RSS MAD

Bruce Sterling update:  Now calling his concept "cybergreens":  "They're all about creating irresistible consumer demand for cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade. It's the Net vs. the 20th-century fossil order in a fight that the cybergreens are winning. Why? Because they're not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.

We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It's not even science fiction -- it's a cybergreen manifesto.

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green."

Coltan and Your Mobile:  Disturbing effect of a key electronic material on the ongoing disaster in the Congo.  "Columbite-tantalite (from here on referred to as Coltan). On its own it looks and feels like a very fertile soil, but when refined you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. Once refined, coltan has myriad uses, all of which pertain to its particular properties of being a dense mineral with the ability to withstand high temperatures and stress.To the high-tech industry this tantalum is a magic dust that is essential in making computer chips, stereo’s, VCR and DVD players and mobile phones. As such, coltan derivatives are used as capacitors in devices such as mobile phones and even complex missile guidance systems. ..

Coltan is mined by hand in the Congo by groups of men digging basins in streams by scrapping off the surface mud. They then “slosh” the water around the crater, which causes the Coltan ore to settle to the bottom of the crater where it is retrieved by the miners...

While a fair majority of the worlds tantalum supply comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil the recent demand for tantalum has caused a more sinister market to begin flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 80% of the world’s known coltan supply is subject to “highly organized and systematic exploitation.” There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining in the Eastern DRC to help finance political and human oppression, child enslavement, torture and war. The mining area is also within one of the main ranges of the threatened Eastern Lowland Gorilla  .. In April of 2001 the United Nations issued a report on the rape of resources from the DRC. In their findings field investigators reported that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. ..Coltan smuggling has also been implicated as a major source of income for the military occupation of Congo which is also linked to forced child enlisting, rape and the rampant spread of HIV. ..

Manufacturers rely on their “suppliers” which are Tantalum capacitor makers like Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world’s largest tantalum capacitor maker and on the companies trading the minerals. .. some 80 percent of the worlds Coltan comes from the DRC and most of that passes through several black market hands before its finally delivered to the refineries it what appears to be legitimate means."

Global Voices Online:  Interesting compilation of current blog material from citizens of many counties, including Lebanon, Libya, China, Iran, with coverage of local news.  Would provide interesting inputs to the "open source intelligence" movement.

Inflated influence of India's IT-factor:   "In 2003, for example, India claimed to have exported US$8.7 billion worth of software, most of which went to the United States. But US companies recorded just US$420 million worth of software imports from India — a remarkable 20-fold difference.  The GAO believes that this huge inconsistency arises, in part, from India misreporting financial data. For instance, India counts the earnings of all temporary workers in the United States as part of their exports figures. But this is against universally-accepted financial disclosure conventions suggested by the International Monetary Fund. The result is a gross over-representation of Indian software exports.Several factors also point to a relatively small impact on economic development from India's IT industry. In 2005, for instance, the IT exports industry was a marginal job-creator, employing 770,000 people — just 0.21 per cent of the total labour force."

WaterHealth International Closes Series C Funding:  "WaterHealth International, Inc. (WHI) today announced the final close of its Series C funding for a total equity investment of more than $11 million.  SAIL Venture Partners, L.P., anchored the latest investment of $4 million.  Series A investor Plebys International LLC, founded and led by WHI CEO Tralance Addy, also invested in this round.  The new investments are in addition to the $7.25 million equity investment anchored by Dow Venture Capital that WHI announced last month.  

WHI has more than 450 installations of its water purification and disinfection systems in developing countries around the world.  This additional funding further strengthens WHI and will allow for accelerated growth in the company's target markets, primarily India and South Asia, West Africa, the Philippines and Mexico."  This is the product developed by Ashok Gadgil, which I've been following for a few years.  Glad to see it get substantial backing.

Non-profit Discount - DreamHost:  Free web hosting for non profits from a reputable hoster.  (via John Sequeria).

Strong Angel 3 lessons:  This year's Strong Angel exercise has received extensive coverage.  An excellent long summary is provided by Sanjana at his ict4peace blog.  The linked magazine article provides a few tech takeaways:

• "Perhaps the most popular technology used during Strong Angel was the Fossil Abacus smart personal object technology (SPOT) watch. This is a wristwatch with an embedded FM radio receiver designed to receive text messages. Although the watches are primarily intended for personal use, a portable and configurable FM transmitter with a 50-mile radius allows the devices to operate in areas without infrastructure, power or Internet connectivity. Messages can be sent to selected groups of SPOT wearers, such as police, fire department personnel and National Guard troops. ..
• [Also popular were] satellite dishes manufactured by GATR Technologies, Huntsville, Alabama. The dishes resemble oversized beach balls and are available in several sizes. The smallest antennas weigh 70 pounds and provide a two-megabit-per-second Internet connection. ..
• Route 1 Incorporated, Toronto, Canada, provided all of the event’s participants with a device called a Mobikey. Roughly the size of a data stick, it fits into a computer’s universal serial bus port to create a virtual private tunnel from any terminal or computer that users are operating in the field back to their organization’s server or personal desktop. ..
• One assumption that was quickly dispelled was that wireless Internet connectivity could be easily established. “Everybody showed up with a Wi-Fi [wireless fidelity] router and nobody could get online,” [Microsoft's] Kirkpatrick shares."
  

Record-Breaking Governance Prize Launched:  Great idea: reward leaders to leave office peacefully.  "Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced today a $5 million annual prize for African leaders who were elected fairly, improved their country's standard of living, and handed over power peacefully to the next elected government.

Recipients of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership will get $500,000 a year in their first 10 years out of office, and $200,000 a year for the rest of their lives. The prize will be the world's most generous award, according to the foundation. .. [Ibrahim] hopes to make the first award by the end of 2007.

The prize's selection committee will choose winners with the help of a governance index that is being developed by Dr. Robert Rotberg at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The foundation will spend about $500,000 a year to develop and update the index. ..

Rotberg told AllAfrica that most existing measures rely on interviews and other forms of documentation for comparison, but that he will use only quantifiable, objective measures. For example, in measuring changes to the national infrastructure, the index may count the miles of paved road in a country. To measure political freedom, team members may identify the number of journalists or opposition leaders held in prison. ..

Ibrahim said his financial models assume that leaders will live 25 years after leaving office, making the estimated net prize worth $8 million. With new winners being added each year, the cost to the foundation will quickly rise into the tens of millions, but Ibrahim said .. "We are fully funded. We are not seeking money from anybody."

Much of Ibrahim's personal fortune comes from last year's sale of his African telecommunications company, Celtel, to Kuwait's MTC for $3.4 billion."

WorldChanging book and book tour:  I've been a fan of the blog for years, and now it's a book, complete with big city book tour.  Bravo!

Windows XP Multiuser Remote Desktop:  With a couple file renames and a registry change, XP can run three remote desktop sessions (normal desktop plus 2 more). 
Combined with the $20-30 terminals that are available from outlets like www.surpluscomputers.com, and the $150-250 LCD screens, you can extend an ordinary PC to multiple users (with very low power and zero noise to boot).

Mifos: Grameen Foundation USA is sponsoring teh open-source development of an ambitious system for microfinance management.  "Mifos is a universal, flexible and scalable software platform for information management for the global microfinance community. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) will use Mifos as their base operational software to administer their client accounts and financial portfolio. Loan officers will use it to create loans as well as savings, insurance and other financial services. Mifos will be used to record all transactions. It will manage the user and client database, define the products, and create reports for internal use and outside reporting to regulators, funders and supporters. Finally, it will include surveys to help measure the social impact of the MFI operation."

