Bangalore – City in beta

By Jamillah Knowles
BBC News

Blogging, tweeting and social online activity have been changing the way we consume news. The BBC’s Jamillah Knowles turned down traditional broadcasting tools to experiment with a new way of reporting news for online and radio while on assignment in India’s technological hub, Bangalore.

“In taking on this reporting assignment from Bangalore, I decided to explore how newsgathering is changing for traditional journalists, bloggers and other content producers online.

Bloggers and social media practitioners often have the upper hand when it comes to instant reporting, live updates and adding material online on the move.

I have been a blogger for a long time and worked with some of the brightest people creating their own content for the radio show and podcast, Pods and Blogs on BBC Radio 5live.
It seemed pertinent, when looking at online life in India, to use the new tools of this creative and innovative group to see if they can really help make traditional newsgathering any easier.
I have used a traditional radio kit when reporting from the field in the past. The set-up included a satellite dish, a small audio mixer, a large and heavy microphone and a big set of headphones. I had a work laptop and a difficult connection to the intranet for communicating with headquarters in London.

You are basically connected but the effort to carry such a huge amount of equipment as a solo reporter and to fight a connection into the work system can slow things down: not easy when you are not working out of a foreign bureau.

Notebook and mobile – more a note machine than a telephone on the road

This time I took a domestic tool kit. The most important thing for me was connectivity and netbooks are rather good for this. They are small, portable and my files can be managed on a USB flash drive so if something goes wrong with the computer, they are safe elsewhere. Another benefit of the new mini-portable computers is that they fit rather nicely in the hotel safe. So all of my kit was locked away when it needed to be.

I also used a mobile phone to send notes and thoughts to Twitter and to send images to Flickr.

I think the lead-up to feature writing by engaging an audience with your raw material is a good thing. I understand that there are topics where you might not want to reveal an exclusive, but there is so much discussion and also added information and value available when the data is circulated. It also means that adding live information online means I have a firm reference, basically digital note taking.

For recording audio for the radio show, I was a bit more traditional. I took a mini-disc recorder and a small microphone. I prefer this method of working as again I can be sure I have copies of data in a different place. I could have been uploading these to the web for safe-keeping, or used a flash mic to save digital audio files.

Using social and mobile media for note-taking and uploading can be really convenient. I could get instant feedback on images and locations as well as a response to tweets from people in the local area that I had already been in touch with.

TOOL KIT
Netbook A smaller version of a laptop. Highly portable, usually used for surfing the web. Often has less in the way of storage for files.
Flash memory A computer chip that contains read-only memory that it keeps when switched off
Flash mic A microphone with in-built memory chip
SD card A very small flash memory card designed to provide high-capacity memory in a small size. Can be used in many devices
Digital SLR Digital Single Lens Reflex camera
Flip A small digital video camera with built-in USB plug. Designed to add video simply to the web
Flickr Social photo-sharing website

The emergence of cheap and small video cameras for creating video content online was also a benefit.

In describing an atmosphere or event, video online is highly engaging. I uploaded video from a Flip camera which was unobtrusive in crowds and very simple to use. Short video clips uploaded to YouTube were then easily transferred to the Pods and Blogs page.
I had my own digital SLR camera with me. I used the Flickr photo uploading service to send all of my pictures each day.
This meant that I was free to shoot a lot of images and clear out my SD card each day. It also meant I could get some early feedback as to which images were making an impression on the audience.

Minidiscs and recorder – small, light and simple to use

There were a few quality issues with the end results. Although I had added images to a social photo site, I had to lower the resolution to upload them to the site from my location. In crunching down my audio to file it back to London, there was an audible hiss that luckily could be addressed by our fantastic audio technologists – though they should not have to clean things up for reporters.

In all, using alternative equipment meant that I was on familiar turf for technology and possibly changed the tone of my writing when I was blogging to something that was a little more relaxed. Having a reference point online was valuable to me as discussion points with readers and listeners. Generally being more open with an audience meant that this sort of participatory journalism was ultimately more satisfying.

