Smith Dharmasaroja is a hero of mine. Disagreeing with a hero does not come easy. But he is wrong to give equal or greater weight to national tsunami detection and monitoring systems than to communication of last-mile warning. It may be that the fault lies in the reporter in ordering the comments, but it does appear that Mr Smith believes ...

This debate about access to data about railway delays in Britain has interesting implications in other fields such as electricity. She told me part of the problem is when public services are provided by the private sector; such firms claim that selling data is a revenue stream for them, and ask for public-funded subsidies to make it open. For example, ...

First results from Telenor Myanmar, from Telecom Paper. Telenor ended its first quarter in Myanmar with 3.406 million mobile customers. The new mobile operator generated NOK 287 million in revenues in Q4 2014 and an EBITDA loss of NOK 248 million. It spent NOK 598 million in Q4 and NOK 4.28 billion in all 2014 on rolling out the new ...

The Financial Times carried a good discussion on the failure of the Google Flu Trends model to predict. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/21a6e7d8-b479-11e3-a09a-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2xLIVMnX4 I am not ...

I was sending email to Sri Lanka from around 1991 through LAcNET, but many do not consider that real Internet because it was store-and-forward by Sanjiva Weerawarana at Purdue using MCI Friends and Family calling plans that we all contributed to. So after they officially launched in April 1995 and then finally got SLT to connect the wires properly on ...

Bangladesh and Myanmar have joined an international consortium, which has signed an agreement today in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to build the South East Asia – Middle East -Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) cable. Once activates in early 2016, the cable will be literally a lifeline for Myanmar’s international connectivity. The country now survives on pre-historic SEA-ME-WE 3 submarine cable, which ...

Making Emergency Communication Effective 3rd LIRNEasia Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture  On 19 June 2012 from 15:00 – 17:00 at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, 100 Independence Square, Colombo 7 The main talk will focus on actions to improve alerting and situational-reporting to make emergency communication more effective. The talk will focus on establishing an alerting profile and a multi-agency situational-awareness software ...

The rise of social media hammered the readership of our blog. So there have been times when I have wondered whether it’s worth the time and effort. Today is not one such day. I was reading the Reforms Chapter of the recently released Annual Report 2013 of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Finance and Planning, when my eyes were snagged ...

So Telenor is about to hit the market. They’ve got to work smarter, lacking the billions (USD 15, but I’ve heard even larger numbers) Ooredoo is committed to invest. Being the late comer, Telenor is betting on service quality as well as extensive marketing network to ensure success. While MPT assigned 13 companies and shops to sell its SIM cards, ...

Companies are increasingly relying on business analytics to extract value from the large volumes of computer-readable and analyzable (or “datafied”) data in their possession. Big data for development (BD4D) seeks to apply these techniques to big data held by both government and private entities to answer development-related questions. Given low levels of “datafication” of transactions and records in developing ...

Most people think platforms and transformative ICT companies are best described by the acronym GAFA. Some add Microsoft to make it five. But living in Asia, we know better. There’s Baidu, Alibaba and TenCent. Alibaba has become one of the most highly valued technology companies in the world, and its recent string of strong financial results has signaled the continued ...

Bangladesh has been ranked 55th among the 61 countries globally and very last in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2012 Web Index. India was ranked 33, Pakistan 44 and Nepal 52 among the South Asian countries. The index has, however, excluded Sri Lanka for unknown reason. It has been compiled by the World Wide Web Foundation, which was launched in ...

The usefulness and ease-of-use of interactive voice, with Freedom Fone, for Sarvodaya Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members to supply incident information was blogged two weeks back. Now the question is “how is all that information put to use in responding to those incidents?”. In here we tell parts of that story. HIHO processing disaster incident info CERT members call ...

LIRNEasia was among team of researchers under the umbrella of Data-­Pop Alliance was contracted to produce a synthesis report as part of a DfID project on Big Data for climate change and disaster resilience in developing countries, meant to feed into the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. In this context I participated in a discussion workshop in London on June 5, ...

I was listening to a presentation on Work-related Use and Positive Livelihood Outcomes among Mobile Phone Users in Asia by Komathi Ale*, Uni. of Southern California, at ICTD 2015 in Singapore. I was pleased to see some of our publications being cited, but that was just the beginning. After the literature review, the author announced that the entire paper was ...

Nalaka Gunawardene asks good questions. So I paid attention when he tweeted: Where does urban end & rural begin in #lka? Not silly admin demarcations, but in REAL terms? What decides: Tele-density? Purchasing power? — Nalaka Gunawardene (@NalakaG) July 5, 2014 Based on the ongoing work using mobile transaction generated data (big data), we can give a good answer about ...

With 70 percent of mobile users having smartphones, Myanmar is possibly the fastest growing Internet market in the world. With rudimentary international links, this can cause all sorts of problems. One (partial) solution is content delivery networks. Internet users in Myanmar have received a speed boost as Norway’s Telenor and local company Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP) go live with Google Global ...

This is continuation of discussion with Sunil Abraham and Steve Song. It got a little too long for a comment. The problems under discussion are difficult. So it’s good that we have an active discussion. We could have a discussion about all sorts of approaches to privacy. But let’s focus on what the practical problem is. It is not about ...

India used to be the center of gravity of everything we did at LIRNEasia. In terms of expenditure and effort, perhaps the center is shifting. But intellectually, the challenge of managing the asymmetrical relationship between Sri Lanka and India continues to engage. I was asked to write something for the visit of Prime Minister Modi. Unbeknownst, the piece had also ...

I saw first hand the futility of the Mullahs’ efforts to prevent Internet access by Iranian youth when I was in Tehran at the height of the Arab Spring. But what is new is that it’s the Minister of Culture who is highlighting the hypocrisy and futility. According to “The Iran Primer,” a website and publication of the United States ...