I'm back from my trip to the Conservation International conference in Madagascar.  I kept  a travel blog, which is now finished, at http://kensroad.blogspot.com/ .  Feel free to visit.

Lessons of post-Cold War development: Summarizes and links to papers by Harvard's Dani Rodrik, especially an excellent review of economic development policies since 1990, "Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?"  For example:  "While it is true that over the past ten years scores of developing nations have not experienced economic growth, and in some cases have actually fallen backwards, despite following the rules of the Washington Consensus, paradoxically, that doesn't mean the era of globalization has been an unmitigated disaster. Quite the contrary: "From the standpoint of global poverty," writes Rodrik, "the last two decades have proved the most favorable that the world has ever experienced. Rapid economic growth in China, India, and a few other Asian countries has resulted in an absolute reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty."

But what's fascinating is that China and India made their march forward, according to Rodrik, not by willy nilly opening up their markets with neoliberal abandon, but with great attention to policy choices, and with explicit government involvement in the economy that can only be described as industrial policy. The same was true of many of the East Asian nations who developed earlier, like Taiwan and South Korea, which only started to seriously open up after they had achieved substantial economic growth through a mix of protectionism, export subsidies, and other policy choices."

Text messaging, thumb drives, and Web mail for disasters:  "Communications systems were largely useless when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, “but text messaging did work,” said John Lawson, CIO of Tulane University in New Orleans. Lawson and other officials who were on the ground during Katrina’s aftermath told a gathering of public-sector CIOs that because text messaging requires so little bandwidth, and in very short bursts, it became a primary means of communicating during rescue-and-recovery operations.

“Our young folks figured that out for us,” said Joe Castillo, chief of operations for the Coast Guard district serving New Orleans. .. Castillo [also] said the Coast Guard relied on thumb drives to courier data around the area. The miniature storage devices contain flash memory and typically connect to computers through a USB port. “I bought a ton of them,” Castillo said.

Agencies on the ground also relied heavily on commercial e-mail services and recommended off-site e-mail systems as part of a continuity of operations plan (COOP). Eric Rasmussen, a director of emergency medicine for the Navy, said his group set up accounts on Yahoo Mail, Google and others in order to share information.

Lawson said he learned to have an off-site e-mail system in place in case of disaster. Tulane was eventually able to find an offsite partner to set up accounts for students and personnel, but the school was unable to populate the system on the fly with all user account information. ..

Rasmussen was pleased with the Groove peer-to-peer collaboration tools his team employed in New Orleans, but they weren’t perfect. In order to establish secure collaboration, Groove’s communications are encrypted end to end. Therefore, an emergency response official must be invited to a Groove workgroup in order to collaborate. COOP plans should include technologies for workgroup discovery, Rasmussen said. .. “The ability to find out who is doing collaborative work … by having some Web-based discovery capability or some e-mail-based discovery capability would be very useful,” he said. “A lot of work that was done in a collaborative workspace was not available to anyone else.” "

111m surfers in China: "The number of Web users in China, the world's second largest Internet market, grew by 18 percent in 2005 to 111 million, the Economic Daily reported on Wednesday. Some 8.5 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people now had access to the Internet, the newspaper reported, citing a survey released by the China Internet Network Information Center.  .. The 2005 gains represented an acceleration from 2004, when the number of Internet users grew 16 percent to 94 million. More than half of China's Web population -- or about 64 million people -- accessed the Web via broadband connections, suggesting a 50 percent increase versus 2004 as China strongly promotes the development of its broadband networks. ..

China is the world's No. 2 PC market, with nearly 16 million units shipped in 2004 and the number expected to have grown another 13 percent last year, according to data tracking firm International Data Corp."

Why Do Some Turks Have Bird Flu Virus but Aren't Sick?:  I wonder if surviving a mild version of bird flu immunizes against the bad version.  "five cases in Ankara hospitals are different from those elsewhere in Asia. Four of the five display only mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all..  Doctors are unsure whether they are for the first time seeing human bird flu in its earliest stages or if they are discovering that infection with the A(H5N1) virus does not always lead to illness. ..

Since none of the five have died, it is raising the possibility that human bird flu is not as deadly as currently thought, and that many mild cases in Asian countries may have gone unreported.  Turkey is the first country outside eastern Asia to have human cases, and the first one anywhere to have so many separate animal outbreaks simultaneously.

In one week, Turkey announced 15 confirmed human cases of A(H5N1); Asia has seen only about 140 in the space of five years. .. In Ankara, where the government has been sending out vans with loudspeakers urging people to report symptoms and avoid contact with animals, even people with mild symptoms are being checked for bird flu, meaning that milder cases are more likely to be detected than they are in other parts of Asia. "I'm sure that part of the explanation for the high number of case in Turkey is better surveillance," said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the W.H.O. in Geneva."  Again, better surveillance and quick communication are key.

Getting in early as China cleans up: "Stories on environmental disasters come out of China and other Asian developing countries regularly.  A review of impacts and the resulting investments:  "Environmental damage from pollution is costing China the equivalent of 7.7 percent of gross domestic product annually .. Other sobering statistics in the report, called "Connecting Asia," include estimates of 6.4 million work years lost annually in China to air pollution, 178,000 premature deaths in major cities every year caused by the use of high-sulfur coal and the fact that 52 urban river stretches have been so contaminated that they are no longer suitable for irrigation. ..

[Investment manager] Sorenson said that in terms of environmental standards, "China is now where the U.S. was in the late 1960s" [when disasters and new laws] changed the way U.S. companies conducted business. A similar process was seen in Japan, spurred by the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, and in South Korea, when Seoul was host of the Olympics in 1988. There is much hope that the 2008 Games in Beijing will prove as seminal in China's environmental development. .. In November, [China's] State Environmental Protection Administration estimated that the government would spend around $156 billion in environmental protection from 2006 to 2010. ..

Sorenson's FE Clean Energy Group is currently putting together an Asia fund, which Sorenson expects to total around $75 million. .. [Another is] the China Environment Fund, set up in 2001 by Tsinghua Venture Capital Management, a fund management company affiliated with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Catherine Cao, executive director of the firm, said that its third fund should be ready by the end of 2006 and aims to raise $50 million. Two previous funds [were] $13 million and $30 million..

The easiest means of entry for small investors still remains the mutual fund. The Impax Environmental Markets fund of £45 million, or $79 million, rose by around 32 percent in 2005. Among its biggest holdings are Casella Waste, a U.S. waste disposal company, Kurita Water of Japan and Horiba, a Japanese environmental testing company."  Other options: big utilities, especially European, operating in Asia; Shenzhen Dongjiang Environmental, listed in Hong Kong; canada's Zenon Environmental; Nordex of Germany; solar companies Kyocera and Sharp.  [via Salon]

Uganda in trouble:  Uganda's government has been a model of moderation and economic liberalization for over 10 years.  But now the long-standing Museveni government is cracking down on opponents.  This reports on a demonstration for an opponent just released from jail, which was attacked with teargas and batons by police.  "From 1986 to 1996, one of them told me, crowds of this size would meet Museveni wherever he went and whomever he was with.  A decade later, a growing number of Ugandans wonder why their president doesn't seem ready to emulate his colleagues in East Africa and leave power peacefully, as Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania has done. No amount of tear gas or water can erase the doubts about Museveni, but using them often seems to increase public anger. .. 

Britain's [decided] last month to cut $26.5 million in aid to Uganda due to concerns over Besigye's arrest .."

