In many Third World and developing countries, the distance between people in need of healthcare and the facilities capable of providing it constitutes a major obstacle to improving health. One solution involves creating medical diagnostic applications small enough to fit into objects already in common use, such as cell phones — in effect, bringing the hospital to the patient. UCLA researchers have advanced a novel lens-free, high-throughput imaging technique for potential use in such medical diagnostics, which promise to improve global disease monitoring, especially in resource-limited settings such as in Africa. The research, which will be published in the quarterly journal Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) and is currently available online, outlines improvements to a technique known as LUCAS, or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging. Read more.
Mobile social networking is still a small part of the way people use their cell phones, but industry officials expect that use will grow, and not just for teenagers who want to text their friends or send short video clips. Analysts and network providers said that workers will adopt mobile social networking, following the way social network sites, such as Facebook, have begun to grow within workgroups that rely on desktop computers. These experts also expect that there will be affinity groups, such as doctors, engineers, lawyers or even baseball fans, who are linked with wireless devices. Mobile social networking makes sense because mobile devices are personal and they are taken everywhere, offering the potential for transmission of quick ideas or images. Mobile social networks will (and some already do) put video, GPS, text, voice and collaboration into the palm of a user’s hand.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Thursday launched a Rs 200-crore (about US$ 40 million) innovation fund for promoting entrepreneurship in the telecom sector. The objective of the fund is to provide opportunities to the entrepreneurs to undertake innovation in the field of telecom with regard to content, software and technologies, Bharti Airtel Joint MD and CEO Manoj Kohli told reporters. This is the first ever telecom innovation fund in the country, he said. Source: The Economics Times
Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said the company hopes to start operations in Sri Lanka within this calendar year, despite the delay in getting interconnection from the local operators there. “Discussions are going on with the Sri Lankan telecom regulator and the existing operators there relating to the interconnection issue. It should be sorted out shortly,” company’s CEO Manoj Kohli told reporters here. “We should be in a position to start our operations there before 2008. It is as per our schedule,” he said.
Last Friday, I was invited to speak at an awards ceremony for the winners of Colomba Wate, a mobile game in Sinhala. The young entrepreneur had given up a cushy university job to start the company, Gamos Technology Solutions. That was perhaps the main reason I agreed to speak at his event within hours of returning to Sri Lanka. The slides that I used to illustrate my talk are here. The basic thesis was that the mobile is now becoming more than voice, or even an Aladdin’s Lamp, to use Muhammed Yunus’ phrase.
The era of the American Internet is ending. Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States. Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
Verizon’s chief technologist took a swipe at Net neutrality advocates on Tuesday, saying the concept has become overly politicized and important engineering details have been overlooked in Washington debates. “We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into political decisions,” Verizon’s Richard Lynch said at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s technology policy conference here. Lynch gave the example of a customer placing a call using a voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, service that relies on time-sensitive packets. Unless a continuous stream of VoIP packets arrives, the call quality can suffer or even become incomprehensible. How to accomplish that in a congested network?
The government today allotted start-up GSM spectrum to new telecom players, including Datacom and Unitech, in four circles of Mumbai, Maharashtra, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh (East). Tata Teleservices, which has got GSM licence under dual technology policy, has also been allotted spectrum in the lucrative Mumbai circle while it is yet to get the radio frequency in other three circles. With this, new players can now roll out services in 10 circles as the government has already released spectrum in six circles of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. In Punjab, only three players have been accommodated as only 15 MHz spectrum was available. HFCL, a CDMA player, has got GSM spectrum in Punjab under the dual technology policy.
Launched this year, the Future Telecom Leaders Contest asks students to address an important question: “How can Canada become a recognized global leader in telecom in the next 10 years?” Students are invited to submit their ideas in a variety of formats: audio-visual files (like YouTube); audio only (podcasts or MP3 form); or print. Ten winners will be selected from across Canada and invited to attend the 2008 Telecom Laureate Awards Gala and Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies in Ottawa/Gatineau on October 29, 2008, and have exclusive introductions to Canadian telecom senior executives. The top two winners will receive $1,500 scholarships. “The Future Telecom Leaders contest is a novel and exciting way to engage young minds on the question of Canada’s telecommunications future,” says Lorne Abugov, Founder and Director of Canada’s Telecommunications Hall of Fame.
Google has thrown its weight behind ambitious plans to bring internet access to three billion people in Africa and other emerging markets by launching at least 16 satellites to bring its services to the unconnected half of the globe. The search engine has joined forces with John Malone, the cable television magnate, and HSBC to set up O3b Networks, named after the “other 3bn” people for whom fast fibre internet access networks are not likely to be commercially viable. They are ordering 16 low-earth orbit satellites from Thales Alenia Space, the French aerospace group, as the first stage in a $750m project to connect mobile masts in a swath of countries within 45 degrees of the equator to fast broadband networks. Larry Alder, product manager in Google’s alternative access group, said the project could bring the cost of bandwidth in such markets down by 95 per cent. “This really fits into Google’s mission [to extend internet use] around the developing world,” he said.
Asia Pacific telecom operators had a big party in Colombo this week. They were celebrating the 21 st anniversary of the global mobile standard, GSM. Despite a few puzzlingly sexist comments about the significance of the 21 st birthday to a “Young Girl” (as though it was not significant for a male) it was a good party. Anyway, the point is that it was not just fun and games. The conference that followed was a serious one.
Sep 4th 2008 | From The Economist print edition Computing: In future, most new internet users will be in developing countries and will use mobile phones. Expect a wave of innovation THE World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that leads the development of technical standards for the web, usually concerns itself with nerdy matters such as extensible mark-up languages and cascading style sheets. So the new interest group it launched in May is rather unusual. It will focus on the use of the mobile web for social development—the sort of vague concept that techie types tend to avoid, because it is more than simply a technical matter of codes and protocols. Why is the W3C interested in it?
The study was conducted by Deuden Nikomborirak and Saowalak Cheevasittiyananond. The total numbers of subscribers have increased significantly since 2001 with the entrance of the 3rd player into the telecom sector. This is the concept of the disruptive new entrant. Until 2001, a duopoly existed and there was a system of price fixing. This changed with the entrance of the new player.
New Delhi: The Indian government is set to begin here Monday the process to e-auction radio frequencies for telecom operators to start third-generation (3G) mobile services across the country and fetch the exchequer over Rs 40000 crore ($10 billion). The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will hold a pre-bid conference here with all the potential consultants – one of whom would oversee the process to e-auction spectrum for next generation mobile applications, officials said. Read the full story in ‘sify.com’ here.
Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director, LIRNEasia argues mobiles (and other ICT tools) play a definite role in the climate change – or rather preventing it. That will decide whether the future generations will see Elephant Pass or not. Irrespective of the outcome of the war, it might be six foot under water soon unless global warming is stopped. Extracts: I will not get into the debate about who should cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, conceding that what little Sri Lanka does will not affect the outcome decisively. Instead, I will simply look at one small area that will help us to reduce our carbon footprint (a good thing to do in any case) and also improve the quality of our lives.