In the recent special issue of Information Technology and International Development, Ayesha Zainudeen et al. identified the non-ICT barriers to the spread of e commerce in developing countries, including payment mechanisms when credit cards did not exist and the bad state of the postal services. The NYT has a fascinating story about how Indian entrepreneurs are combining cheap and plentiful labor and ICTs, to develop workaround solutions. Several months ago, when Prabhu Kumar could not find a book he wanted in bookstores here, he found it online at Amazon.com for $10.
A company has done real download speed tests in multiple US cities and Idaho has come last at 318 kbps. This is in the same range as much of South Asia. The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: In Pocatello, it would take nearly 12 seconds to download that music file, according to the study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Mass., a Boston suburb, it would take just over one second.
I was privileged to listen to a presentation by Dr C Mohan on IBM’s collective wisdom on technology trends yesterday at the inaugural session of WSO2Con 2011. There were many, many fascinating nuggets, but what particularly struck me was the prediction of the importance of big public data sets. The very first post I made in 2011 was on this subject. We have open data sets, but they are just there. How can we make them more usable and truly open?
The m payments in buses research conducted as part of the Mobile 2.0 component of the 2008-10 research cycle is about to be piloted by the private bus owners association: “The private bus industry in Sri Lanka incurs an immense loss of more than Rs.13 billion annually due to the current system of collecting bus change from passengers. The government incurs an annual loss of about Rs.500 million owning to the production of coins each year.
The political thriller The Ghost Writer hinged on the memory chip of a GPS device in a borrowed car. The whole panoply of issues around information generated by US citizens as they go about our daily business (and access to that information by the state) is to be decided by the US Supreme Court. It’ll take a while for the rights of those in other jurisdictions to be defined. The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars. “The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
Making m payments work is not easy. Common standards have to be created and accepted, so that retailers have to invest in one piece of equipment. They are trying to do it in the UK but also giving the elbow to a disruptive competitor. That may be changing, however. In France, the government in 2010 began trials of mobile payments for bus and train tickets in Nice and Paris.
On several occasions, I had stated that the mobile industry HHI in India was lower than the US Department of Justice threshold for all industries. The Obama people had revised it to 2500 in 2010. That means that most S Asian telecom industries are below the threshold. The Justice Department has officially used HHI since 1982, and the guidelines were revised by the Obama administration in 2010. Mr.
The spread of mobile telephony, especially among the poor, is one of the greatest public-policy successes of all time. Not because government officials went around identifying the deserving poor and handing them telephones manufactured in government factories, but because they focused on removing barriers to participation in the supply of communication services and allowed private suppliers and customers to collectively evolve new business models that connected hitherto unimaginable numbers of people at hitherto unthinkably low prices. The mobile revolution was building up a head of steam from the 1990s, but really took off at the turn of the century, with massive growth occurring in South Asia since around 2004. That is when LIRNEasia started work, with a focus on South Asia. At the urging of Randy Spence we began the Teleuse@BOP demand-side survey.
Our good friend Nalaka Gunawardene has blogged about the difficulties of figuring out how many people are actually using the Internet in Sri Lanka. He shares our frustration with the archaic data reporting by the TRCSL. This produced a total of 2,184,018 — which takes the percentage of population to almost 11%. And if we apply the same average number of 3 users, it could give us 30% of population accessing and using the Internet. But is that assumption of 3 users per subscription equally applicable to mobile devices?
Even countries like Sri Lanka have 300 MW energy plants. The power generated by Bhutan’s Tala dam is more than 1000 MW. Looks like the data centers are more efficient than we thought. I’ve had little time for people who criticize energy use of web search. Earlier writing was without too much data, because data was not available.
The increase of smuggled mobile phones in prisons across America has prompted the Government Accountability Office investigating any links between the high cost of landline phone calls and mobile phone use. It has been found that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) charges high on landline calls as it uses the funds to pay for inmate wages and other amenities, rather than those costs coming from the State as would happen in most countries. The BOP charges inmates $0.06 per minute for local calls and $0.23 per minute for long distance calls, with no connection charge.
We have worse postal services in our region. They do not have hard budget constraints, so they keep going. But the future looks bleak for those that do have hard budget constraints: Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago. It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.
The end game in m health: medical monitors implanted in the body, wirelessly connected to doctors and nurses who can take remedial action. Not really something researched in Nuwan Waidyanatha’s m health projects, but still worth keeping an eye on: “If the technology delivers as promised,” Mr. Casey says, “then we believe that’s when we’ll move from sensors on people diagnosed with a disease to literally everybody.” Professor Rogers is a co-founder of MC10, an electronics company in Cambridge, Mass., that is aiming to turn the epidermal monitor prototype into a commercial product in 2013.
In our current emergency communication research aiming to enable interoperability between Freedom Fone and the Sahana Disaster Management System for disseminating Common Alerting Protocol messages and receiving Situational Reports over voice channels, we came a cross the situation where the 2N UMTS modem license had silently expired. During our silent-test this weekend, in preparation for a drill this week, we noticed that the license had abruptly expired. Unaware of the licensing dependency, the Sarvodaya Hazard Information Hub staff were scratching their heads trying to figure out what had happened. Even though the problem was identified, given that it is the weekend, getting any immediate support from the vendor is questionable. This project: FF4EDXL follows from LIRNEasia’s HazInfo and Biosurveillance research.
Our world is still overwhelmingly populated by feature phones, but it won’t be long before smartphones take over (only question is when). Just yesterday we were discussing how GPS enabled smartphones, if given to government officials or even private sector people, can overcome the problem of them actually going to the places they’re supposed to go to (the example was the agriculture extension officer who does not go to the actual place where the plants are, but gives instructions from the office or the road). So here’s an update on the smartphone wars: The competition is only going to grow more heated. Android doesn’t just use different carriers, different manufacturers, and different software than the iPhone; it represents a different vision for the entire mobile industry. Apple exerts complete control over the iPhone.
One of the most significant ICT applications in the world is being pioneered in India: the Unique Identifier. “What we are creating is as important as a road,” said Nandan M. Nilekani, the billionaire software mogul whom the government has tapped to create India’s identity database. “It is a road that in some sense connects every individual to the state.” For its proponents, the 12-digit ID is an ingenious solution to a particularly bedeviling problem.