Gapminder: An interactive presentation for the "Human Development Report 2005" by UNDP, relating population, income and health across countries and regions over 50 years.  Much improved in recent months.  In 10 minutes, it conveys a lot about where the world is going.

Nanotechnology for Development: More groups are studying the potential impact of nanotech on developing countries.  The World Bank Development Gateway has a site, with a few familar names (editor John Daly, and advisor Anil Srivastava) .  The Merdian Institute Nanotechnology and Development News provides daily updates via RSS or email. From a Press Release: " Several recent reports, including the report of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Science, Technology, and Innovation, conclude that science and technology, in particular nanotechnology, can contribute significantly to alleviating poverty and achieving the MDGs.  "The use of nanotechnology applications for water treatment and remediation; energy storage, production, and conversion; disease diagnosis and screening; drug delivery systems; health monitoring; air pollution and remediation; food processing and storage; vector and pest detection and control; and agricultural productivity enhancement will help developing countries meet five of the Goals," states the Task Force Report.  .. Over 20 countries, including innovative developing countries such as China, South Africa, Brazil, and India, have national nanotechnology programs.."

People Finder Interchange Format: For Katrinalist.net, an "all volunteer team created a searchable directory of persons displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina, consolidating over 25 different online resources into one central, searchable repository. PeopleFinder Interchange Format, (called 'PFIF') is a new, standardized data format implemented in XML.   ..

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project mobilized hundreds of volunteers over the Labor Day weekend to make an immediate difference. .. The team plans to turn its attention to housing and job solutions next, creating a centralized technology solution that aggregates acomprehensive resource set from sites all across the web, standardizes them, and makes them searchable from anywhere."

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Web Hosting: Hosting with "long tail" pricing. "no contracts and no commitments .. If you'd like to talk to one of our sales reps to get a quote, you're out of luck. We don't have any. We also don't have any commissions, referral payments, or kickbacks. With NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, your money goes straight to the services you actually use"

• Data Transfers (Bandwidth):   $1.00 per gigabyte
• Disk Space (Storage):   $0.01 per megabyte-month
• DNS at $0.02 per registered domain per day, no matter how active your domain gets.
• Domain registration at $7.45 for a one-year .com and $7.68 for .net or .org.

Mobile Comms Satellite Launches Into Orbit: Inmarsat bGAN broadband network nearly complete.  "The second step in a $1.5 billion program to create a mobile broadband communications network spanning the globe for users at sea, in the air and on land roared into space today.  .. When [The Inmarsat 4-F2 satellite] enters service from geostationary orbit 22,300 miles (35,888 kilometers) above Earth next year, the craft will join the Inmarsat 4-F1 satellite that was successfully launched on Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 rocket in March from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Together, the two craft will deliver broadband communications to 85 percent of the world."  Connections are expected at around 400 kbps in each direction.

Also interesting is how it got there.  It was launched SeaLaunch, a private company using a floating platform and Ukranian and Russian rockets.

The Year of Rewards: Penestanan 2:  When I travelled in Africa and Asia in the 80s, I shot a lot of slides.  I dreamed then of a digital future where my camera would record sound as well as pictures, and where I could annotate the recordings and beam them out to my friends at home in real time.  Even in 1983 you could see it would come, eventually.  Now, here's a fine example from my friend David Lincoln.  Today he's in Bali, taking a walk with villagers in their rice paddies.

Hurricane Katrina Relief: IT providers like Microsoft, Novell, etc, are providing assistance to businesses recovering from Katrina.  "For businesses, organizations, and institutions whose computing systems were adversely effected by the hurricane, InsynQ and a community of ASP, technology, and software providers are donating various virtual computing solutions to help them transition to recovery. .. "

Current BPL Internet Service Plenty Fast: An early user of BPL (Broadband over Power Line) Internet service from Current Communications over a local Cincinatti power company, Cinergy.  "To use the service, you get a BPL modem. It looks like a largish wall-wart power plug with some LEDs on it. It has an RJ-45 jack on it to connect to a computer or a router. That's about it.  We opted for the Cadillac level service: 3mbps up, 3mbps down, and a dedicated IP. That runs $49.95 a month, but the price decreases as more people in my neighborhood sign up (my current price with >3 neighbors signed up is a paltry $42.46)"  Measured performance:  3.5 mbps downline, 4.2 mbps uplink (!).

Energy Solutions Toolkit for ICT:  USAID interactive website for design of ICT's with off-grid power sources.

FTC Message Switching Systems: A blast from the past, the project I worked on 20 years ago.  "The Sombers Group built the company's fault-tolerant Tandem Computer-based switching systems, which were installed both in the U.S. and overseas. "  By "overseas" they mean Cameroon, where I installed the message switch at Intelcam in 1983.  I also upgraded the switch in 1986, and then hosted their staff for TCP/IP training in 1995 in California.

Wildlife trade on the web: "Internet shoppers in search of the exotic have sparked a booming trade that is threatening the existence of many endangered species, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. .. “Trade on the Internet is easy, cheap and anonymous,” said IFAW UK director Phyllis Campbell-McRae.  .. The report “Caught in the web - wildlife trade on the Internet” found in just one week 146 live primates, 5,527 elephant products, 526 turtle and tortoiseshells, 2,630 reptile products and 239 wild cat products for sale."

Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century:  20 years ago I travelled in Africa, telling people that wireless phones would be the IT that would matter there.  Nice to read the stories of how that works today.  "Bekowe Skhakhane does even the simplest tasks the hard way.  Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook, she gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles.  But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works in a steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she takes out her mobile phone. ..  "It is a necessity," said Ms. Skhakhane.. "Buying air time is part of my regular grocery list."  She spends the equivalent of $1.90 a month for five minutes of telephone time. ..

One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber. .. cellphones are enabling millions of people to skip a technological generation and bound straight from letter-writing to instant messaging. .. One woman living on the Congo River, unable even to write her last name, tells customers to call her cellphone if they want to buy the fresh fish she sells. "She doesn't have electricity, she can't put the fish in the freezer," said Mr. Nkuli of Vodacom. "So she keeps them in the river," tethered live on a string, until a call comes in. Then she retrieves them and readies them for sale. ..

William Pedro, 51, who deals in farm and garden plants, said he tried for eight years to lure customers to his nursery in a ragtag township near George.. "now [customers] can phone me for orders and I can deliver them the same day." ..

Congo was in the midst of a civil war when Alieu Conteh, a telecommunications entrepreneur, began building a cellular network there in the 1990's.  No foreign manufacturer would ship a cellphone tower to the airport with rebels nearby, so Mr. Conteh hired local men to collect scrap and weld a tower together. Now Vodacom, which formed a joint venture with him in 2001, .. [hauls] each satellite dish into place with ropes. Base stations are powered by generators. .. Vodacom Congo has 1.1 million subscribers and is adding more than 1,000 daily.  ..

How does an African family in a hut lighted by candles charge a mobile phone? ..  the solution is often a car battery owned by someone who does not have a prayer of acquiring a car. Ntombenhle Nsele keeps one in her home a few miles down the road from Ms. Skhakhane's. She takes it by bus 20 miles to the nearest town to recharge it in a gas station.  For 80 cents each, Ms. Nsele, 25, lets neighbors charge their mobiles from the battery. She gets at least five customers a week.  "Oooh, a lot of people," she said, smiling. "Too many." "

Global University Phone System: "The GUPS Initiative provides universities with a voice over IP (VOIP) system they can easily install and configure to connect their phone networks with other academic institutions around the globe. Calls are routed over the internet using VOIP thus bypassing traditional telecommunication charges for phone calls "

Royal Philips Electronics development pilots: Three projects, including one launched by Paul Rankin from the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship at Stanford.  "Voices in Your Hand is a pilot project running in Recife, Brazil, to bring digital connectivity to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. .. Using modified MP3 players, people can listen to personalized web casts of audio information offline in their homes, talk back and use voice email. Then they visit a public utility point to link their sets to the Internet. The customer here may be a family or a village, rather than an individual. ..  The pilot will be completed mid 2005, learning will be captured and results will be used to test the feasibility of possible scale up scenarios."

