Verizon has launched an anti-iPhone advertising campaign, satirising the Apple handset and its exclusive carrier, AT&T, teasing viewers with the promise of its first Android phones in November. iDon’t have a real keyboard … run simultaneous apps … take 5-megapixel pictures … allow open development … have interchangeable batteries,” say the advertisements, ending with: “Everything iDon’t, Droid does. According to Eric Schmidt this month, “Android adoption is literally about to explode”. Android appeals as a viable alternative for mobile handset makers looking to break the dominance of Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple, which have two-thirds of the US market and an 80 per cent global share. Ken Dulaney, analyst with the Gartner research firm, said: “If I’m a hardware manufacturer who needs to license a smartphone operating system, my choice is [open source] Linux, which doesn’t have much of a UI [user interface], Windows Mobile, which people don’t seem to like these days because the UI is kind of antiquated, or Android” Gartner sees Android eating into Nokia’s leading market share and featuring on 18 per cent of smartphones by 2012, up from 1.
LIRNEasia has been, for some time, documenting how users at the Bottom of the Pyramid are innovating with ICTs. This story has the views of Eric von Hippel, the guru of the “users and innovators” school on how Twitter has mobilized users as innovators. In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings. “Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.
There seems to be something about open operating systems, as shown by this NYT story. The question now is whether Apple will open its operating system too. More cellphone makers are turning to the free Android operating system made by Microsoft’s latest nemesis, Google. Cellphone makers that have used Windows Mobile to run their top-of-the-line smartphones — including Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Sony Ericsson — are now also making Android devices. Twelve Android handsets have been announced this year, with dozens more expected next year.
I took the first photo. That was in April 2008 in an informal telecenter visit. The second one appeared in a Sinhala blog recently. Mangedara Nenasala telecenter at Thulhiriya (less than 2 km from MAS Holdings) is one of the hundreds of defunct Nenasala telecenters. During better times it provided services such as utility bill payments and computer training.
The objective of this document: Guidelines for Evaluating RTBP v0.4 is to outline the evaluation methodology for assessing the upstream communication: data collection, data processing: event detection, and downstream communication: alerting/reporting stages (verticals in Figure 1) on the aspects of social, content, application, and technology of a RealTime Biosurveillance Program (RTBP). The blue arrows across the verticals and the horizontals indicate the interoperability between elements.
According to the ITU ICTeye, which is now carrying 2008 data, Pakistan’s surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives (143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile connectivity (apparently all adult Maldivians carry two active SIMs; there are only two operators in the Maldives), and Sri Lanka second with 52 SIMs per 100 people. On the fixed side, assisted by CDMA phones that are counted as fixed, Sri Lanka is the leader (17 connection per 100 people), followed by Maldives (15 per 100). Like in cricket, the middle of the rankings are the most interesting. Both Pakistan (50/100) and Bhutan (37/100) are ahead of India (29/100) in mobile. This shows that India cannot afford to let up the pace of 10 million connections a month for some time.
From: http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/telecom/26138/ict-promote-3g-services The Information and Communication Technology minister has advised TOT to begin promoting its third-generation mobile phone services to win customers before the 3G auction is called by the National Telecommunications Commission. The minister, Ranongruk Suwunchwee, said TOT must market its 3G service on the 1.9 GHz spectrum to attract people to the services, which are scheduled to be available on a trial basis next month in limited areas of Bangkok.
I have always been interested in why people refuse convenient technologies that most of us take for granted. I recall visiting Amish country in Pennsylvania with a friend, Diane Zimmerman, who had written a book on their refusal to use the phone within their homes. Now the NYT has done an interesting piece on those whose refuse to use mobiles. Given our teleuse@BOP work, I found this piece about what is likely to tip a non-owner into ownership quite interesting. It is the “crisis.
Two years ago customers flocked to Etihad Atheeb Telecom, which paid USD139 million for Saudi Arabia’s second fixed-line license, bringing to an end a monopoly enjoyed by Saudi Telecom (STC). Now a group of young Saudis has organized a boycott of STC, in protest of persistently high prices and poor service, while the newcomer’s managers complain that fair competition remains a far-off goal. Ahmed Sindi, new entrant Etihad Atheeb’s chief executive, said: We have a lot of problems with the incumbent operator, and we are not seeing enough actions from the regulator to stop it. We do not have access to critical infrastructure like dark fibre; we do not have access to conduits of transmission between various cities because the pricing is very high; and interconnectivity has been delayed massively. With a young, rapidly growing population and up to 7 million expatriates, Saudi Arabia’s telecom market is one of the most coveted by local and international companies.
LIRNEasia has been pretty successful at doing policy-relevant research and communicating the results to the policy process. Interestingly we have gone deeper into the use of statistics over this period, without giving up on institutional analysis. In this context, it is quite interesting to see how the debate is playing out in the context of a US Senator’s move to prohibit federal funding of social science. What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F.
m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) interviewed Medical Officers in Kurunegal District in Sri Lanka and Sivagangai District in Tamil Nadu, India, during the months of September and October, 2009. These interactions revealed that outpatient health record entry in real-time by Medical Officers, using the mobile phone key pad is inefficient and the idea was rejected by them. The aim of the RTBP is to collect digitized patient disease, syndrome, and demographic information from the point of care to rapidly detect disease outbreaks. Village Health Nurses in Tamil Nadu examine at most 70 patients a week. Ninety percent of the Village Health Nurses opt to jot down the records on paper and later enter them leisurely after the day’s work is complete.
This is no news, but we now have evidence. Overall, North American broadband users are certainly luckier than their South Asia counterparts. (Please note exceptions!) All four North American broadband packages tested for the Oct 2009 release performed better than any of the nine South Asian ones for value for money in accessing an international server. In other words, the USA and Canadian users pay less for the same amount of bandwidth even ignoring PPP.
A report on Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites, edited by the late Amy Mahan, former Senior Researcher and coordinator of LIRNE.net, is available for download here. The report takes a detailed look at the state of regulatory authority websites in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and North America and identifies benchmarking indicators for evaluating them. Among its co-authors are LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Manager, Chanuka Wattegama, and former researcher, Lara Alawattegama. As a founding member of LIRNE, Mahan worked to ensure dissemination of the network’s research and coordinated research practices across its partner networks.
The FCC has engaged Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to study net neutrality and its impact. Here is the draft report. Most of the highest-ranking countries use net neutrality policies, under which the incumbent carriers have to allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks and offer their own services, the Berkman report said. By contrast, the U.S.
The Finns have done it again. Accessing to Internet at minimum (not up to) 1 Mbps speed is the birthright of every Finnish citizen, announced the government. It makes Finland the world’s first country ensuring high speed broadband access a fundamental right, Telecom Asia reports. The government has also planned to make the 100 Mbps broadband connection a legal right for each countryman by the end of 2015. Finland launched the world’s first commercial GSM network in 1991.
The European Court of Auditors’ latest report reveals that billions of euros funding into research networks have been wasted. It says the EU’s flagship research programme spent €17 billion, almost half its budget, on two types of pan-European project without setting clear objectives. Some people in Brussels must have been smoking wrong stuff. That’s Europe’s problem. But the EU often lectures us on good governance and wise spending.