Yesterday ICANN started receiving applications for new gTLDs with a very high hope to “discover the next big .thing”. You can also have a video overview of the Next Big .Thing. This initiative of ICANN has already generated lot of interest from all...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
Introducing competition in the Pacific is a challenge. With the exception of Paupa New Guinea, all the Pacific Island countries are so small and population so dispersed that telecom investors have very little interest. On top of this, these Pacific mar...
According to LBO’s second write up on our teleuse results, the higher awareness of health information services in Sri Lanka can be explained by two factors: the mismatch between supply and demand in the government health-services sector and the existence since around 2000 of e Channeling, a multi-modal service that allows people to make appointments at private health facilities (and pay for them) over a mobile, over the Internet, through an intermediary at a local pharmacy and so on. I tend to give greater weight to the latter; government health services are rationed through congestion all over the world, not only in Sri Lanka. There is nothing like the service being available for awareness to rise. The study in 2011 by the LIRNEasia think tank said found that the use of mobile phones for services other than the basic voice function was still sparse among the poorest users compared with a previous survey in 2008. In Sri Lanka only six percent of users in the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) or poorest segment knew of banking services through mobile phones compared with 18 percent in India and 15 percent in Thailand.
Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, has challenged the U.N. report and questioned the merit of accessing Internet a human right. He said, “It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living.
In the Pacific, as per the Doing Business 2012 report there are winners and losers. The economy that improved the most in the ease of doing business in 2010/11— with improvements in 3 or more areas of regulation measured by Doing Business— is the Solomon Islands.
In the Pacific, as per the Doing Business 2012 report there are winners and losers. The economy that improved the most in the ease of doing business in 2010/11— with improvements in 3 or more areas of regulation measured by Doing Business— is the S...
We predicted the spread the BTN model from Asia to Africa. We saw the duopoly structure in Latin America preventing its spread to that continent. We really didn’t say much about Europe, except in passing. But it looks like the issuance of a fourth license in France (we did not even know France had only three operators! How backward!
If telephony was supplied as it was in the bad old government-monopoly days, we wouldn’t have the current levels of access. It is because the service was reinvented that things changed. In the same way it is necessary to reinvent the university. The writer thinks mobile phones, especially smartphones will have something to contribute to the solution. From South Asia through much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, it’d be impossible to build schools or train teachers fast enough to keep up with the “youth bulge” that has given humanity more than a billion teenagers either to nurture or tame — the difference depending largely on access to education beyond elementary grades.
For some time, I was thinking to have a PIRRC blog to share and comment on some interesting worldwide ICT news and developments with my colleagues in the Pacific. It was not urgent so I carefully placed it in my New Year resolutions basket. The basket ...
For some time, I was thinking to have a PIRRC blog to share and comment on some interesting worldwide ICT news and developments with my colleagues in the Pacific. It was not urgent so I carefully placed it in my New Year resolutions basket. The basket ...
We’ve been interested in traceability since Harsha attended a conference in Cairo and then we got IDRC to fund our first agriculture research. And from bar codes, we got interested in QR codes too. At 8.01 a.m.
The awaited end of rapacious money making from international calls is nigh, according to Telegeography. International long distance traffic growth is slowing rapidly. According to new data from TeleGeography, international long distance traffic grew four percent in 2011, to 438 billion minutes. This growth rate was less than one-third of the industry’s long-run historical average of 13 percent annual growth. Because telcos must rely on strong volume growth to offset inevitable price declines, slowing traffic growth is making life ever more difficult for international service providers.
The story now is about Samsung’s rise and HTC’s decline. But the silence is more interesting: no talk about Chinese manufacturers. The US 100 computer handset is Huawei’s. Let’s see how this story gets written next year. HTC was the first company to make a big bet on Android.
Some countries chafe at the fact that their largest investor, employer and/or tax payer is foreign. In many developing countries, this is a mobile operator who came in under the radar to a small and unimportant sector and by growing rapidly became the largest entity before the nationalists could stop them. Such was the case with Digicel in Haiti. But according to a report, it looks like win-win for the company and the country and for the rest of us too, because Digicel seems to be pioneering a new model for managing disaster recovery. Digicel, on the other hand, is the country’s largest employer and taxpayer.
We’ve been seen as an ICT shop, wrongly. To us ICT is a domain. We apply the tools of economics, law and public-policy analysis to various domains. In the past it has been primarily ICTs. But agriculture is a domain we have been active in for some time, with the engagement increasing qualitatively in recent times.