Archive for the ‘IT’ category

A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth, and Poverty Reduction

September 29th, 2009

In September 2003, IDRC organized A Dialogue on ICTs and Poverty: The Harvard Forum. The current paper has been drafted as background for a second Harvard Forum – A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth and Poverty Reduction, September 2009. Six years later, much has changed. Trends highlighted at the Harvard Forum and elsewhere have progressed and many have accelerated. ICT regulation and policies have improved in many countries, often in response to good research and advocacy. There has been explosive growth in mobile phone access and use in all regions, with both private and non-profit operations servicing the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) with very low-margin, high-volume business models.

In both poor and wealthy countries and populations, mobile phone use has enabled and facilitated the expansion of markets, social business and public services. An entire range of economic services, enabled by mobile phones, has emerged – banking and financial transactions, marketing and distribution, employment services, personal services, and public services. [1] Beyond economic impacts, improvements are being made in other freedoms or dimensions of well-being: personal security, political participation and accountability, peace, dignity and opportunity.

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via Publius Project.

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Consumers Trust Recommendations From Friends Online, Opinions From Strangers

September 22nd, 2009

Consumer survey…

According to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising worldwide. 90% of consumers surveyed said that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online.

via MediaPost Publications Consumers Trust Recommendations From Friends Online, Opinions From Strangers 07/13/2009.

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Mobile app sees science go global

September 18th, 2009

I am currently working on the OakMapper project that aims to enable citizen science using the web and mobile phone, which has a very similar approach as EpiCollect. OakMapper Mobile is built for iPhone and is now in AppStore. Check it out. I hope to try out EpiCollect with a Android phone one of these days.

A mobile phone application will help professional and “citizen” scientists collect and analyse data from “in the field”, anywhere in the world.

The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles – on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species – in a web-based database.

The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.

The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google’s Android open-source operating system.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Mobile app sees science go global.

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Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency

September 16th, 2009

Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index and GoodGuide are two interesting systems to study.

Two months ago, Wal-Mart made an announcement that could set off an ecological earthquake: The giant retailer disclosed it was cooperating with an academic consortium to develop a sustainability index for rating its hundreds of thousands of products.

Just weeks after Wal-Mart’s announcement, the Harvard Business Review featured a cover story proclaiming that sustainability has become the key to successful corporate strategy. The article, co-authored by the University of Michigan-based strategy maven C.K. Prahalad, proclaimed that the next business model must be green and touted ecological innovation as the coming driver of economic growth.

Wal-Mart has handed the environmental movement a new tool for ameliorating the human footprint: using an emerging generation of information systems to create market pressures to upgrade the ecological performance of commerce and industry. This strategy entails making life-cycle-assessment data for products transparent — that is, labeling them with a sound, independent rating so shoppers can easily take the ecological impacts into account as they decide what to buy.

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A prototype for just such a sustainability index is already in operation: GoodGuide.com, launched earlier this year, aggregates more than 200 databases — from the global warming evaluations of companies compiled by ClimateCounts, to government listings of toxic chemicals — into a single rating on a 10-point scale.

The advantage of an all-in-one rating is this: say you’re buying a wood product that has won Forest Stewardship Council approval — but you also want to know how it rates on chemicals of concern, how workers are treated, and its carbon footprint. GoodGuide, developed by a team led by industrial ecologist Dara O’Rourke of the University of California at Berkeley, tells you all that, and much more — either in a single summative score (on a 1 to 10 scale), or broken down into sub-ratings in environmental, health, and social categories — and, if you’re determined to dig down to details, with transparency about how the ratings were arrived at. So far GoodGuide rates 70,000 or so individual products, with more in the pipeline

via Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency by Daniel Goleman: Yale Environment 360.

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Posted in Environment, IT

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‘Athens’ on the Net

September 16th, 2009

Thanks to Alastair for forwarding this article to me because it thoughtfully presents the enabling power and the dangers of the internet in influencing on our society’s political governance.

One thing that strikes me in this article assumes or interprets that democracy and the internet will enable everyone to have a voice and every voice is equal. This is the assumption behind the idea of crowdsourcing or “wisdom of the crowds.” While I do not disagree with the validity of these ideas in certain areas of applications, they should not override the fact that there are differences within the crowd. There will be people of greater expertise in the crowd than others. To simply deny the differences is a denial of such a reality.

I believe that internet applications need to allow us to zoom into the crowd and see the individuals. We should be able to distinguish one from another in the online mass. Trust is enabled when we come to know the individuals, which is brought up in the documentary file.

12giri.1902 ‘Athens’ on the Net “Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)

The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.

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Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.

via ‘Athens’ on the Net – NYTimes.com.