The Africa You Never See: Africa, "according to the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct foreign investment, [yet] it attracts the least. Unless investors see the Africa that's worthy of investment, they won't put their money into it.  .. Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list of the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+ credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar and Citibank have invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish on the future.

The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional caricature of a complex continent. .. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.

Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations. [In Somalia] private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no government intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the latest satellite phone technology. The electricity works. When the state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went out of business. Today, there are five private carriers and price wars keep the cost of tickets down. .. Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance -- or even just some governance -- but it's also true that, through resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a functioning society.

Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure, but the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It just costs them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell phones are filling the gap. .. As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the future of the continent. "

Are We Prepared for Avian Flu?: An interview with "Laurie Garrett, the only reporter to win all three of journalism's big "P" awards (the Peabody, the Polk and the Pulitzer) .. resigned from Newsday earlier this year [citing] a deteriorating climate for journalism .. Today, Garrett is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her story "The Next Pandemic?" was published in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs ..

"Avian influenza comes from aquatic birds, including migratory ducks, geese and herons. The loss of these birds' migratory routes in China has brought them into direct contact with humans in farms and parks. In this way, influenza is spread from migrating birds to domestic birds, then to pigs and ultimately to humans. This chain of events involves veterinary science, ecology and medicine, the triumvirate studied by the science of conservation medicine."  One general issue: we lack "respectful mutual lines of communication between those protecting human health, those protecting animal health and those dealing with ecology."

On avian flu response specifically:  "I think the CDC is doing a lot. But what I keep trying to get across to people is that flu starts in Asia. We're a lot better off if we can stop it in Asia than if we wait until it is here and try to figure out some means to minimize the damage. And that means a whole lot more multinational agreements, and this is difficult at a time when our Congress is full of members saying really terrible things about China [and Vietnam]..

In a recent study published in Nature, a team at Oxford University did a computer model just simply asking if it is possible to stop pandemic flu. And the good news is their answer is yes, it is possible, but the bad news is it can be stopped only if you identify it when there are just 30 human cases. Well, we're not going to spot those first 30 human cases before it spreads to hundreds or thousands of people unless we have a much better infrastructure of public health, vigilance and surveillance in poor countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and in countries with more money but completely lacking in sophisticated public health infrastructure, like China." "

Mobile phones in Kenya:  Good anecdotes on small business' use of phones.  "When handyman Alex Theuri puts down his wrenches after laying water-pipes in buildings, he picks up screwdrivers and pliers to install electric wiring elsewhere -- but there's one tool he's never without. The mobile phone has become the most essential work item for Theuri, a Kenyan plumber, electrician and small businessman who, like so many others in the East African nation, makes a living from various different jobs at the same time."

Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria: "In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near misses, and hatching new plots.  Festac Town is where communication specialists operating underground sell foreign telephone lines over which a scammer can purport to be calling from any city in the world. Here lurk master forgers and purveyors of such software as "e-mail extractors," which can harvest e-mail addresses by the million. Now, however, a 3-year-old crackdown is yielding results, Nigerian authorities say.

Nuhu Ribadu, head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, says cash and assets worth more than $700 million were recovered from suspects between May 2003 and June 2004. More than 500 suspects have been arrested, more than 100 cases are before the courts and 500 others are under investigation, he said."

G.M. Thrives in China With Small, Thrifty Vans: "In this obscure corner of southern China, General Motors seems to have hit on a hot new formula: $5,000 minivans that get 43 miles to the gallon in city driving. That combination of advantages has captivated Chinese buyers, propelling G.M. into the leading spot in this nascent car market.  ..

The minivans, which G.M. builds in a joint venture with a Chinese partner, have a quarter the horsepower of American minivans, weak acceleration and a top speed of 81 miles an hour. The seats are only a third the thickness of seats in Western models but look plush compared with some Chinese cars. ..

The utilitarian minivans and pickups are mainly purchased in China by small-business owners in towns and smaller cities, who drive them both to carry supplies for their businesses and to transport their families. .. The minivans have been a big hit, helping G.M. sell more than 170,000 very small vehicles - automobile types not available in the United States - and to pass Volkswagen this year in sales in a market that VW has dominated for two decades. They have helped turn China into G.M.'s biggest center of automotive profit - in contrast to losses in manufacturing operations in the United States - and its second-largest market in terms of the number of vehicles sold, after the United States...

The Chinese government has also encouraged a shift toward more efficient models through stringent fuel-economy regulations, even as Congress has opted for more subsidies for oil production and a limit on hybrid car subsidies .."

Inveneo.org:  San Francisco-based NGO bringing IT to remote villiages.  One project in Uganda with ActionAid, with pedal- and solar-power plus a Linux-based server/IP-PBX.  Infoworld story says 15 mins pedaling the bike powers 1 hour of VoIP talk time.  Also proposed:  an NGO remote office or a villiage education system.

France Telecom offers ''Big Screen'' Video EyeWear to Mobile Phone Users: "MicroOptical's video eyewear contains two Kopin full-colour, QVGA-resolution (320 x 240) CyberDisplay 230K microdisplays. The sleek eyewear allows users to privately view large-size video or pictures equivalent to a 12-inch screen as seen from three feet away, yet simultaneously view their surroundings thanks to the small size of the frame and MicroOptical's patented optics which allow the user to see around the screen.  ..

Orange SA, one of the world's leading wireless companies with 52 million customers in 16 countries, will bundle a MicroOptical binocular video eyewear with Samsung's SGH-D600 cell phone as part of its new "Orange World" wireless multimedia service. The bundled package, unveiled at the recent European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, will be made available to Orange subscribers in October 2005. ..

Built with nanotechnology, the CyberDisplay 230K .. operates at traditional video speeds and consumes only five milliwatts of power."  I find the power figure amazing.  Display size and power consumption are big limitations to many applications.  Looking geeky is a small price to pay for portability.

Samsung Builds Flash Based Disk Drive: "Samsung says it has developed a way to store up to 16GB of data using Flash memory, a development that could lead to extended battery life for notebook and tablet PCs. Flash memory has a power consumption that is five percent of today's hard disk drive, according to the company.  These solid-state disk (SSD) Flash-based drives will also provide faster access to data, at about two-and-a-half times the speed of current notebook hard drives. In tests, Samsung was able to read data at 57 megabytes per second (MBps) and write at 32MBps."  That's 2-3 GB/Min, comparable in my experience to desktop HD.

"Flash drives also offer the benefit of less noise and heat emissions. They are also less temperature- and humidity-sensitive, meaning Flash-based drives can be used in a wider array of applications and environments.  The disk drive itself will look much like a regular 1.8-inch hard disk drive, meaning manufacturers will have to make minimal adjustments to PC designs in order to incorporate the new drives. .. SSD Flash drives based on the new technology are expected on the market by August of this year."  They would be useful in off-grid locations, in developing countries or in sensor apps.  I wonder if the price will remain at today's $30-50/GB or will be lower.

