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Making ICTs relevant to development is possible
Bytes For All Readers list is a platform for information on ICT solutions in developing countries. It is an extension of an information portal of the same theme launched in 1999. Keen to share information generated on the list, Bytes For All presents a summary of topical news and views posted in August. Readers are encouraged to visit the BFA website for archives, details on events, research papers and thematic articles surrounding the ICT4D paradigm. The website covers a wide range of subjects including low cost access to technology, education, disaster management, community radio, egovernance, telemedicine, and the free software movement.
Breakthrough tech
Raj Reddy, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, plans to unveil a new project. The PCtvt is a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year. His low-cost computer doubles as a TV and a DVD player. Mr. Reddy believes that he will be able to use it as a vehicle to take computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world. "Entertainment is the killer app, and that will smuggle something that is a lot more sophisticated into the home," said Tom Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at Berkeley. This November Mr. Reddy hopes to begin installing the first 100 prototypes of the PCtvt in India and possibly several other countries. The project will work in partnership with University of California researchers who are attempting to develop high-speed wireless digital networks for rural communities.
Voice and Data
PBX software for GNU/Linux
Primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86, Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Mac OS X Jaguar, and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX. It offers Voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium dba Linux Support Services Inc., the code has been contributed from open source coders around the world. Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. It supports a wide range of TDM protocols and US and European standard signaling types used in standard business phone systems. Mark can be found on Orkut.com where he moderates an Asterik community.
West Africa to legalize VoIP
VoIP telephony has been largely illegal in Africa but a new breed of telecom regulators opened up its use in West Africa. Guinea Bissau's Eguitel had held a license for nine months and was about to start carrying international traffic for the new second mobile operator, Spacetel. However, the company was contacted by the Regulator and told that the license was being revoked. Eguitel's CEO has vowed to continue operating, saying that the recall of the license is not legal.
Mobile vendors excite South Asia
A Pakistani mobile vendor created a huge stir by offering free pre-paid connections to consumers. The offer drew over 3,00,000 subscribers to Ufone GSM. Teledensity remains low in Pakistan and is mainly saturated in urban areas. Telecom is getting increasingly competitive since the market privatized, however, companies will have to expand their services to remote areas at lower tariffs in order to tap into potential demographics. A sharp reduction in tariffs, including complete relief in nationwide roaming charges, prompted a fierce battle between existing mobile vendors recently. Over in India, Reliance Infocomm cut rates for its pre-paid wireless access by 60%, forcing other GSM players to consider tariff reduction, despite possible losses in revenue. A call made by a Reliance prepaid mobile customer to any other Reliance phone in the same region will cost as low as 0.99 rupee ($1=INR46.32) a minute, while calls made to other networks will cost INR1.79 a minute.
Software
Compiere is free
The open source ERP and CRM software is freely available from Compiere partners and its users and developers rank Compiere among the top 10 active projects in SourceForge (since March 2002). An Oracle license is currently required to run Compiere, but it can be provided as part of a support contract if you so wish. Database independence from the Oracle platform is under development, which will negate the need to license Oracle.
Weka 3: Data Mining Software in Java
Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset or called from your own Java code. Available for free from Sun, Weka contains tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization. It is also well suited for developing new machine learning schemes. Weka is open source software issued under the GNU General Public License and requires Java 1.4 to run. See the website for details on projects using Weka, installation and support help.
Open Source Protege
Protégé is ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system. It is also an open-source, Java tool that provides an extensible architecture for the creation of customized knowledge-based applications. Protégé's OWL Plug-in now provides support for editing Semantic Web ontologies.
Kannada Opentype Fonts
The Indian Language Technology Solutions Project released two more Kannada Opentype Fonts named "Kedage" and "Mallige" due in September. Beta copies of the fonts will be available through e-mail requests. Mallige is a handwritten font while Kedage is a regular font with much better glyphs compared to Kannadas Sampige font. Creators are in the process of ensuring GPL License for the fonts.
Education
Low cost PCs in SA [www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html]
South African company OnPoint Solutions have invented a low-cost, four-in-one PC that could lower the cost of offering ICT in learning institutions. The purpose built PCs offer internet, e-mail, phone, word processing and network facilities exclusively for educational purposes and concessions provided from Microsoft International have allowed the machines to be sold at the low cost of 298 per system.
e-Governance
India needs a supercomputer grid?
'Could India have a supercomputing grid for governance?' Sunil Abraham raised the question as he speculated on the implementation of Thunder-like supercomputers at the federal and state-level for governance. Thunder runs on GNU/Linux, and all its code has been released under the GPL as Free Software. Anand Babu led the Engineering team of California Digital that built the super computer code named "Thunder" for Lawrence Livermore National Labs, US, that has been ranked the second fastest supercomputer in the world. It can perform 19.94 trillion floating point operations a second yielding the best price/performance ratio at 86.7% efficiency.