I can see that traditional means produce higher quality and more reliable reports, but using lively and instant tools online that are open to all, can mean there is an alternative tone and method for making online journalism that is exciting.”

Ubuntu readies the Karmic Koala

What do French gendarmes, Andalucian school children, Wikipedia and San Francisco International airport have in common?

It is not the set up for a tortuous pun. Instead all of them are big users of the free Ubuntu operating system.

The French national police force runs its operations on the open source OS; computer systems supporting Spanish schools have their own version; the online encyclopaedia runs its hundreds of servers on Ubuntu and SFIA’s internal computer system is based around it.
Ubuntu is based on Linux – the open source operating system that is maintained, expanded and extended by legions of fans and professional programmers around the world. Thanks to their efforts Ubuntu has become the most popular of all the Linux distributions.

On 29 October, version 9.10 of Ubuntu is released. All versions of the operating system have an alternative alliterative appellation. Ubuntu 9.10 is known as Karmic Koala.
The launch comes in the wake of Microsoft’s fanfare around Windows 7 – the latest incarnation of its flagship operating system.

Factory mode
While Ubuntu’s developer Canonical can not quite match the hoopla surrounding Windows 7 for its launch, the software competes where it matters, said Chris Kenyon, one of Canonical’s OS evangelists. “For the first time in 20 years you can buy Ubuntu pre-installed from more than one manufacturer,” he said. “That’s an extraordinary story.”

Computer makers HP, Dell, Toshiba and Acer now all offer the OS as a choice on machines people buy via their websites. The number of models varies by territory with the software proving more popular in some places than others. Dell China, said Mr Kenyon, has more than 40 models with Ubuntu available. Before now, he said, many people installed the software themselves on laptops and desktops that formerly ran Windows. Their experiences varied because the development effort that helps to keep Ubuntu updated sometimes lags behind what people are using. But, he said, with the software increasingly likely to be installed at the factory those days of frustration may be on the wane. “Hardware problems are only really solved through installation,” he said. “That’s going to become increasingly the case over the next 12 months.”
Competition time

The steady march of technology was also removing many of those stumbling blocks that stopped people plumping for Ubuntu and kept them with Windows or Apple’s OS X, said Mr Kenyon.

Microsoft now lists Canonical under threats in its regular stock filing
Some have been reluctant to move to Ubuntu and open source software because it would mean learning their way around programs that were the equivalent of what they used on older machines.

But, said Mr Kenyon, the growing use of web applications – such as Google Docs – was eroding those differences quickly. “The web is making the compatibility part far easier,” he said.

To help with that ease of use Ubuntu 9.10 has Firefox 3.5 onboard that works with the many web-based programs, such as the BBC iPlayer, that are becoming increasingly popular.
With the web levelling the playing field between the different OS makers, Mr Kenyon said the fact that Ubuntu runs faster and is more secure than rivals on the same hardware will convince many to try it.

He admitted that some of the security of Ubuntu was down to the fact that cyber criminals do not target it in the same way as they do Windows.
“Some of the security is through obscurity but it’s also better by design,” he said. “Fundamentally it requires you to run a safer system. It’s there from the ground up.”
Canonical is also making it easier to road test Ubuntu with a “live mode” that lets potential users run it off a USB drive to check its compatibility with the hardware on their desktop or laptop.

Evidence that it is being taken seriously can be found, he said, in the annual “10-K form” that Microsoft files with the SEC. Every public firm must file one of these to outline the market conditions and competitors it believes pose the greatest threat to its business. In 2009, for the first time, Canonical got a mention.

Given that Microsoft recognises its success, Mr Kenyon is convinced that it’s only a matter of time before Ubuntu’s 12 million strong pool of users is joined by many more.
“We’re nearing a tipping point,” said Mr Kenyon.

