It’s very difficult to measure the true value of the Internet. It’s not that one Internet search is equal to another in value. Information obtained from the Internet does not always lead to good or bad outcomes, by itself. It is combined with other inputs. And so on.
I know one thing about predictions: they are wrong. But we use them. They have their uses. Does the VNI have a good use? You can decide.
It’s been a few weeks since this presentation, developed on the basis of work Tahani Iqbal did while she was at LIRNEasia. It had one piece missing, the importance of timing. This was pointed out by my colleague M. Aslam Hayat. If MNP is introduced when a new and hungry entrant comes into the market, it could make a difference.
LIRNEasia uses Facebook as another window to its web content that is located primarily on the blog. Since the blog is searchable, it has never been a problem for us that Facebook search sucks. But that is not the case for people who use Facebook as their primary web interface. Now, Facebook is trying to make it easier to find that lost photo or restaurant recommendation and unearth other information buried within your social network with a tool it calls Graph Search. On Monday, the company will roll out the feature to its several hundred million users in the United States and to others who use the American English version of the site.
Now that the two mobile licenses have been issued, all eyes are on the new Telecom Law, expected to be enacted any time. The version I looked at, supposedly worked with assistance from the ITU Bangkok Office, was so bad that it was withdrawn. It appears the subsequent version is not too good: The Sections 15 and 16 of the proposed bill says the license holders must abide by the rules, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Ministry of Information and its related departments. And the Section 32 stipulates that license holders must provide services in conformity with the price rates approved by the department. According to Section 38 said the license holders are not allowed to share market, buy telecommunication appliances from unapproved suppliers or go against a certain opponent in an improper way.
LIRNEasia Research Manager, Shazna Zuhyle was recently invited to speak about the realities of the virtual world by her alma mater, Methodist College. The talk was for students and the Parent Teacher Association separately. She was also invited to a round table discussion among a few heads of schools and more recently to address the students of Ladies College. The effects of social media have affected the schools to some extent with stolen identities and altered images being used in the public domain. This has also raised privacy issues.
I’ve had a running argument with my friends M. Aslam Hayat (one of the creators of the Fund) and Parvez Iftikhar (first CEO of the Fund) about whether it’s possible to have an effective, efficient universal service fund. My position has been that that such a thing can function for a few years, if well designed and with political commitments, but that it’s a matter of time before they go bad. As we used to say when we were designing Sri Lanka’s fund in 2003, when the cheese is out, the rats are inevitable. I have pointed to the successes of the Pakistan Fund in its early years in many of my talks, but I have always qualified the claims being made of its behalf.
President Obama makes a distinction between the contents of phone calls and the information generated by the call (he calls it meta data, we used to call it transaction-generated data, and now it falls within the scope of big data), here is the analogy that is governing his thinking: Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr.
I was privileged to be in the audience in the early 1990s, when Doug Englebart received one of his many accolades. A great imagination. A great man. Many know him as the inventor of the mouse, but his contributions were much greater: In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr.
Travel broadens the mind. Maybe. I doubt that sometimes. Makes me reflect, at least. Since being asked to think about Sri Lanka-China relations recently, I’ve been paying attention to the ascendant Chinese model.
We used to talk about the hegemony of Wintel, the ironclad command exercised by Microsoft and Intel. The world changed. Internet came center stage. Mobile became the new thing. People like Jobs figured it out.
Xenophobes are not very bright. What Myanmar needs to achieve its target of connecting its people very quickly is massive investment. Myanmar Buddhist capital could not connect even five percent of the population in all these years. Now the government has decided to allow foreign capital to do the job. What color is money?
It has been quite a story, the issuance of licenses in Myanmar. Poor Digicel, even sponsoring soccer teams was not enough. Telenor’s ads seem to have worked though. It would have been a lot simpler to have an auction that factored in investment and coverage commitments. But the licenses are finally given.
Bob Pepper of Cisco is speaking on LTE, with specific reference to the 700 MHz Band. If the FCC had the knowledge it now has about how to make the digital transition work, they would have taken back 160 MHz, not 108 MHz. Auction for the digital dividend spectrum in US was in 2007, but actual switch-over was in 2009. It was important to create the stakeholders to ensure pressure was maintained on the regulator to keep to the schedule and not backtrack. Pepper is talking about White Space.
Julie Welch of Qualcomm is speaking on LTE at the GSMA Public Policy Forum in Shanghai. She sees LTE as a complement to HSPA, not one replacing the other. She states that LTE is showing the fastest growth rate they have seen. Qualcomm is working very closely with equipment manufacturers on devices. Only Band 28 core requirements have been finalized by 3GPP in June 2012.
I would have tweeted this, but this is China. I am at the Public Policy Forum of the GSMA Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai. Listening to Mike Wright of Telstra on the 700 MHz Band. He just said that they are done with 3G. Investments cancelled.