Fundable: A web site for pooling money in small groups.  "Get it to happen or get your money back."  Could be great for non-profits, open-source coders or freelancers wanting to get paid for making a contribution, fans raising money to fund a concert, bulk buying, school projects, and more.  (How about a private lottery: if we all chip in, one of us gets to go somewhere amazing..) [From Hugh Pyle]

Water Filters Rely on Nanotech: Report from the October 2004 NanoWater conference. "A slow, methodical transformation of the $400-billion-a-year water-management industry is currently in progress, and nanotechnology appears to be leading the way. .. Two products incorporating nanotechnology are going to hit the market within the next year and are already being tested in developing nations. .. Matrikx water filters will be on store shelves within the next year after already having experienced success in 50 pilot programs throughout central Asia.  Argonide's president, Fred Tepper, is trying to get his product in the hands of consumers in the next 60 to 90 days, he said, having recently secured a distribution deal with a European company ..

Though these breakthroughs seem cutting-edge, the technology is not terribly new. Water-treatment plants have been using nanofiltration and ultrafiltration membranes to separate good water from bad for more than five years. And already the technology is becoming the industry standard. .. The same technology is allowing desalination -- the process of removing salts from fresh or sea water -- to occur at a much greater rate. The largest desalination plant in the world will begin operating in Ashkelon, Israel, in March 2005."

Argonide Nanomaterials has an interesting history of collaborations with US govt labs, Russian institutes active in nanotechnology, and others in Italy, Japan, and Singapore.

Development Through Enterprise: New web site, NextBillion.Net, with multiple author blogs. "Our goal is to identify and discuss sustainable business models that address the needs of the world's poorest citizens."  High quality content, looks like a good model for collaborative blog/infohub.

Soros funds mesh nets: "The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the Open Society Institute, funded by the Soros Foundation, to develop wireless technology to be used around the globe, with a focus on developing nations. The result will be the most advanced community wireless technology in the world. "  OJC Technologies is doing the implementation under contract.  CUWIN has released an open source beta: "Imagine a free wireless networking system that any municipality, company, or group of neighbors could easily set up themselves. Over the past half-decade, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has been developing an open source, turnkey wireless networking solution that exceeds the functionality of many proprietary systems. CUWiN's vision is ubiquitous, extremely high-speed, low-cost networking for every community and constituency."  More background: "To set up a CUWiN network, you burn a CD with the 0.5.5 software later this week and use it to boot a computer with a supported wireless card. The system finds nearby nodes, creates tables, and establishes itself as part of the network. The software is free and open source. "

Operation Tsunami Aid: April 25 2005 collection of stories on comms in the tsunami response.  Highlights include fast deployment of wifi nets, extension of nets with new WiMax links, and military-civilian cooperation lessons.  "The Defense Department conducted an unprecedented humanitarian relief operation to aid victims of the tsunami. "This was the largest relief operation since the Berlin airlift" after World War II, Tapper said. To aid countries hit by last year's tsunami, the Air Force airlifted an average of 261 tons of relief supplies a day for 47 days, he said. The Navy deployed a veritable humanitarian relief armada off the shores of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, with a total of 18 ships and 35 embarked helicopters dedicated to tsunami relief [from December to April] ..

In early January, [at] the headquarters for a multinational force called Operation Unified Assistance, Monti realized he had a problem. He had more than enough military assets and personnel — including deployed DISA personnel — to provide SIPRNET and NIPRNET communications.  What he lacked, Monti said, was an unclassified network that could also be accessed by military personnel from Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and other countries, as well as representatives from the United Nations, other NGOs and U.S. civilian agencies, such as USAID...  a separate, shared unclassified network for purposes of trust, which he believed could not be achieved with U.S. personnel operating behind a classified wall.  ..

Rasmussen said DOD units also need to pay more attention to social networking, or person-to-person communications among U.S. military and UN, NGO and USAID staff, which "is the dominant part of collaboration in the field." Rasmussen wrote in the report that those relationships need to be developed through frequent exercises before a disaster hits. .

Steckler said the NPS team plans to use the Thailand experience as a model for quickly developing networks during future humanitarian and military operations. NPS officials are developing a WiMax and Wi-Fi kit that could be easily transported and quickly set up. .. Steckler returned to Thailand in March and, with the assistance of Marine Capt. Dwayne Lancaster, increased the power of the humanitarian network with another satellite terminal at the survivor camp and a dual-redundancy router. Officials at the World Wide Web Consortium have provided initial funding for survivor camp satellite connections, Steckler said.  They have also formed a partnership with California State University at Monterey Bay to set up an NGO training center. "

$100 computers are on the way: Interview with Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz.  "The PIC was our first attempt to do something different. I think that will continue to morph into a new generation of products. We have a PIC 2 and a PIC 3 on the road map. All those products will improve the (computing) power and value, while at the same time lowering the cost.

Low-price computer design is meant to help provide Internet access to people in emerging markets. I don't think a $100 computer is out of the question in a three-year time frame. A lot of people forget that the first cell phones came out at $3,000 to $4,000 dollars and today are free. I think there's going to be some of that same kind of movement with computing and communications devices.

It's important for us to not lose sight of the segment that today doesn't have any products built for it. The trickle-down effect of desktops and laptops into that segment just doesn't work. I believe that we have an opportunity to use our x86 know-how and capability to really build products for that segment. That will be the PIC at the beginning, and there will be more. I think, within three years, it's not at all unreasonable to think of a $100 laptop for that segment. "

Cellular Internet relayed to Wi-Fi:  "Enter a little green box, about the size of a videocassette, called the Junxion Box. It grabs a wireless cell connection and turns it into a Wi-Fi signal (it also outputs Ethernet). The result: instant high-speed network."  Applications: trade shows; client visits by consulting teams; workers at construction sites; wifi access on public transport.  Takes a PC card to adapt to different cell networks.  Cost: about $600.

How SMS Could Save Your Life: Cell phones are being used "to manage the treatment of HIV/AIDS in [South Africa] where health care systems are overburdened and doctors are scarce. ..

Therapeutic counselors fill a crucial gap at the Gugulethu clinic, where 525 patients taking ARV drugs are served by just two doctors and two nurses. They visit patients at home and count pills. They take note of conditions that interfere with treatment, such as the absence of food in the house. In short, they are the first line of defense against problems with side effects and drug resistance that can develop if treatment isn't managed properly. In the past, this job involved writing out the cumbersome details of each home visit by hand. But as the clinic data accumulated and the number of patients on treatment grew, the system became unmanageable..

They [now] use SMS to send all of this information to a central database, where Sister Mtwisha can instantly view it on her computer screen. With all of the relevant information compiled neatly in front of her, the irregularities stand out. .. "I used to pick up some faults in the system after a week or a month," she says. "Now I send a message and things are sorted out on the spot, without having to wait." ..

The system, which runs on open-source software, is inexpensive and can easily be managed remotely and adapted for various projects. ..

"If a patient in Gugulethu goes to the Eastern Cape and gets sick and goes to a clinic, they would need to know what drug regimen he's been on, what side effects he had, whether he was hospitalized," she says. "We need to get a system like an ATM where you can get money from every bank. We need something like that for HIV."  The Cell-Life project, started by civil engineering faculty and students at the University of Cape Town and the Cape Technikon, has enlisted engineers and computer programmers to provide just that. 

