IDRC has been in the business of applying knowledge to development for forty years. Much better than straight Dollars or Renminibi. But then, that could be a self-serving statement, given we are in research and IDRC is our principal funder. Anyway, Chanuka Wattegama has written about all this in the Daily Mirror, and included references to two of our projects: The aim of the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System, an IDRC supported joint research project of Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia immediately after the 2004 tsunami, was to deploy various alert and notification wireless technologies intended to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to natural and manmade hazards in Sri Lanka. Adopting an ‘all-hazards, all-media’ approach, designed around a set of five wireless communication technologies: addressable satellite radios for emergency alerting, remote alarm devices, mobile phones, fixed phones and VSATs this research evaluated the pros and cons of each technology.
This has been the week of IT and ITES (or queries related to them). A local weekly asked me about the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living survey, where Colombo had come in the lowest 20, but above Indian cities and Dhaka. According to EIU, the survey is for ‘human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in 140 cities in 93 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.’ Companies can then apply this index to an executive’s spendable income to reach a fair cost of living allowance. The purpose of a cost of living allowance is to reimburse employees for excess living costs resulting from a foreign assignment.
I’ve been invited to discuss a paper on Sri Lanka-India services trade. The paper contained a number of ratios calculated using data from the ITC (International Trade Center) on service imports and exports from Sri Lanka. Sadly some of the tables do not pass the smell test. For example, Sri Lanka is not supposed to have imported ANY computer services from 2004 to 2008. The government’s data of exports of software and BPO services do not match the ITC export data.
This is an estimate from a consumer goods retailer that sells 500 laptops a month. When LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP results come out later this month we will be able to see what the numbers are at the bottom of the pyramid. Perhaps this was one of the questions asked in the census? We tried to propose some questions, but they closed early. Albert Tung regional director for South Asia at Asus Technology says it is the third best selling notebook brand in the world.
I co-taught an experimental graduate seminar with one of my colleagues at Ohio State University in the early nineties where we explored what policy could learn from research on how people actually behaved, thought and decided. I taught the first half of the seminar by deconstructing various policy and regulatory debates (dominated by lawyers and economists) to lay bare the fundamental (and unexamined) assumptions regarding human behavior. She taught the second half, talking about how behavioral research could challenge or confirm those assumptions. This then led to multiple funded projects and dissertations that she directed on policy-relevant social science research. It was possibly because of this “priming” (a key concept in contemporary behavioral research) that I was unquestioningly amenable to the suggestion to study how poor people actually used ICTs that came from the research planning sessions we conducted as part of the launch of LIRNEasia in September 2004.
We’re generally in favor of budget business models, but export industries that do not earn enough per employee to pay a decent wage have to be an exception. Here is some analysis I did on the Sri Lanka software export and offshoring BPO industries, based on official figures: The total software earnings of USD 294 million are produced by 27,000 people. That is LKR 99,825 per employee per month. Lower than I expected. On the BPO side, 13,000 people produce USD 98 million.
The first supranational regulator was created in the Eastern Caribbean in the 1990s. It was a logical solution to the problem of micro states that lacked adequate capacity still wanting to do conventional regulation. But it sorely lacked teeth. Now we have a supra-national regulator with teeth. Well worth watching because national regulation is not working too well.
I still recall what Nobel Laureate Yunus told Harsha de Silva during a television interview: the mobile was going to the new Aladdin’s Lamp, giving its user not one thing, but many. I don’t think he meant it would open doors, but that’s what this story documents: Front pockets and purses are slowly being emptied of one of civilization’s most basic and enduring tools: the key. It’s being swallowed by the cellphone. New technology lets smartphones unlock hotel, office and house doors and open garages and even car doors. It’s a not-too-distant cousin of the technology that allows key fobs to remotely unlock automobiles or key cards to be waved beside electronic pads at office entrances.
The World Economic Forum has issued its Global Information Technology Report which includes the NRI rankings. I find the sub indices always more instructive but for now, only the top line aggregate rankings are discussed. The big winner, among the countries LIRNEasia works in and the WEF covers, is Indonesia, advancing from 67th place in 2009-10 to 53rd place in 2010-11, a massive jump of 14 places. Sri Lanka has advanced six places from 72nd to 66th. Bangladesh advances three places to 115th, from 118th.
The International Telecommunication Regulations of 1865 (subjected to a major overhaul in 1988) are what underlie the ITU’s claim to be the oldest international organization. I spent a considerable number of days working on their reform when serving on the Expert Committee appointed by the then Secretary General to propose measures on how to update them. They came to nought partly because several members representing powerful governments wanted nothing to be done. The error of that decision is now becoming apparent. Prime Minister Vladimir V.
Starting with a low base, but 62,000 well paying jobs is a great achievement. Sri Lanka’s information and communications technology workforce has doubled in the past four years as the island ramps up training and investment to make the sector a key export industry. A new survey said the number of ICT sector jobs increased by 100 percent to over 62,000 this year from 30,120 in 2006. Over 50,000 people are estimated to have been employed in the IT sector in 2010. The national ITC workforce survey by the state-run Information and Communication Technology Agency covered 80 state institutions, 325 private sector firms, 30 BPO (business processing outsourcing) firms, and 75 IT training institutes.
Since 2009, farmers in Sri Lanka, have been able to benefit from a new service called Tradenet which provides agricultural market price information through mobile phones. The service is a joint initiative between Sri Lanka’s largest mobile phone operator (Dialog Axiata PLC.) and a not-for-profit called Govi Gnana Seva (GGS). GGS which means “Farmer Knowledge Service” has since 2003, been collecting and dissemination wholesale agricultural produce trade information. An evaluation of this new service by LIRNEasia found that farmers were able to get livelihood benefits by using this system.
A New York Times columnist writes about the possible use of ICTs to counter violent extremism. Not your father’s kind of public diplomacy. Being done by Google, not by a unit with Department of State. I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.
How much should a teleco know about the apps you are running on your mobile? In other words, should it be able to check if you are using Skype on your mobile? According to KPN, 85 percent of the company’s customers who use a Google Android phone downloaded WhatsApp onto their handsets from last August through April. As a result, KPN’s revenue from text messaging, which had risen 8 percent in the first quarter of 2010 from a year earlier, declined 13 percent in the first quarter of this year. At a presentation to investors in London on May 10, analysts questioned where KPN had obtained the rapid adoption figures for WhatsApp.
David Pogue, my favorite writer on gadgets has reviewed the first laptop made specifically for cloud computing: no hard disk, no software. Just the cloud. And the verdict is . . .
Shabbir Syed Abdul, is an academic we know; he’s of Indian origin but living in Taiwan; working with a team of Bioinformatics researchers at the National Yang Ming University. Him and his team have leveraged Facebook to engage the masses in getting their Health Minister to change health policy – “… Early on one of the members posted “Is there any use of these posts? Does our minister have time to read Facebook?” The Minister replied by posting “every message is read by me and my staff”. This modest gesture satisfied the emergency-room staff that their concerns were being taken seriously by the Department of Health, and further motivated them to engage in discussing the issue…“; The Lancet, Volume 377, Issue 9783, Click to read full story