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Posted in Governance, IT

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China Moves to Retaliate Against U.S. Tire Tariff

September 14th, 2009

The role of the internet and the “angry youth” are observed to play a part in China’s response to President Obama’s policy of raising the tariff to 35% on tires imported from China. The voices on the internet seem to have exerted pressure on the Chinese government to retaliate US punitive tariff measure. In other words, the collective voices, expressed via the internet, can have a political will, power and influence on Chinese national and international policies. This political dynamic has been emerging for the past 10 years. And it will be very interesting to observe how the government handles this growing online nationalism and its impact on the government’s policies.

The Chinese government’s strong countermove followed a weekend of nationalistic vitriol against the United States on Chinese Web sites in response to the tire tariff. “The U.S. is shameless!” said one posting, while another called on the Chinese government to sell all of its huge holdings of Treasury bonds.

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The Chinese government sometimes organizes blog postings to defend its own policies. But some postings on the tire decision have been implicitly critical of the Chinese government, making it unlikely that they are part of an orchestrated effort.

“Why did our government purchase so much U.S. government debt?” said one posting signed by a “Group of Angry Youths.” It continued, “We should get rid of all such U.S. investments.”

via China Moves to Retaliate Against U.S. Tire Tariff – NYTimes.com.

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Chinese workers use Internet for shoptalk

September 9th, 2009

Although Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China, Chinese citizens are still able to take advantage of the internet and mobile technologies to increase communication and information gathering.

Reporting from Shenzhen, China – When Jiang Dabao lost his right hand to a molding machine three years ago, his factory boss said he wasn’t eligible for workers’ compensation. Unemployable, Jiang whiled away his days in the Internet bars that thrive here in China’s manufacturing heartland.

Eventually he tapped into an online forum on QQ, a popular social networking service, where he found a workers advocacy group that helped him win a $30,000 settlement.

“Before I got hurt, I had no idea how to use a computer or even the Internet,” said Jiang, who identified himself by his childhood nickname for fear of official reprisal.

Forums such as the one used by Jiang have become the Chinese proletariat’s equivalent of Facebook or Twitter. And the conversations taking place on those channels are seen by some as the faint beginnings of a labor movement, and one that might have muscle.

via Chinese workers use Internet for shoptalk — latimes.com.

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Posted in China, IT, News

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Its Ophone Débuts, as China Mobile’s Keeps in Touch iPhone Opportunities

September 8th, 2009

While introducing OPhone into the Chinese mobile market, China is also talking with Apple about releasing iPhone into the market later on this year.

From LG GW880 leaks out, runs Android on China Mobile:

It’s sort of interesting that China is where all the Android action seems to be going down lately, but here we are, staring at the LG GW880 — essentially the company’s first Android phone. Of course, “Android” in this case means China Mobile’s custom WiFi-less OPhone platform, which means we’ll probably never see this guy outside of the Middle Kingdom, but it’s a fair look at what LG’s handset designers think an Android set should look like: 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen, 256MB RAM, GPS, and a five megapixel camera. Honestly? We’re hoping LG has grander plans for those other Android phones it has planned for this year — we’ll just have to wait and see. Hit the read link for a few more shots in the meantime.

From Its Ophone Débuts, as China Mobile’s Keeps in Touch iPhone Opportunities
In an e-mail to the Wall Street Journal, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison said she could confirm that the sales agreement with China Unicom is not exclusive, which reignites the possibility for cooperation between Mobile and Apple. China Mobile has been hoping to launch the TD iPhone by Apple, but Apple has been hesitant on the issue.

China Mobile has officially released its Ophone, based on its own platform, and with its Mobile Market, opened two weeks ago, China Mobile has already launched a version suitable for the Chinese market to compete with iPhone’s beautiful hardware and its APP Store,

“Both Ophone and iPhone have their own characteristics and they do not need to compete against each other.” says Wang. In Wang’s outline of the mobile internet in the future, China Mobile will challenge the 3G market with both Ophone and iPhone.

As mobile technologies continue to advance and become available to the Chinese consumers, will they take advantage of the computing and networking power of these tiny devices? For example, I am currently working on the OakMapper project, in which I take advantage of the onboard GPS unit of the iPhone to submit a suspected Sudden Oak Death (SOD) infected oak tree. Can Chinese consumers use these devices, GPS-enabled, to carry out environmental accountability?

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Posted in China, IT, News

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China’s Internet Market

April 29th, 2008

Peter Scheer at SF Chronicles did a short article on doing IT business in China. He drew out a few points on the threats and opportunities of IT business inside of China’s Great Firewall.

A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest Internet market in the world. At 225 million users and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with the Chinese government inevitably entails.

The link to the article: The Great Firewall

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Posted in China, IT, News

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