On 5 March 2008, LIRNEasia in partnership with the Indonesian Institute for Disaster Preparedness (IIDP) will hold the third and final “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-based Last-Mile Warning Systems” workshop at the Hotel Borobodur in Jakarta, Indonesia. Rohan Samarajiva, Natasha Udu-gama and Nuwan Waidyanatha will participate and speak at the event alongside several Indonesian speakers from various governmental, community-based and international NGOs such as BAKORNAS PB, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), KOGAMI Padang and GTZ GITEWS. As in past HazInfo workshops in India and Bangladesh, the Indonesia workshop will not only discuss findings from the “Evaluating Last Mile Hazard Information” pilot project, but also exchange lessons learned from Indonesian counterparts.
Rohan Samarajiva chaired the panel discussion on ‘Convergence in Regulation – Designing Regulation for Convergence’ at the GSMA Third Annual Government Mobile Forum on 12 February 2008. The Forum was a part of the 2008 Mobile World Congress, taking place from 11-14 February 2008 in Barcelona 2008. The panellists included: Maria Del Rosario Guerra, Minister for Communications, Colombia Binali Yildirim, Minister of Transport and Communications, Turkey Daniel Pataki, Chairman European Regulators Group (ERG) Mickael Gosshein, CEO Orange Jordan Sol Trujillo, CEO Telstra The Government Mobile Forum is a unique platform where ministers, regulators and industry leaders come together, face to face, to discuss the opportunities that the mobile industry offers for economic growth and social development and the barriers it faces in meeting this challenge.
Monday 31 March 09:00 – 11:00 Opening session – Information society policies Information society policies have been on the policy agenda in all countries and regions of the world since the beginning of the 1990s. The opening session of EuroCPR 2008 will explore important outcomes of policy initiatives and the similarities and differences between different regions of the world. For this purpose, speakers from Europe, Asia and the US have been invited to give their critical assessment of policy aims and results. Speakers: • Eli Noam, CITI, Columbia University • Andrea Renda, CEPS • Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia Discussant: • Frans De Bruïne, ISC, formerly INFSO EC Powered by ScribeFire.
This past Saturday at a conference organized by the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing Harsha de Silva chaired a session with Hans Wijayasuriya of Dialog Telekom, Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNEasia and Keith Modder of Virtusa that addressed issues such as this. One point that ran through the discussion was the need for companies to develop self-regulation to safeguard the trust of their customers. China’s mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool? – LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE “We know who you are, but also where you are,” said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users. He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.
Sustainability First: Tapping the Bottom of the Pyramid According to Lirneasia research, 41% of the BoP in Sri Lanka, owns their own phones and 21% of them are mobile phones. Another 31% is planning to buy a phone. But 28% is not planning to buy, mostly because they cannot afford to buy. This can be a primary market for telecentres in Sri Lanka, according to Prof Rohan Samarajiva of Lireneasia. Powered by ScribeFire.
LIRNEasia recently unveiled a painting by S. H. Sarath, the renowned Sri Lankan artist at its premises. It is untitled leaving ample room for one’s imagination. Photo shows LIRNEasia guest speaker of the day Robin Mansell and Executive Director Rohan Samarajiva doing the honours.
Click on the links to see the full articles covering LIRNEasia’s book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks. ‘BSNL’s monopoly over infrastructure a hindrance to growth’ – Financial Express (India) Rural connectivity is now the focus of every telecommunication player in the country. Almost all stakeholders, from handset manufacturers to service providers, believe that the next wave of growth is in the rural areas.”However, India’s roll out (of telecom services) in rural areas has been slow. BSNL has the backbone infrastructure but is not yet ready to share it with private players,” he added.
Sri Lanka News | Sundayobserver.lk Three years after the tsunami, a natural disaster satellite alert system is now ready to help warn last-mile rural villages on natural disaster emergencies. The Addressable Radio for Emergency Alert (AREA) is a digital satellite device that uses simple radio technology, delivering messages to save lives. LIRNEasia (Learning Initiatives on Reforms for Network Economics) is a research-based organization that has collaborated with World-Space USA. They have field-tested the AREA device in Brahamawatte – Balapitiya (Galle District) and villages, like Panama in Ampara.
:::::DAILY MIRROR ONLINE EDITION::::: Can there be a better occasion than the anniversary of South Asian tsunami just to ponder how far we have developed our systems to be ready for a similar event in future? What guarantee we have that a similar tsunami today would not result in a catastrophe of the same size? This article by LIRNEasia’s Chanuka Wattegama was also featured in the Lankadeepa, the largest circulation Sinhala Daily and summarized in Earth Times. Also at : http://www.indianmuslims.
LIRNEasia’s new book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, was unveiled on the 16th of December at the IIT-Madras Campus. The first copies of the book were handed over to Chief Guests of the event, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Professor William Melody. Edited by Professor Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen and co-published by Sage Publications and the IDRC, this well-structured volume brings together scholars, practitioners, former regulators and policy makers to address the problem of expanding ICT connectivity in emerging Asia. It centrally engages the widespread claim that technology by itself—independent of policy and regulatory reform—can improve access to ICTs. In doing so, it shows that complex workarounds are possible, but they are significantly less effective than the appropriate policy and regulatory reforms.
Ms. Helani Galpaya presented “Taking e-Government to the Bottom of the Pyramid: dial-a-Gov?” co-authored by herself, Prof. Rohan Samarajiva and Ms. Shamistra Soysa at the 1st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV 2007) held in Macao on the 10 – 13 December 2007.
This edited volume, based on LIRNEasia ‘s 2004-2006 research program brings together scholars, practitioners, former regulators and policy makers to address the problem of expanding information and communication technology (ICT) connectivity in emerging Asia.
The LIRNEasia HazInfo team, Rohan Samarajiva, Nuwan Waidyanatha, Natasha Udu-gama, joined its partners from Sarvodaya, Dialog Telekom and WorldSpace Corporation (India) to present findings from the “Evaluating Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination” (HazInfo) pilot project at the “Making Communities Disaster Resilient” on December 11, 2007 during the Third Global Knowledge Partnership (GK3) conference in Kuala Lumpur from 11-13 December. The session, moderated by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, presented findings and analysis within a 90-minute session divided into two mini-sessions on technology and community. Mr. Michael De Soyza of Dialog Telekom and Mrs.
Buzzcity got the top award for mobile networking applications at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress held in November 2007. This blog describes how they are changing their charging structure, partially based on LIRNEasia research. gammalife: BUILDING MOBILE COMMUNITIES We organised a session of BuzzCity-NUS Digital Media Forum a few weeks ago with presentation by Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, who leads a regional ICT policy group called LIRNEasia. His group had a done a study across five Asian nations – India, Pakistan, The Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand – and asked people the main reason why they use a mobile phone.
IDRC interviewed me at GK3. The voice cut is below. Rohan Samarajiva: International Development Research Centre Rohan Samarajiva, executive director of LIRNEasia, describes how its pioneering research work is helping make communities more resilient in the face of disasters like tsunamis and cyclones. Powered by ScribeFire.
LIRNEasia’s first book, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen will be launched on December 16 2007. The Chief guests at the event will be Shri K.Sridhara, Member (Technology) & Ex-Officio Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications & IT, and Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras. The book looks at the policy and regulatory barriers to the expansion of information and communication technology infrastructure in emerging markets, based on Asian experience and is co-published by SAGE Publications and the International Development Research Centre.