Meanwhile, a number of other clinics have expressed interest in using the system, but it has been difficult to raise funds to expand the program. Most donors would rather buy drugs than spend money on systems for distributing them, Rivett says.  Instead of donating money, however, she maintains that large companies like Coca-Cola could make an even greater contribution by sharing their knowledge in areas like distribution and product management.  "You find Coca-Cola in rural villages everywhere, but you don't find drugs," she says. "The Coca-Colas and the Unilevers can make sure their products get to these places. We need to use these guys to help us get drugs into every single clinic."

U3 - New USB memory/device standard:  "U3 makes the promise of anywhere, anytime, any PC computing a reality. By combining the widely adopted storage capabilities of today’s UFDs (USB Flash Drives) with the ability to transport and run applications from a small UFD, U3 ensures truly personal and portable computing.   The U3 standard enables developers to create easy to use applications that minimize the complexities of today’s digital life. From your own email folders to healthcare history to fully functional work applications, U3 makes everything available anywhere without having to access multiple devices or lug around a laptop." 

Memorex, Kingston, and Verbatim have promised products: "Called a smart USB flash drive, these drives enable consumers to carry all of their personal computer settings, applications and data for use on any PC wherever they go. The new Verbatim smart Store ‘n’ Go USB flash drives will be availabe worldwide [in 2005]. .. The U3 platform includes three components. U3’s hardware specification gives manufacturers the core technology to build their smart USB flash drives. The U3 software developer kit includes sample code, a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs), and thorough documentation. The U3 Launchpad is a friendly graphical user interface that is used to access and run applications." 

This could improve the utility of internet cafes: users can keep an offline personalized environment and secure information store for a small purchase price.  Many of today's UFDs play and record sound; with U3, they could rapidly download and upload voice mail at an internet cafe to extend VOIP services (e.g., in developing countries).  The U3 could be added to an entertainment device, like an MP3 player, radio, game machine or camera, making the net cost per user negligible. 

frontline: high stakes in cyberspace: Paul Saffo in 1995 on PBS:  Fun to read the old stuff.  Paul Saffo is remarkably on-target, 10 years later.  This article mentions "macro-myopia: A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short term impact of this stuff will be less than the hype would suggest but the long term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today."  I've since encoutered Gartner's Hype Cycle, which they say they started to use also in 1995, with a graphic version of this insight. 

I found this when looking for a reference to an aphorism that I think comes from Saffo.   The aphorism:  Over two years, things change much less than we think they will; but over ten years, they change more than we imagine. 

It makes me wonder about the timeframe in between, say 5 to 7 years in the future, when major impacts will be felt from things we know are changing now, despite hype (digital sensors and surveillance) and disillusion (wind and solar power).

Network Startup Resource Center: A venerable source of help, founded by Randy Bush about the same time as CGNET.  "The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), a non-profit organization, has worked since the late 1980s to help develop and deploy networking technology in various projects throughout Asia/Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the New Independent States. Partially supported by the US National Science Foundation, the NSRC provides technical and engineering assistance to international networking initiatives building access to the public Internet, especially to academic/research institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)."  Nice recent shot from Bhutan.

WorldChanging: Nanotechnology and the Developing World:  "the Global Dialogue on Nanotechnology and the Poor [is] a project intended to trigger a conversation about the ways in which nanotechnology can be applied to the problems of development and poverty. Anyone may participate .."  SciDevNet covers the conference and has an introduction to the material.   The 29-page report covers risks as well as benefits, with a useful appendix showing the UN Millenium Goals for reference.

This has been a major interest of mine since 2000.  The bottom line for me came down to two things:  nano-engineered materials for energy and water.  Nanotech's first fruits are a new universe of materials with electrical and chemical properties that will offer new options to engineers of all goods, including those meeting basic needs.  It's like plastics a century ago; we're at the start of a decades-long absorbtion of new possibilities, both good and bad.  This time the changes will come faster, sped up by computer-aided design and manufacturing.   (Nano-assembly, whenever it arrives, will only further add to the changes.) 

For developing countries, the key benefits are in the basics for manufacturing and urban life.

• purified or desalinated water
• distributed electric generation and new options for fuel, ideally from renewable sources with hydrogen and/or battery storage of power
• more efficient use of energy and materials overall 

I think this will be on balance good for the environment, in its greater material efficiency.  However, nano-engineered materials will also be applied to increase the efficiency of raw material extraction, such as taking fossil fuels from the earth faster and cheaper.  It will also give rise to more extravagant ways to use energy in the developed world, perhaps super-sonic transport, large-scale military applications, or ever-larger interiors for housing and commerce.  I am optimistic that enough funding and volunteer attention will be given to pollution-reducing and poverty-alleviating applications to tip the balance.  (I think that the top-down and exploitative applications have been refined so much already, that it's probably easier for researchers and innovators to have a big impact in the less-explored sustainable applications.)

Ethiopians unite for Marley anniversary: "About 200,000 people gathered in Ethiopia's capital Sunday to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the birth of reggae icon Bob Marley. The concert, dubbed Africa Unite and billed as the country's largest ever, marks the first time the late reggae star's birthday celebrations have ever been held outside his native Jamaica. Marley, who died of cancer in 1981. .. Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson also declared an official year-long celebration to honour Marley's birth."  In the 80s, I spent 5 years on the road in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  I don't think I spent a week without hearing Marley's music in the street or on the radio.   Long live liberation music.

EPIC 2014: Very amusing flash projection of media in 2014.  Worth all 8 minutes.

More on the AMD PIC:  Cringely offers some info and suggested applications outside the developing world:  "the OS is Windows CE. It keeps user changes and personal settings on a separate disk partition so that the main OS partition can be updated at any time back to factory settings from a hidden 'factory reload' partition. It has no legacy interfaces at all (just VGA, RJ11 modem, AC'97 audio ports, and four USB 1.1 ports). It has no fan or even any passive ventilation. It has a 366 Mhz AMD Geode processor, 128-megs of SDRAM, and a 10-gig Seagate hard drive. It is ugly [but] cheap.  Think of the PIC as a cheaper, dumber Mac Mini. ..

in the ultra-low-end computer market right now as consumers are starting to use mobile phones to perform functions that might previously have been done with handheld computers like the iPaq. As a result, handheld sales are actually dropping, which in the PC market means the niche is already dead. .. The logical thing to do, it seems to me, is to split the niche into its two component parts -- mobile communication and cheap computing. Phones get the nod for mobility, but HP and Dell could easily pick up the cheap computing segment by selling many sub-varieties of PIC. It is ideal for home automation, for becoming a car video server to end drowning in Dora the Explorer DVDs, for acting as a home Internet gateway, for hosting the inevitable VoIP home PBX -- each a 100 million unit market, and each totally untapped by the big OEMs. .. Given a bit more effort on AMD's part, this little guy could be used to replace fading K-12 PCs all over America at prices that schools can actually afford. The power savings alone are such that an eight watt PIC will pay for itself in under two years. .. "

Cringely links to a page showing an Antiguan hacker's view of the PIC, and the AMD annoucement page that says that Linux will soon run on it.

The hundred-buck PC:   "The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software ..

An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.

Mr. Negroponte’s idea is to develop educational software and have the portable personal computer replace textbooks in schools in much the same way that France’s Minitel videotext terminal, which was developed by France Telecom in the 1980s, became a substitute for phone books."

ComTechReview: Winter 2004-2005.  Interesting journal of digital divide articles, with recent addition of an international section.  This edition includes a profile of the Owerri Digital Village, a project of a recent Reuters Digital Vision Fellow.  (The fellowship is accepting applications this year until March 15, 2005)..

