Mauritius has population density of 632, the 18th highest among territories, just behind Taiwan. It has the highest population density in Africa (Rwanda is next with a population density of 407). It has a GNI per capita just below that of Malaysia. It is the third most prosperous country in Africa, behind Equatorial Guinea and Seychelles. It is also the site of an exciting new development, where a new entrant is offering everything but voice over fiber.
The author of the op ed is an Australian Professor of Engineering who worked mostly on water projects in South Asia. In Australia, a copious water supply and sanitation takes around 2 per cent of the economic resources of a family. In South Asia, barely enough potable water to survive can take 20-40 per cent of a family’s economic resources. Effective engineering in Australia accounts for much of the difference. Therefore, it is not the lack of money that influences national poverty as ineffective engineering that imposes crippling high costs for water, energy and other essential services.
In an attention-grabbing talk where among other things he wrote off Facebook, the Forrester CEO placed the mobile at the center of it all. Mobile engagement, built on architectural change brought about by the app internet will replace the broader Web as the focus of innovation and change, he said. For CIOs it means, “You are going to put your company in the pocket of customers so that when they need you, they are in contact and you are there for them…anytime, anywhere.” Here is his forecast on Facebook: He then described Facebook as “half way there,” before adding: “I think Facebook is toast…the company is in major trouble around mobile engagement and the app Internet.” Why else would CEO Mark Zuckerberg buy Instagram or be talking about launching a mobile phone, he asked.
Increasingly, we are finding that it is impossible to talk about ICTs, without also talking about electricity. Interesting new development on that front is reported by NYT. EBay plans to use about six million watts of power generated on-site by fuel cells, which are a substantially cleaner and more efficient source of energy than coal, in its new data center in South Jordan, Utah. The company also operates PayPal, the online payment service, out of the South Jordan site. Bloom Energy, a private company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Workaround was a key theme across the chapters in our 2008 book. People were doing all sorts of things, like using WiFi to haul data over long distances in Indonesia, that made sense in the specific circumstances, but had no other value. As soon as the Indonesian telecom incumbent provided leased lines, the WiFi use stopped. This was a classic jugaad. A contrast is the budget telecom network model, that came about because companies were trying to deal with the low purchasing power of their customers and the low transaction cost afforded by pre-paid mobile.
Research on explosive developments in the ICT field in recent times shows that the ITU was a marginal actor. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support the market liberalization processes that yielded innovation and growth. Even in the area of standardization, they could not lead from the front. Entities such as the IEEE were responsible for most of the critical innovations. Now it appears that the ITU Secretary General, in alliance with Vladimir Putin, is trying to take over the Internet: The problem, Gross said, is that participation will be limited to representatives of national governments, not telecoms players, and a number of proposals have been put forth that will put the internet under much more restrictive regulation than it is now.
I started reading about cancer because people kept pestering me about electro magnetic radiation from mobile handsets and towers. Siddhartha Mukherjee is the best writer on cancer. But I have to admit I have yet to read his Pulitzer winning “The emperor of all maladies.” In Ohio, where I lived for over a decade, they took asbestos really seriously. Buildings were condemned because of asbestos.
But this time they are not the numbers given by the ITU. They are the exaggerated claims of the BTRC. The Daily Star questions: If BTRC’s figures were true, Bangladesh would be among the top 20 countries in the world in terms of number of internet users. Alas, it is nowhere in sight. Munir Hasan, an ICT expert and secretary general of Open Source Network, estimates the number of internet users in the country to be no more than 1.
A state-owned enterprise. But you cannot call a state-owned enterprise a monopoly. Not in China. Challenging the system, Mr. Zhang contends, has been the key to China’s economic success.
Acxiom does a lot more than just analyze streams of transaction-generated information (our definition of big data). But TGI is an important element of what does into Acxiom’s machines. Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that legislative action is required for permitting competition in Myanmar telecom market: Officials have enacted an investment law with guarantees against nationalization and have proposed tax reform. However, these don’t go far enough. The state still controls the most lucrative industries, since a 1989 law restricts private enterprise in oil and gas, mining and telecom. This makes it imperative that the retrograde ITU sponsored draft law be thrown out and a piece of legislation appropriate for the 21st century be adopted.
I was in Kathmandu June 11-13 for a World Bank workshop on regional cooperation for journalists. I could have talked about the challenges of increasing integration in the world’s least integrated region through the lens of the battles over CEPA. But I decided to talk about a subject that was much more mundane, but one where we at LIRNEasia could provide current factual information that no one else could: the related topics in intra-SAARC calling charges being too high and within SAARC roaming charges being rapacious. The talk is here. The media included: Nepal’s Republica and Sri Lanka’s LBO.
Dialog Axiata, Sri Lanka’s leading mobile operator launched mobile money payment system yesterday with the consent of central bank, Sri Lanka. Back in 2009 LIRNEasia‘s Senior Policy Fellow Muhammad Aslam Hayat wrote about the possibility of having mobile money in Sri Lanka and LIRNEasia facilitated it. Dialog is the first operator to be licensed by Sri Lanka’s central bank to make mobile payments. “The dawn of the mobile money era in Sri Lanka has been made possible by the progressive, and financial inclusion focused, regulatory ethos of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka,” Wijayasuriya said. “In this respect Sri Lanka’s payments and settlement legislation and Mobile Payment regulations stand among the most progressive in the world.
Given below in sober scientific language is the outcome of decades of deliberation: After a week-long meeting of international experts, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organization (WHO), today classified diesel engine exhaust as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1), based on sufficient evidence that exposure is associated with an increased risk for lung cancer. The New York Times explains that the implications are more serious for people in developing countries : The W.H.O. decision, the first to elevate diesel to the “known carcinogen” level, may eventually affect some American workers who are heavily exposed to exhaust.
The Government of Bangladesh announced its intention to impose more taxes on mobile bills last week. My op-ed in the Daily Star drew on economic principles and regional experience. There is no debate about the government requiring money. A dynamic sector such as telecom must make its fair contribution. Collection leakages in telecom are much less than in other sectors because it is a modern sector with automated billing and collection mechanisms.
Research Fellow and Knowledge Management Specialist Dilini Wijeweera is the sole Sri Lankan to be awarded a Hubert H. Humphrey fellowship for 2012-13. She will spend an academic year at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle. We wish her well.