It seems like overkill when there are only 50 subscribers to Twitter in the whole country, but the Cameroon President seems ultra insecure. He should be, perhaps. He has been in the same job since 1982, a West African Ben Ali. And predictably, the Minister of Communication has equated the President’s security with that of the Nation. What next?
We were dragged into work on roaming by the SATRC. Our focus was on intra-SAARC call charges, but the then Chairman of SATRC, Mr Nripendra Mishra of TRAI wanted to act on both. So we started. We were more interested in intra-SAARC call charges because it affects more people, and more at the BOP. But looking at roaming prices, one cannot but be outraged.
LIRNEasia’s IAB member and close collaborator Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala has written a thought-provoking op-ed in the Times of India: Black money thrives in the cash economy. If we introduce traceability in financial transactions, it will be difficult to hide. We can do this using some simple available technologies. It is possible to carry out all transactions in electronic form, where money is transferred from the payer’s bank account to the payee’s. The back-end core banking system of almost all banks allows that.
Ever since Harvard Forum II, Randy Spence and I have been kicking around Amartya Sen’s notion that ICTs have a net positive liberating potential. I have been the skeptic. But evidence is adding up in Randy’s column: For some of the protesters facing Bahrain’s heavily armed security forces in and around Pearl Square in Manama, the most powerful weapon against shotguns and tear gas has been the tiny camera inside their cellphones. By uploading images of this week’s violence in Manama, the capital, to Web sites like YouTube and yFrog, and then sharing them on Facebook and Twitter, the protesters upstaged government accounts and drew worldwide attention to their demands. A novelty less than a decade ago, the cellphone camera has become a vital tool to document the government response to the unrest that has spread through the Middle East and North Africa.
Nokia is big in emerging markets, very big. But marginalized in the smartphone segment. Now the long shot to change that: abandonment of Symbian and adoption of Windows. Why not an open system, one wonders. Microsoft’s operating system software dominates the PC industry.
Telephone networks were shut down when Lech Walesa was leading the workers of Gdansk against the Polish government in the early 1980s. King Gyanendra shut down the mobile networks of Nepal a few years back. It is not the first time that telecom networks have been shut down by governments with their backs to the wall. Reflections on the Egyptian shut down should be read in this historical context. The key difference is that Egypt was perhaps at a qualitatively higher level of ICT use when they hit the kill switch.
The NYT reports a possible alliance that appears to be a reaction to the rise of Android. Shares of Nokia, the mobile phone market leader, climbed for a fourth day on Thursday amid speculation that the company may be poised to announce a software alliance with Microsoft designed to revive its struggling U.S. smartphone business. Nokia’s shares have risen more than 4 percent since Monday when an analyst, Adnaan Ahmad of Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, urged the Nokia chief executive — and former Microsoft executive — Stephen Elop, to form an alliance that would put Microsoft’s Phone operating system on Nokia’s advanced smartphones.
Looks like it’s not enough to shut down the Internet. You got to shut down all the mobile networks too. Unedited, raw, anonymous and emotional, Egyptian voices are trickling out through a new service that evades attempts by the authorities to suppress them by cutting Internet services. There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.
I never expected an economy as advanced as that of Egypt to shut down the Internet. But it did. Not completely, as shown by the Figure in the Wired article that I have taken the excerpt below from. Egypt’s largest ISPs shut off their networks Thursday, making it impossible for traffic to get to websites hosted in Egypt or for Egyptians to use e-mail, Twitter or Facebook. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak also ordered the shut down of mobile phone networks, including one run by the U.
As the owner of a G1, I can afford a little smirk about the ascendancy of Android. But really, the bigger story from the perspective of the people at the BOP who are our prime constituency, is the Gartner prediction that this is the cross-over year for those accessing the Internet through mobiles, though of course, one has to interrogate the basis of the prediction. Google’s operating system for cellphones has overtaken Nokia’s Symbian system as the market leader, ending the Finnish company’s long reign, a British research firm said Monday. In the three months through December, manufacturers shipped 33.3 million cellphones running Android, Google’s free, open-source cellphone operating system, up from just 4.
Last research cycle, we did work on payments through near-field communication for busfares. One barrier that was identified was the lack of standard NFC capability in handsets. Looks like the London Olympics may solve that problem, according to BBC. Moving the experience on to the mobile is something consumers want, according to Jason Rees, head of m-payments at Everything Everywhere. “Studies show that people are more likely to forget their wallets than their mobile phones.
I just got back from observing extended focus groups on the knowledge and information gaps faced by small-scale rubber growers in the Galle and Monaragala districts of Sri Lanka. The locations were quite remote, if one checks the map of Badalkumbura (we were several km further to the interior). The remoteness is exemplified by the fact that it took me six hours of driving to get back to Colombo. It is too early to talk about the results of the focus group research, which will be released in due time. What struck me was how Sri Lanka had changed in terms of telecom.
A subsidiary of the incumbent telco has launched WiMAX 16e service in Sri Lanka. The launch has come after a long preparation period, but if the price and quality parameters are right, the chances of success are high since broadband is about to take off. Sky Network CEO, Mahinda Herath said that WiMAX 16e broadband service offers a superior broadband experience for households, the corporate sector and SME. He said the offering will soon incorporate other value added features such as usage and quality of service based charging models and web-based payment options. “Our vision is to give each and every person in Sri Lanka access to high-speed broadband connectivity and digital content anywhere in the island at any time,” Herath said yesterday while addressing an audience at the launch of the new product.
“The mobile phone can be an instrument of liberation even against heavy odds, and this is a subject on which the authorities are, understandably, scared. Communication is snapped in order to keep the population in a state of voice-less and communication-less submission” Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen makes the above statement about a liberating potential of mobiles. Here is the counterpoint: Social networks offer a cheaper and easier way to identify dissidents than other, more traditional forms of surveillance. Despite talk of a “dictator’s dilemma”, censorship technology is sophisticated enough to block politically sensitive material without impeding economic activity, as China’s example shows. The internet can be used to spread propaganda very effectively, which is why Hugo Chávez is on Twitter.
Writing a piece on the technological challenges that had to be overcome to increase connectivity in the 49 least developed countries (LDCs) recently, I was struck by how many words I devoted to electricity, both on the need for keeping down the costs of network equipment and for powering handsets. In the old days, we assumed that the footprint of the electricity network was larger than that of the telecom network; now it is the other way around. What is interesting is that the trigger for getting the USD 80 solar generator in the story below was the phone: For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market. Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid. Every week, Ms.
It was impossible not to notice the dramatic changes in the mobile handset market in the past few years, with new brands coming up and putting pressure on the old warhorses. Who was responsible? Vijay Govindarajan gives the credit to MediaTek in his guest blog at Harvard Business Review. Both Vijay and MediaTek are worth keeping an eye on. MediaTek’s strategists and engineers figured out a way to design a much less expensive phone system.