Voter forms online help Gurgaon
Peoples Action Gurgaon has launched a website called Voter-card.com designed specifically to help residents access Form-6 online. The Form-6 is the first step towards acquiring a Voter ID card as it registers the individual as a prospective voter. Peoples Action is currently running a campaign for registration of new voters in Gurgaon with the intent of increasing participation of residents in the election process.
VoteSmartIndia needs volunteers
Vote Smart India (VSI) has been populated with affidavits data in a number of Indian regional languages. VSI is looking for Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi speaking translators who can convert the documents into English and enter the data into Excel sheets. Volunteers are welcome to help complete the VSI database and a group might even be given responsibility for a language or region as well. Other ideas are welcome.
Agriculture
e-Mandi eyes multiple buyer, seller scenario
Citing India's e-choupal scheme's limitations as a single buyer system, Vipol Arora pointed to the 'e-Mandi' project as an alternative. Both ideas build on the belief of enabling farmers' use of ICT to establish an Online market of agricultural produce by neutral players. e-Mandi, a commodities exchange, can link the prices of agricultural produce to market considerations, liberating agriculture from the above constraints. Four Futures exchanges have already been established and promoted by the Indian government in the past year. However, these exchanges manage risk for Banks, Traders, Stock Market and Commodity traders. Individual farmers have been excluded by design. In a manner that BSE and NSE provide a market for people all over India to trade in Stock of companies, e-Mandi will allow people from all over India to trade in agricultural produce. Vipol says he is developing this idea as a Visiting Fellow at Stanford.
On the Air
Mountain Forum and Sagarmatha reach out to Nepal
A unique triad will make the Mountain Forum of Nepal's virtual network available to a huge offline population. The Forum Secretariat is launching a pilot project in association with the Asia-Pacific Mountain Network and Radio Sagarmatha, which reaches people in 8 districts of Nepal. Despite an astounding 16,000 strong subscription list maintained by the Forum, project managers felt technology limits their access to the average Nepali. The idea works out simply: Radio Sagarmatha staff and Mountain Forum staff will collaborate in identifying issues for discussion and post them on the MF list, seeking subscribers input. This will be sent to the radio producers who will then go in field to pose questions and record reactions on the issue. The programme will be broadcast in the local language. It will later be translated and adapted for MF discussion lists and posted (in English). Responses of the MF community will be broadcast in the next programme by Radio Sagarmatha. A summary of the dialogue will be provided on MF discussion lists at the end of this cycle. Producers are eyeing 8-10 episodes and the first broadcast is set for 17th of September. Suggestions can be sent to:
radio@mtnforum.org
Telemedicine
Mali hospital links to satellite
[www.balancingact-africa.com/news/back/balancing-act_217.html]
Situated some 750 km from Mali's capital Bamako, patients at Dimbal hospital are now benefiting from the medical opinion of experts in Geneva. The Geolink Access satellite allows doctors in the hospital to ask questions of experts 6,000kms away in case of difficulties.
Gender & IT
Women in Action
The first issue of Women in Action explores corporate media environment in a transnational era and how women are grappling with issues of identity and gender bias. It explores case studies in India, Africa and Latin America where women took center stage to utilize ICTs for activism in their communities.
Net Regulation
Zimbabwe govt to plant bugs
Zim Online reports that the Zimbabwe government is planning to acquire high-tech equipment from China for the purpose of bugging the internet. According to the site, "Authoritative sources within Posts and Telecommunications (PTC) and government circles have revealed that the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) is already looking into ways of controlling internet communication as soon as the equipment arrives."
South Africa questions US dominance of ICANN
A Panos feature article reports on the concerns held by countries in the developing world of the dominance the US has over the Internet. South Africa is amongst the countries leading the call for the formation of an intergovernmental agency within the UN to take over the functions of the American based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which alone is responsible for administrating the Internet's domain names and address identifiers. According to South African President Thabo Mbeki if the Internet remains under the control of ICANN, 'the world continues to be governed by California law'. The South African Government recently wrested legal control of its country domain (.za) from a local ICANN-appointed Internet pioneer, without seeking ICANN approval.
Access to internet
The .tk project
Ever wondered about the origins of the .tk domain name? The Tokelauans are looking to register 1,000,000 such domains to draw interest of Fortune 500 companies for their Tokelau Internet Project. The island of Tokelau wants high-speed Internet Access and needs the funds, products and resources to do so. Project managers say, "Dot TK will show its gratitude to our Ambassadors for referring new registrants, by rewarding them with special recognition and with "virtual FISH". These FISH can be bartered for various items of value to Dot TK domain holders. Upon meeting pre-determined achievement goals Ambassadors accelerate through five (5) levels of distinction, each earning more FISH for each new registrant referred, as well as greater recognition from Dot TK."
