A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices. The Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project aims to create the open source platform for initial release in October 2007. The operating system will be developed by members of the Ubuntu community, along with staff from chip giant Intel. Its development was prompted by the growth of power hungry portable devices that place new demands on software. “It is clear that new types of device – small, handheld, graphical tablets which are Internet-enabled – are going to change the way we communicate and collaborate,” said Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman.
Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops – New York Times Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not. “After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.” Powered by ScribeFire.
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China has just 530 point-of-sale (POS) terminals and ATMs per million people, far below the 10,000 per million found in the United States. Accordingly, cash is used in 83 percent of all payment transactions in China, compared with just 21 percent in the United States. With most of these terminals and ATMs in China’s cities, practically all rural transactions are cash based. One way to wean rural consumers off their reliance on cash might be to add more ATMs and POS terminals. But it would cost at least $2 billion and add just 130 terminals and ATMs per million people.
The latest figures from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority show that March 2007 was the best month for proportionate growth in the mobile market in Pakistan since the sudden change of gear in November 2006. The monthly growth rate in the first ten months of last year averaged almost 7.5% but dropped to below 5% in the final two months, a trend which continued into January and February 2007. Whilst growth in March did not reach the heights seen last year, the rate was back over 5% – 5.2% to be precise – as customer numbers climbed to 55.
Not Negroponte’s USD 100 one-laptop-per-child, which is now priced at USD 175, but a thin-client application that depends on software from a distant server. Makes sense if you have reliable connectivity, I guess. Made in India PC for just about $100 The machine, launched by Chennai-based Novatium Solutions in 2004, costs a little over $100 as of today in the US currency, thanks to the depreciation in the greenback, but it was priced at less than $100 till a few months back. Novatium is targeting 10 million users in the next five years for this innovative product, company CEO Alok Singh told PTI from Chennai. The company has already started a successful commercial pilot for its NetPC computer in Chennai, he said.
Pasted below is a communication from Harsha Purasinghe of MicroImage that may be of interest to readers of this website. “We are pleased to inform you all that Dialog Telekom launched the Sinhala & Tamil Mobile Browser and their Content Portal “SINHALANTHAYA” during New Year week. The browser can be downloaded by visiting http://www.dialogwap.com using your mobile and going into Application Download Area.
The e-readiness rankings are relatively well regarded and do not contain absurdities such as Zimbabwe being ahead of India. The latest rankings are out and show India and the Philippines tied for 54th place (a one-place drop for India); Sri Lanka at 61 (dropping two places); and Pakistan at 63 (up four places and likely to catch up with Sri Lanka soon). Indonesia, another country of focus for LIRNEasia, has slipped 5 places to 67. Zimbabwe, the country that leads all of South Asia according to the ITU, is not in the top- 70 that is provided. Nigeria, on the other hand, is just behind Sri Lanka, at 62.
WorldSpace, LIRNEasia’s partner in the last-mile hazard information project, is promoting a satellite-radio-based mechanism for point-to-multipoint distribution of educational content such as readings and slides. The link below provides a complete description. The excerpt below includes description of an ongoing project in Sri Lanka (not involving LIRNEasia) and the general conclusions drawn by the author, Dr S Rangarajan, a good friend of LIRNEasia and Sri Lanka: Online Journal of Space Communication: An example of a CLASS network that is set up nationwide is the Sri Lankan Network for e-Health and Alerts (SNeHA). Medical professionals in the remote district centers use this network for continuing medical education, to update their knowledge and pass better health care to their patients.
Someday, emergency response teams handling a crisis like Hurricane Katrina, or even a major traffic jam, may coordinate their responses using a system that projects a bird’s-eye view of human movement by tracking cell phone signals via computer. Read more
Telephony base swells; ARPU continues to dip New Delhi April 17 Telephone subscriber base of the wire-line and wireless services together reached 189.92 million in the quarter ending December 2006 from 170.02 million on September 30, 2006, showing an increase of 11.7 per cent during the quarter. However, the blended ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) per month for GSM services has declined by 6.
Another municipal WiFi network, but this time, not for free. BBC NEWS | Technology | Switch on for Square Mile wi-fi But is there really that much demand for open-air surfing? After all, staring at a laptop screen in the sunshine is not a great experience – especially in an area where so many cafes have wi-fi access. The network’s backers think one of the big attractions will be the ability to use wi-fi enabled phones to make cheap calls using Skype or other internet telephony services. It’s hard to see why well-paid City workers would bother with the extra effort needed to make a wi-fi call – but the City of London Corporation believes it will prove attractive to migrant workers on construction sites.
More indications that the BOP [Base of the Pyramid] markets in South Asia are beginning to develop a criticial mass of attention:TelecomTV® NewsDesk A survey carried out by an unusual collective of researchers from the Russian School of Economics, the London Business School, various colleges of Cambridge University and the Anglo-Russian telecoms investment group Altimo, comes to the conclusion that those companies, manufacturers, vendors and service providers want to make the most of the world’s telecoms markets should focus on Bangladesh, India and China. The report says southern and south-eastern Asian markets will provide suppliers with the most lucrative opportunities over the course of the next five to seven years thanks to a felicitous combination of “high projected per capita GDP growth and significant current capital expenditure”. Powered by ScribeFire.
The Central Bank Annual Report 2006 (p. 39) states: The inflow of foreign direct investment increased substantially by 110.3 per cent to US dollars 604 million in 2006 . . .
Big Money in Little Screens – New York Times Searching the Web on a mobile phone has been a lot like getting online via dial-up modem circa 1995: slow, tedious and not terribly useful. Typing on tiny buttons, squinting at a list of links and clicking through to a page that won’t display properly is enough to test anyone’s patience. The head of Yahoo’s mobile strategy, Marco Boerries, standing, said overcoming difficult Web navigation would be a challenge. But that is beginning to change. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all trained their sights on cellphones, which they see as the next great battleground in the Internet search wars.
International consulting firm, Oxford Analytica (www.oxan.com) based in Oxford University and draws on a network of over 1,000 senior faculty members at Oxford and other major universities and research institutions around the world reported on Lirneasia’s “Telecoms on a Shoestrings” survey outcomes in its Asia-Pacific Daily Briefs on April 18th. OA’s existing clients include over 35 governments, major international institutions, and over 160 of the world’s leading multinational corporations and financial institutions. See http://www.