knott-Craig says he wants the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) to drop the rates even further beyond the 40c/minute they will reach in March 2013. “To Icasa, I say: ‘Drop mobile termination rates even further, provide Cell C with asymmetrical rates to help us achieve the scalability we need to compete even more fiercely with the large incumbents, and we will surprise you and them with our response.
Few months back, our COO Helani Galpaya was out in the field in Indonesia, doing qualitative interviews with BOP teleusers. She picked up an odd response pattern: negative answers to questions about Internet use that would lead us to conclude the respondent was not an Internet user but claims that they were using Facebook on the mobile. So it seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook. This is the gist of the argument in Wired: Today, after just eight years in existence, Facebook now has more than 750 million users all by itself. At that astonishing rate of growth, the company is on track to accomplish much more than just a multibillion-dollar IPO.
This is what we might use if we were to have a tagline. We’ve been using it since our launch in 2004. But now it seems that MIT Poverty Lab research shows that hope in the heart leads to money in the pocket. Nice summary by the Economist. The results were far more dramatic.
Response to the Draft VAS Guideline (BTRC/LL/VAS(391)/2012, dated 31-01-2012) LIRNEasia is a regional think tank that has, among other things, conducted research on VAS in Bangladesh. The comments below are based on (a) examination of the policy, regulatory and business issues pertaining to mobile VAS in the context of LIRNEasia’s 2008-2010 research program on mobile 2.0; and (b) detailed analysis of the practical experience of CellBazaar, a successful VAS developed in Bangladeshi conditions. The peer-reviewed journal article on a successful Bangladeshi value-added service, CellBazaar, is attached. LINK.
After watching the video, please take a few minutes to complete this questionnaire (there are only three simple questions to answer). You may scroll to the bottom to access the questionnaire; else click here. Thank you in advance. With the spread of affordable telecom services, most Asians now use their own phones to stay connected. Can talking on the phone help those responding to emergencies to be better organised?
In all businesses, it is important to keep an eye on game-changing technologies. As South Asia places even greater weight on outsourcing of various kinds in their drive to increase service exports, it is worth keeping an eye on unsourcing, according to the Economist: FOR the past decade, technical support has been in the vanguard of globalisation. With the costs of intercontinental communication shrivelling to virtually nothing, phone and online customer services have migrated to wherever they can be managed most efficiently and cheaply. India blazed the trail, building a $5 billion outsourcing business on helping Westerners solve high-tech niggles. Recently, the Philippines has taken over as the world’s call-centre hotspot, offering comparable wage costs to India, with the added benefit—at least to North American ears—of a Yankee drawl.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a dependency theorist of a different kind. Not the whiny, it’s all the fault of imperialists kind, but one who saw local agency in the creation of the status quo and who clearly understood that poor countries would get out of their condition only through the actions of their own people, defined by local circumstance. He was a formative intellectual influence on me. His writings on globalization and marginalization have defined LIRNEasia’s outlook. The Library of Congress will award the $1 million John W.
Europe was the pioneer in regulating voice roaming. It has now acted on data roaming. If talk could bring down prices, South Asia would also be a pioneer. European lawmakers on Thursday approved a plan to extend and lower the Continent’s limits on mobile phone roaming charges paid by consumers for another five years, and added the first controls on mobile Internet use. In addition to the caps, the legislation adopted by the European Parliament will allow E.
Every where Government agencies are territorial and fear losing their budgets and ability to stand ground. Therefore, choose to work as a silo with less lateral integration. Such structures are ineffective and lead to irresponsible behaviour at the expense of causing havoc on the citizens. Time and time again we hear of the shortcomings arising from unplanned and ad-hoc procedures carried out in the presence of hazard events. The past experience being the 2012 April 11 Sumatra earthquake.
David Ebert, the second keynote speaker at the ISCRAM2012, in his talk says – “Recently, big data analytics has become the buzz in international news and corporate campaigns as the technology to change the future. However, while necessary in our modern data deluge of over one zetabyte of digital data, the common big data analytics approach tends to utilize only computational power and algorithms to turn data into information and then knowledge and provide an answer to the responder or decision maker using the system. In contrast, visual analytics capitalizes on the best and complimentary abilities of both components of the human-computer decision-making process through iterative, interactive visual interfaces to leverage and supplement the cognitive capabilities of the human user.” In our Real-Time Biosurveillance work, this is exactly what we did; thus, take the over 100s of records coming from each clinical facility every day, then present them to Epidemiologists using temporal and spatial data visualization methods offered by the T-Cube Web Interface. Additionally, provide them with tools to drill into and apply statistical analyses methods to look for unusual patterns in the large data set.
Francis Boon presented the LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya conducted feasibility study at the CDAC Media and Tech workshop in London.
Claude S. Fischer wrote one of the most important books on teleuse, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, University of California Press. (1992). I’ve owned the book for years; recommended it to many. He knows what he’s talking about.
We have been grateful for funding from the UK Department for International Development channeled through IDRC. In the speech that I quote from below, the UK Minister for Universities and Science, comes out strongly for public availability of publicly funded research. Therefore, it is pleasing to be able to report that LIRNEasia has insisted on making its publicly funded research, publicly available, with almost no exceptions. Our starting point is very simple. The Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results.
A short piece I wrote on my own time (IDRC is subject to Canadian government restrictions against any expenditures of Canadian funds in/for Myanmar) was just published in English in the Myanmar Times. I am hopeful the Bamar translation will also be published. The text is below: In 2010, I worked on a section of an ITU report about information and communication technologies in the least developed countries (ITU, 2011). Analyzing the countries that were at the bottom of the league tables in telecom, I found to my unhappiness that Burma was one before the last in mobile telephony. Hearing that N Korea was reaching 1 million active connections by end 2011, I checked the data again.
Ericsson has released results of a representative sample survey (3,000 sample) of teleuse in Bangladesh. This is a rare quantitative study for the region. We hope to make a few more posts on it, hopefully after getting a hold of the full report. The Daily Star provides a summary worth reading. The trend towards internet use for social networking in urban areas of the country is growing remarkably, keeping pace with the global trend, he said.