Cloud Computing
Clash of the clouds

Oct 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The launch of Windows 7 marks the end of an era in computing—and the beginning of an epic battle between Microsoft, Google, Apple and others

DO YOU have plans for next weekend? If not, don’t worry: perhaps a friend will be throwing a party to celebrate the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft’s new operating system, on October 22nd. You’ll get help installing the program and be shown how to use the new features. To maximise the fun, your friend will get tips from the “HostingYourParty” video on YouTube or go to the dedicated website, complete with downloadable party favours and a trivia quiz (sample question: “The Microsoft Pretzel Hunt is an annual pretzel hunt held at the Redmond campus. True or false?”).

This is not satire. It is a toe-curling attempt by Microsoft to create some buzz for its new software. Fortunately for the firm, it will hardly matter, because Microsoft dominates the market for operating systems. After the let-down that was its predecessor, Windows Vista, Windows 7 is certain to be a success. There is plenty of pent-up demand, because Vista’s aged predecessor, XP, is still widely used. Reviews of Windows 7 have been positive, some even glowing, although the software is sometimes hard to install.

Windows 7 is not just a sizeable step for Microsoft. It is also likely to mark the end of one era in information technology and the start of another. Much of computing will no longer be done on personal computers in homes and offices, but in the “cloud”: huge data centres housing vast storage systems and hundreds of thousands of servers, the powerful machines that dish up data over the internet. Web-based e-mail, social networking and online games are all examples of what are increasingly called cloud services, and are accessible through browsers, smart-phones or other “client” devices. Because so many services can be downloaded or are available online, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s first operating system to come with fewer features.
As one window closes…

The launch of Windows 7 coincides with the closing of the book, after more than a decade, on Microsoft’s antitrust woes. The company got into hot water in America and Europe mainly for abusing its dominance of PC operating systems to promote its web browser. On October 7th the European Commission said it had all but reached a settlement with Microsoft. The firm has agreed to give Windows users in Europe a “ballot screen” that allows them to choose a rival browser in place of its own Internet Explorer.

Windows is not going to disappear soon, but cloud computing means it is no longer so important. Other products, some being launched this autumn with less fanfare than Windows 7, represent Microsoft’s future. Last month the company opened two data centres that between them will contain more than half a million servers. This month it released a new version of Windows for smart-phones. And next month it will launch Azure, a platform for developers on which they can write and run cloud services.

The rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft’s centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. Technological developments have hitherto pushed computing power away from central hubs: first from mainframes to minicomputers, and then to PCs. Now a combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors, and ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, is pushing power back to the centre in some respects, and even further away in others. The cloud’s data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes. At the same time, the PC is being pushed aside by a host of smaller, often wireless devices, such as smart-phones, netbooks (small laptops) and, perhaps soon, tablets (touch-screen computers the size of books).

Although Windows still runs 90% of PCs, the fading importance of the PC means that Microsoft is no longer an all-powerful monopolist. Others are also building big clouds, including Google, a giant of the internet, and Apple, renowned as a maker of hardware, with a market capitalisation that now exceeds those of both Google and IBM, its original arch-rival (see chart above).

Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services—web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.

These three giants (for their vital statistics, see table) are already preparing for battle. In July Google mounted a direct attack on Windows by promising to launch a free PC operating system, Chrome OS. Rumour has it that a basic version may hit the market on the same day as Windows 7, or soon after. Microsoft’s new operating system for smart-phones represents its latest effort to catch up with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s operating system for handsets, called Android. On October 12th Apple and Google severed a tie when Arthur Levinson, a member of both boards, resigned from Google’s. In August Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, had quit Apple’s board because “Google is entering more of Apple’s core businesses,” in the words of Steve Jobs, the gadget-maker’s boss.

A taxonomy of giants
Despite the growing similarities among the three, each is a unique beast, says Michael Cusumano, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. They can be classified according to how they approach the cloud, how they make money and how openly they approach the development of intellectual property.

Google, you might say, has been a cloud company since its birth in 1998. It is best known for its search service, but now offers all sorts of other products and services, too. It has built a global network of three dozen data centres with 2m servers, say some estimates. Among other things, it offers a suite of web-based applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets. Lately it has branched out, releasing Android for phones, and its Chrome web-browser and operating system for PCs.