Internet on three wheels
For 12-year-old Anju Sharma, hope for a better life arrives in her poor farming village three days a week on a bicycle rickshaw that carries a computer with a high-speed, wireless Internet connection. Designed like temple carriages that bear Hindu deities during festivals, the brightly painted pedal-cart rolls into her village in India's most populous state, accompanied by a computer instructor who gives classes to young and old, students and teachers alike. "By using computers, I can improve my knowledge," Sharma, whose parents plan to pull her out of school at 15, said in Hindi, before joining a class on Web cameras. "And that will help me get a job when I grow up."
Events
Eradicating Poverty through Profit
An international conference exploring private sector initiatives for public opened debate on the event's objectives. Readers pointed out that the website showed little representation from the developing world and the registration fee was considerable, making the event elusive in its approach towards poverty. Wrote Satish Jha, "Let us face it- conferences are a business that require the credibility of institutions that have the horsepower to make them happen. However, as soon as they touch the area of poverty and development, the economics, the values and the expectations begin to touch an area that require some add-ons to the market perspective." The event is inspired from a recent book of the same name written by C. K. Prahalad. "CK Prahalad was able to raise a different point altogether in his book on the same subject," said Mohandas, "This type of a conference was not an answer nor a solution. The huge registration fees and other appendages prohibit ' poor' people like us to participate. If the intention of the organizers were to genuinely propagate the idea then they should have found ingenuous ways to reach a wider spectrum of people."
2004 O'Reilly Open Source Convention
O'Reilly's 'Open Thinking' event drew 2000 participants in Portland, Oregon making it the busiest convention in its three year history. "We've unleashed enormous technological changes, but where are they going?" asked O'Reilly Media, Inc. CEO Tim O'Reilly. "One of the lessons of open source is that the project with the best community adoption characteristics wins. Open source has found its natural communities, and is now reaching out to new ones."
Essential reading
Objections to a Global Rural Network
Larry Press gives nine reasons why a Global Rural Network, a scheme looking to provide internet access to every village in the developing world, should not be on the agenda.
The NAI Campaign
Royal D Colle, International Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, on the National Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and its role in persuading urban and rural people alike about the value of knowledge, information and communication, and their participation in contributing to information databases.
The search for community and profit: Slashdot and OpenFlows
George Dafermos looks at the web's most popular blog to evaluate a volunteer-based business plan that serves the community it thrives on. "Who gets the money? Is it the marketing genius behind Slashdot who pays for the server expenses that should get the money or the volunteer who provided the link to the product and wrote the review at the first place? Or both?"
Africans in the Information Society
Senegal-based ENDA has published an advocacy document presenting major issues faced by African countries and their inclusion in the information society, as perceived by women. With a forward by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the document is described as a 'tool for public, private and civil society stakeholders and decision-makers for integrating gender into ICT policies for an inclusive African information society.'
Factoids
The number of PC users is expected to hit or exceed 1 billion by 2010, up from around 660 million to 670 million today, fueled primarily by new adopters in developing nations such as China, Russia and India, according to analysts.
The Internet is the leading media choice among women, trailing only work, sleep and spending time with family across overall activities, according to research undertaken by Yahoo! and Starcom Mediavest in the US.
Discuss IT
Participate in the Taking IT Global e-discussion on Transparency & Accountability here.
Websites
Open Source portal for Africa
Open Research, together with the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, is developing an open source information portal to assist non-profit organizations. Non-profit, governmental and educational initiatives are welcome to share their experiences to be written up and made available to a broader community.
Grameen Tele Center
Grameen Cyber Society is a not for profit organization based in Bangladesh that intends to make a significant contribution to the quality of lifelong learning, by using ICT in the rural communities. Developed through a unique multisectoral collaboration with the World Bank, BRAC University, CAMPE, Grameen Cyber Net Ltd, Bytes for all, BCS and BDGF, the initiative ensures that the community have access, for the first time to digital based learning materials.
Karmayog
A new free site for enabling individuals and corporates to give their time, talent, money and resources by volunteering, mentoring, giving materials, providing services (free or at reduced costs) to Mumbai-based NGOs, nonprofits, charities, etc.
Parliament of India
Replies to India's parliamentary questions are now available in plain text format, which means you can search and download questions related to issues of your interest.
National Commission for Human Development
NCHD newly launched its re-built website featuring its organizational components, core programmes including education, health, incubation, micro-enterprise development, global resource management and volunteerism.
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Making calls over net technology is changing the face of phones. New technology to make voice calls over broadband has hit UK High Streets with the launch of Freetalk in Dixons, Currys, The Link and PC World.
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Networked Intelligence for Development
Networked Intelligence for Development is a Toronto based network of independent consultants and trainers specializing in new media, information and communication technologies (ICTs), the creative industries and international development. Our consultants have held senior positions in multilateral organizations, governmental and intergovernmental organizations, broadcasting and media institutions, research institutes and non-governmental organizations.
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Digital Divide Network
The Digital Divide Network, a project of the Benton Foundation, examines the digital divide from many perspectives. The Web site offers a range of information, tools and resources that help practitioners stay on top of digital divide developments.
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