HumaniNet - Tsunami Relief: "RBGAN working in Banda Aceh area of Indonesia. We have received additional confirmation that the RBGAN will operate in the Aceh area, although it is not within the guaranteed coverage area. Both the World Food Program and International Medical Corps confirm successful connections. (One user reported they were unable to connect.) We received this report on January 14 from an Inmarsat Land Earth Station (LES): "We have been told by Inmarsat that Regional BGAN works in Northwest Indonesia (Banda Aceh Province, Andaman & Nicobar Island). As with Thuraya, it is outside of the official coverage and service is therefore not guaranteed. "

CMU project envisions computers even the poorest Third World farmer could use: Further coverage of Raj Reddy's project.  "Sometime next year, Reddy plans to begin field tests in India, China and Africa of a device he calls the PCtvt ---- a combination personal computer, television, video recorder and telephone that wirelessly connects with the Internet. It all comes at a projected cost of $250 apiece. ..

These computers, in turn, would link up with an ultra-low-cost broadband technology being developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The goal, said A. Richard Newton, dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering, is an antenna, power supply and other equipment necessary to provide wireless Internet access for a village for about $500. ..

At Berkeley, the initiative is called Information and Communication Technology for Billions, or ICT4B. The National Science Foundation has provided Berkeley with $3 million to help develop low-cost broadband networks."

Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect: Nice intro to the software and its effects. "One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."  [Update: It just passed 1 TB.] ..

[In] November Jon Stewart made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. ..  Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself..

"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show,"  [and for that matter, MP3 reduced the album to the song]

The P2P technology company Kontiki produces software that, like BitTorrent, creates hyperefficient downloads; its applications also work with Microsoft's digital rights management software to keep content out of pirate hands. The BBC used Kontiki's systems last summer to send TV shows to 1,000 households. And America Online now uses Kontiki's apps to circulate Moviefone trailers. In fact, when users download a trailer, they also download a plug-in that begins swapping the file with others. It's so successful that when you watch a trailer on Moviefone, 80 percent of the time it's being delivered to you by other users in the network. Millions of AOL users have already participated in peercasting - without knowing it."

'Our government in Burma is lying when it says just a few people were killed':  Aid workers "say the death toll is certain to be higher than Burmese officials have admitted. "It is in the thousands," estimated one foreign diplomat. ..

Since the tsunami the military's grip has become even tighter. Conscript soldiers have been deployed on main roads leading out of the southern town of Kawthaung. They have orders to prevent foreign nationals from travelling more than two miles from the centre. The naval vessels are looking for boats that they do not recognise in order to prevent unauthorised missions landing along the ravaged coastline. ..

A government official intercepted our vehicle as we left Kawthaung with the aim of catching a glimpse of the damage wreaked on one of the world's last dictatorships. "Go back now," he told us. "I cannot give you permission to leave town and the army checkpoints will stop you. There is nothing to see. We are handling the situation in our own way." ..

Rangoon brushed aside most offers of help, accepting a token £104,000 worth of aid from communist China. .. [Aid organizations are prevented from visiting nearby islands and coastal areas]  Further clues to the extent of the damage come, however, in reports of foreigners who are missing in the area. Two South African backpackers and a group of Christian charity workers have not been in contact with friends and relatives for a week. A Florida-based missionary group has launched an appeal to rebuild a Burmese village destroyed in the tsunami. From the government, however, there is no word."

The politics of disaster: What happened in Burma from the Tsunami is still unknown.  "for the first three days, the official version was that Burma had survived without a scratch. The uniformed gangsters who run the kleptocracy, ravish its forests and murder its citizens, expressed their heart-felt sorrow and decent regret at the news from the rest of the region, but made no mention of the waves taking Burmese lives. A meteorological officer from Rangoon explained the miracle. The border with Thailand may only be 150 miles north of the devastated hotels of Phuket, but Burma was fortunate to have a coastline which rose from shallow seas. ..

On Wednesday the hacks on the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's mouthpiece, admitted that 43 people had died and 25 were missing. Few believed them. Ever since Boxing Day, opponents of the regime who produce the Democratic Voice of Burma website have been receiving leads from scattered sources. An anonymous naval officer told them that a military installation on Coco Island in the Indian Ocean had been washed away. Magye Island in the Gulf of Bengalmay also had been swamped, other sources said. There were reports of the Maubin University building being torn apart, possibly by an earthquake which hit after the waves, of fishermen never returning from the sea and of villages losing dozens of inhabitants. One rumour doing the rounds says that 500 died in one district alone, and it sounds plausible... the inhabitants of the coastal districts are desperately poor. Their flimsy shacks never looked as if they could withstand a raging sea.  ..

It will take weeks to find out if the real death toll is anywhere near as bad as in Thailand - if, that is, we ever find out. The junta has an interest in maintaining the illusion of total control.. Last week reporters who tried to get information from the Unicef office in Rangoon were given a short course on the facts of life. The aid workers stonewalled because they would be thrown out of the country if they said a word out of place. ..

In Burma, many charities have decided that giving aid to Rangoon is like giving EU grants to Sicily or oil-for-food programmes to Saddam's Iraq: whatever your good intentions, the money always ends up strengthening one mafia or another. Thus, while Unicef, Save the Children and a handful of other organisations cling on, most won't go near the place. They know that what Burma needs isn't hand-outs but a revolution. "

Nuclear test monitoring network useful:  Here's a tidbit from Cringeley: "Here is word from a reader in the UK: "The infrastructure for a global tsunami warning system already exists. The system set up to monitor nuclear testing is capable of, detected, and pinpointed the South Asian tsunami as it happened. The monitoring headquarters is in Berkshire, England, and the head of the station had made suggestions in the past that its role be expanded to include earthquake and tsunami monitoring. Better still, the necessary treaties are in place to allow immediate two-way communication between the centre and affected countries. Indeed, they carry an up to date list of contact numbers for key people. What's missing is political will. With that in place organisations, public information, and training can be put in place to make sure any warning is responded to on the ground."'  I recall seeing a map of the placement of their monitoring devicesand the satcoms that relay their information (uniformly spread around the planet).  Interesting to think of the other uses of that sensor network.

The Pen, Too, Is a Tool for Rebuilding: A view of tsunami reconstruction in India, where the local government and NGO sector are leading.  "It occurs to me that the tsunami has done something not even Mahatma Gandhi could: It has brought fundamentalists together to work for a common cause. Since Dec. 26, three sworn enemies have been working with each other on the relief effort: The RSS, the Hindu extremists who are part of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party; their fierce rivals, the Marxists in the Communist Party of India; and the Jamaat, the authorities who run the mosques and serve the Muslim community. ..

The politician told me that the government will endeavor to rehabilitate the islanders on shore. One of my traveling companions, an engineer from Madras, whispers to me that politicians aren't afraid of breaking promises, they're only afraid of the press.

And he's right. India has a dozen 24-hour news channels -- the most in the world. They're all offering nonstop coverage of the disaster and the relief efforts. So much scrutiny is focues on the government, relief organizations, and politicians about their responses to the devastation that any slipups become national news and prompt heated debates. Although I had wanted to volunteer to help with relief efforts, I now don't mind being a reporter again."

More on IBM tsunami recovery aid: "volunteer and corporate support that includes $1 million in cash and services, a total that may increase. IBM Corporate Community Relations worked closely with its US business partners to secure the technology -- as well as extra batteries, country-specific power supplies, Web cameras and fingerprint scanners -- over the New Years holiday weekend. IBM volunteers are now in the process of preparing the equipment for shipment to Bangkok, Thailand, where they will be distributed to outlying areas. IBM managers in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand have received calls from officials in those countries seeking recovery assistance. The IBM Crisis Response Team has been in the region for nearly a week coordinating universal technology solutions that can be used across geographies to help coordinate disaster recovery efforts."  Mark Prutsalis of Strong Angel II is leading one IBM team in the region.

