“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.” A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist?
Behind the Google led attempt to free up the mobile networks for all attachments (Carterfone 2), there appears to have been a scholarly article, a Law Review article of all things! This was after many had written requiems for law review articles saying they were getting too esoteric to be of any use. When Mobile Phones Aren’t Truly Mobile – New York Times Then, in February, Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, published an influential paper, “Wireless Net Neutrality,” which made a well-supported case that the government should compel wireless carriers to open their networks to equipment and software applications that the carriers did not control. Mr. Wu called his proposition a call for “Cellular Carterfone,” referring to the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the F.
LIRNEasia decided to use a blog as its website rather than a conventional website. Website has done well so far; about 3,000 comments so far. Some issues of importance: Front page changes every two days, due to number of posts. Scrolling nature means that sometimes the most important topics do not remain at the top for long. Weaknesses concerning retrieval of documents (unless you know exactly where it is).
The Business Standard (Nokia focuses on rural markets) Sapna Agarwal / Pune July 16, 2007The rural markets account for around 5 per cent of the national GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) handset sales. The figure is expected to rise to 25-30 per cent, adding around 100 million new cellular subscribers by 2009, according to a recent study by LIRNEasia and AC Nielson.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet now at Google, appears to see a key role for the mobile especially in developing countries. ACM: Ubiquity – Cerf’s Up Again! — A New Ubiquity Interview with Vint Cerf CERF: Well, certainly that has happened in the sense that the mobile telephony has allowed the provision of communication services, and let me include in that Internet access, in places where it was very difficult to obtain that service before. And so, I think roughly the number of telephone terminations has more than doubled in the last five years. It’s gone from a little over a billion to a little over 2.
Global telecoms heavyweights say microcredit may provide loan without collaterals but it does not meet the rural people’s total financial needs in the developing countries. Vodafone along with Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks have urged for telecoms and banking regulatory reforms to encourage fund transfer by mobile phones instead. They believe it will transform access to financial services in countries lacking banking networks. Read more.
The survey below, commissioned by Samsung in the US, contrasts with LIRNEasia’s research on teleuse by women at the Bottom of the Pyramid, still in the process of being written up. Our Pakistan findings, being discussed on a PK focused blog, provide the starkest contrast. Survey Reveals Important Role Mobile Phones Play in Women’s Lives “A cell phone does much more than make calls for the Single Mobile Female,” said Randy Smith, vice president of channel marketing for Samsung. “The cell phone is an integral part of the SMF’s life, serving as a pocket-size detective, matchmaker, wing-woman and beyond. It is now officially a girl’s best friend.
One of the key factors that will determine the success of the mobile-centric future scenario for ICTs over the scenario that has a computer/telecenter at the center is the utility of the mobile handset. Whether the iPhone is the prototype of that handset, we cannot predict. But at least it has juiced up the discussion. Rival Manufacturers Chasing the iPhone – New York Times Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before.
The mobile market in India is flourishing because of massive increases in mobile subscribers, that are fueling more mobile handset production, says US research firm Gartner. The report adds that the subcontinent produced close to 31 million mobile phones in 2006, valued at around £2.5 billion. India’s 2007 handset production is forecast to be the highest in the Asia-Pacific region at 68 per cent in terms of units and 65 per cent in terms of value, says Gartner. The research house expects mobile handset production to more than triple by 2011 to reach nearly 95 million.
To lose your mobile phone is unfortunate but to flush it down the toilet is especially careless, although common, if new figures are to be believed. Research suggests that 885,000 (drunk and sober) subjects of Queen Elizabeth helplessly watch their handsets disappearing into the ‘black hole’ every year. That’s roughly £342 million flushing (not contributing) to Her Majesty’s sewage network. The study also reveals that 810,000 mobiles were left in the pub each year, with 315,000 left in the back of a taxi and 225,000 on a bus. Pet dogs in UK apparently chewed their way through 58,500 handsets last year, while another 116,000 went through a spin cycle with the dirty laundry, reports The Telegraph.
The broadband battle is being fought between “imperialist” telcos and “guerilla” Internet firms, a Yankee Group analyst told Tuesday. The established telcos focused on ARPUs and the idea of guiding consumers to a choice of apps on the network. “They are pretty much trying to think about voice, content and access as palette from which consumers can choose.” The guerillas are firms such as Google and Yahoo who don’t own a network and aren’t focused on ARPU, and whose apps run on PCs, mobile phones, PlayStations and all kinds of networks and devices. “They’re advertising-funded.
The title of the article “Sri Lanka to de-regulate payphone business,” is a little deceptive, but then that is probably not the fault of the Director General, but of the editor of LBO. LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO Sri Lanka plans to allow third parties to operate payphone booths in an attempt to popularise them in far flung areas outside the city of Colombo, a top official said.The island’s eight public switched telephone network (PSTN) operators will now be allowed to appoint a third party to operate and maintain a public phone booth on a revenue sharing model. “Its a scheme similar to selling lottery tickets, where the lottery operator does not undertake the burden of running, maintaining and collecting the money,” the head of Sri Lanka’s telecom watchdog, Kanchana Ratwatte said.
Serving Sri Lanka: Indian Ocean tsunami warning capabilities improving Addressable satellite radio sets were found to be the best alerting technology of the community disaster warning pilot project conducted by LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya. Java enabled mobile phones which has a wake up siren came next. The GSM based remote alarm device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa followed closely. It has both light and siren.Findings of this project on learning how information-communication technologies and community based training can help in tsunami and other disaster situations had been discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning with a Focus on Community-Based Last-Mile Warning Systems” at the Sarvodaya Headquarters in Moratuwa recently.
In an empirical study conducted in fish markets along the coast of Kerala (South India), Robert Jensen found that the introduction of the mobile phone allowed improved flow of price information that resulted in a more efficient functioning of the market. Before mobile phone were introduced or coverage was available in Kerala, fishermen would generally return to their “home” markets with their catch. Oversupply meant that fish had to be routinely dumped into the sea to keep prices stable even if (unknown to the fishermen) there were markets 10kms away were fish were in greater demand. Mobile phones enabled price information from other markets to be available while the fishermen was still at sea. The fishermen would divert his boat to the market that offered the highest price for his catch.
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
By Rohan Samarajiva The findings of a pilot project on learning how information-communication technologies and community-based training can help in responding to disasters such as tsunamis were discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “SHARING KNOWLEDGE ON DISASTER WARNING, WITH A FOCUS ON COMMUNITY-BASED LAST–MILE WARNING SYSTEMS” held on March 28th and 29th, 2007 at the Sarvodaya headquarters in Moratuwa. These finding ranged from the difficulties experienced in communicating disaster warnings to villages when mobile GSM and fixed CDMA telecom networks were not functional due to conflict conditions to the importance of not leaving newspapers on top of sensitive electronic equipment which can overheat and shut down as a result. In terms of the five communication technologies that were evaluated across multiple criteria, the addressable satellite radio sets and the java-enabled mobile phones performed the best, with the GSM-based community warning device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa following closely. The VSAT based warning system did not perform too well in the tests. The objective was not to declare a winner among the technologies, but to find out how they could be improved to perform reliably in the difficult conditions of Sri […]