The oldest Department of Mass Communication in Sri Lanka (University of Kelaniya) is running a national conference on the future of media studies in Sri Lanka. I know this from the newspapers. I cannot provide links to any information on the event because none seems to exist, including information on the Department. However, they had invited Nalaka Gunawardene, a friend and colleague, to speak on new media. He was kind enough to share his slides with us.
How can peer review be effective when the underlying data cannot be shared? When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world.
One thing we know about “big data” in developing countries is that the only data stream that covers the poor is that which is generated by the mobile operators. Here is an account of an interesting application of mobile big data: There’s a vast market of consumers in countries like Brazil, China, India, and the Phillipines who want access to financial services like credit cards, loans, or insurance,” says Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi’s chief executive. “But while they may have jobs, and some have bank accounts, there really is no credit history for them.” One thing they do have? Mobile phones.
More than 40,000 ultra-orthodox Jewish males had attended a rally to discuss the evils of the Internet while the women (who are segregated) watched from homes, according to the NYT. What I find interesting is the use of ICTs to discuss the evils of ICTs. The Amish who keep the telephones in a separate shack outside their homes, seem less hypocritical. The rally in Citi Field on Sunday was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews. Those in attendance were handed fliers that advertised services like a “kosher GPS App” for iPhone and Android phones, which helps users locate synagogues and kosher restaurants.
LIRNEasia conducts large-sample surveys. We explain that they are scientific surveys because random sampling is used. Sometimes we don’t emphasize it enough. But apparently we should. A US Representative has exhibited his ignorance by announcing that random is not scientific.
A story on fines imposed on Etisalat’s Nigerian affiliate describes its international reach (without mention of the Sri Lankan affiate): It is easy to see why the company continues to look outside its home market despite the risk of complications. Pressed by Dubai’s agile operator, du, Etisalat has seen eroding domestic profits and market share. Meanwhile, revenues from the company’s international operations, driven by strong performance in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Afghanistan, grew 21 percent in the first quarter of 2012, compared with the same period last year. Etisalat’s international gains helped first-quarter total revenue rise 2 percent to 8.2 billion dirhams, or $2.
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.
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.
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.