Fritz Institute: Develops software and shares best practices in disaster relief logistics.  Good resource for background information, case studies, and links to practitioners.

Groove-based efforts in Sri Lanka:  S.B.Chatterjee reports on Virtual Volunteering with information moving through Groove spaces, building on networks of NGOs there (including Info-Share). 

Sumatran Surfariis - Surfing Indonesia: A number of local Indonesian tourism and shipping companies are organizing bottom-up delivery of relief packages by sea.  Susi Johnston in Bali is blogging details on the ground, with photos.   Assistance from the US is coming via the IDEP Foundation .  [Via Julia Lerman]

Office angels: FT Story of how UNHCR used volunteers from Microsoft and other companies (Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Screen-Check and Security UK) to create a refugee registration system in Kosovo, which is still in use in refugee situations elsewhere.  Shows how corporate partnership programs are potential win-wins in many areas, highlighting the desire of corporations' staff to contribute to humanitarian efforts.

The Broadband Daily: BPL Hype:  A summary of skepticism about Broadband over Power Lines.  Links to stories saying that it generates high levels of radio noise that disrupt other spectrum users; it has been tried by many utilities but only one is going commercial with it; and that industry engineers think it won't scale. 

Senegal: Digital video over DSL trial.  Tivo-like functions, starting with 200 users in 2005.

UN International Year of Microcredit, 2005: "One key need is to collect and analyse hard data on the state of microfinance:  its availability by region, client profiles, and types and quantities of services offered.  As part of the Year’s activities, a Data Project will bring together expert statisticians and researchers from the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations, in collaboration with governments and the private sector, to address current data gaps, anticipate future needs, and build agreement on the best way forward for donors, private investors and practitioners. In addition, the “Blue Book” project will seek to identify constraints and opportunities for the promotion of inclusive financial sectors, culminating in recommendations of concrete actions that countries can take to make microfinance an integral part of national financial systems"  Ongoing activities, including a planned online marketplace, at http://www.yearofmicrocredit.org.

Here are some pictures of the AMD PIC ("Emma") product as launched. It runs a Windows CE version, and typically ships with a 15-inch screen.

NetHope procures Eutelsat network: "Eutelsat, one of the world’s leading satellite operators, announced today that it has been selected by NetHope as a supplier for 2-way satellite broadband connectivity for aid organisations in over 100 locations in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. NetHope is a collaborative organisation formed by the world’s largest humanitarian aid organisations that provides IT equipment and solutions in countries where its members execute their programmes and projects.

Skylogic, a 100 percent broadband affiliate of Eutelsat, based in Turin (Italy) will coordinate logistics, installations, operations, after-sales service, and QoS management for NetHope’s participating member sites in more than 40 countries, from Paraguay to Nepal. From its location in Turin, Skylogic will provide a turnkey broadband access solution to NetHope members through the extensive coverage it can supply through Eutelsat’s fleet of satellites.

The network will use capacity on four satellites and coincides with the commercial entry into service of the African beam on Eutelsat’s recently launched W3A satellite, which is operated through a new IP hub located at Skylogic’s Turin premises. NetHope’s member organisations will also benefit from commercial conditions pre-negotiated with Eutelsat/Skylogic, for broadband 2-way access deployment, as well as project management for the entire rollout and maintenance of their sites for a term of three years."

Korean Cyworld - commercial blogging: "Cyworld is a popular site that provides personal homepage services. As of yesterday, the site surpassed 10 million members, or more than a quarter of the South Korean population. Within just a few years of launching, it has become an important part of mass culture.  Cyworld's main feature is a type of Web log called a "mini hompy," short for mini homepage. Like other blogs, users can create various Web boards, produce online photo albums, and upload other content. Its specialized content includes a "mini room," which users can decorate with items from a cyber shop.  Arcade games and music can also be bought to be included in one's hompy. These are bought with acorns, which cost 100 won (9 cents) each. Currently, Cyworld earns about 150 million won a day from acorn sales."

I was a Cyholic:  Good description by a young user, with screen shots and insights into the social processes cyworld builds on (vanity, status-seeking, and even the pleasures of being stalked).

A recent essay by Clay Shirky provides a valuable counterpoint.  Looking at mailing lists and SlashDot, he notes how a focus on personal computers and individual users obscures what they are used for.  Networked computers are less like "boxes" than "doors" into a social space.  Simple means and rapid experimentation can create a lot of value.

In some nations, the rise of 'shortgevity':  "It's an article of faith among most 21st-century humans that life is getting longer. In the last three decades, the average life span at birth has increased from about 60 years to 67 years worldwide, a remarkable achievement.  But in two dozen countries, human life spans are shortening." Article has table of several countries.  In US from 1970-2000, L.E. grew from 71.5 to 77.1 years.

"Today illicit drugs and alcoholism are still major social ills in the [former Soviet] region. But the outlook has begun to improve as those countries stabilize socially and economically, though longevity rates have still not returned to their peak levels of the 1980s.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the picture remains alarming. Experts attribute much of the problem to the HIV/AIDS epidemic there, which accounts for 25 million of the 40 million cases of HIV/AIDS in the world. According to the latest United Nations Human Development Report, life expectancy in Zimbabwe plummeted from 56 years in 1970-75 to just 33.1 today. Zambia went from 49.7 years to 32.4 in the same period, Lesotho from 49.5 to 35.1, and Botswana from 56.1 to 39.7. ..

Every year of life expectancy gained is estimated to raise per capita gross domestic product in a country by about 4 percent. That's prompted some researchers to question whether development aid to Africa, only about 10 percent of which is aimed at improving health, is being properly spent. It's in everyone's interest "to overcome what I call the 'longevity divide,' " Dr. Butler says.  While the per capita GDPs of sub- Saharan countries have not dipped as dramatically as their longevity rates, that measure can be deceiving, Hill says. The deaths of young adults have reduced the labor force, but that has allowed survivors to pick up extra work and boost their own earnings. Thus, the fall in per capita GDP doesn't look so bad."

Caught in the Net: Maldives Repression:  "Late this summer, Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom employed an extraordinary tactic to quell a two-day pro-democracy uprising in his small Indian Ocean nation: He completely cut off Internet access and text messaging via cell phone, apparently to prevent activists from contacting press organizations and others outside the islands. Gayoom has ruled the Maldives since 1978, and his cabinet said the decision reflected “patience, wisdom, and leadership.” Free-speech advocates called the move irresponsible and unprecedented. There was one exception to Gayoom’s Internet ban—his personal Web site remained up and running, with regular updates during the 48-hour affair.  FP invites readers to suggest incidents in which a government, corporation, or any organization is involved in a unique technological abuse at
caughtinthenet@ceip.org."

Suggest an X PRIZE: "The concept of the [World Technology Network] WTN X PRIZES is to utilize the concepts, procedures, technologies and publicity developed X PRIZE Foundation's Ansari X PRIZE competition for space and .. launch a series of technology prizes seeking to meet the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century."  I think I'll suggest a few in sustainable energy, starting with catalysis of cellulose to liquid fuel, efficient electricity storage systems, small-scale low-grade heat to electricity conversion.  Desalination and other water purification would be another high-impact sustainability technology.