It took Google a while to come up with a way of making money, but it found one in advertising, its main source of revenue. It handles more than 75% of search-related ads in America. Worldwide its share is even higher. Google is also trying to make money from selling services to companies. On October 12th it said that Rentokil Initial, a pest-control-to-parcel-delivery group, would roll out Google’s online applications to its 35,000 employees, making it the biggest company to do so.

Google’s reliance on advertising explains its open approach to intellectual property. Giving Android and Chrome OS away as open-source software not only makes life difficult for rivals’ paid-for products but also increases demand for Google’s services and the reach of its ads. Its openness has limits: Google says little about the architecture of its data centres and search algorithms, because they give the company its competitive edge. The way it organises R&D internally is open and decentralised: self-organising teams come up with ideas for most new services.

If Google was born in the sky, Microsoft started on the ground. Office, its bestselling suite of PC programs, is almost as ubiquitous as Windows. But the company is less a stranger to cloud computing than it may seem. It has built a network of data centres, and is starting to gain traction after losing billions developing online services. Its Xbox games console has powerful online features. Bing, its new search engine, has gained a shade in market share (though it is still miles behind Google). It is even preparing a stripped-down web-based version of Office, and it now offers much of its business software as online services.

However, most of Microsoft’s revenue and all of its profit still come from conventional shrink-wrapped software. But the company cannot leave online advertising to Google, because consumers expect cloud services to be free, financed by ads. Hence Microsoft’s efforts to convince Yahoo!, another online giant, to merge its search and part of its advertising business with Microsoft’s. The deal, sealed in July, means that Microsoft will handle 10% of searches, against Google’s 83%, says Net Applications, a market-research firm.

Given Microsoft’s history, it is hardly surprising that its treatment of intellectual property differs from Google’s. It gives other software firms the technical information they need to write programs that run on, say, Windows. Otherwise, it guards the underlying recipes of its software jealously. That said, the firm now supports many open standards and has even started using bits of open-source software. Internally, its R&D is somewhat more centralised than Google, at least in its online division: teams are bigger, work with more co-ordination and get more guidance from above.

Apple, too, came from outside the cloud. Online services have always been a bit of an afterthought to what the company excels at: pricey but highly innovative bundles of hardware and software, of which the iPhone is only the latest example. Its online offerings—the iTunes store for music and video, the App Store for mobile applications, and MobileMe, a suite of online services—were all originally meant to drive demand for Apple’s hardware, but the firm’s interest in the cloud has grown. It is building a $1 billion data centre, possibly the world’s largest, in North Carolina.

Still, Apple’s financial health thus far has depended mainly on selling hardware. Gadgets generate most of the firm’s revenue and profit. The firm does not reveal its revenue from services separately, but it is not to be sneezed at. Apple accounts for 69% of online music sales in America and 35% of all sales, more than Wal-Mart, reckons NPD Group, a market-research firm. Apple has so far forgone advertising revenue: its services are ad-free, but most of them require payment. Apple’s services are aimed at consumers, not businesses.

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

Apple is also the odd one out when it comes to openness. The word does not appear in its vocabulary. It does not allow any other hardware-maker to build machines using its operating system. It blocks iPhone applications it does not approve of from appearing in the App Store. Apple is also secretive about the way it conducts its internal R&D. Mr Jobs clearly calls most of the shots. But insiders say that there is a system of teams that pitch projects to him.

How will this three-way contest play out? The last similar war was in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Apple, IBM and Microsoft fought for mastery of the PC. After much fire and smoke, Microsoft was victorious. Thanks to what economists call strong network effects, which allow winners to take almost all, Windows relegated its rival operating systems to mere sideshows, securing fat profits for its owner.

Such a lopsided result is unlikely this time. One reason is that the economics of the cloud may be different from those of the PC. Network effects are unlikely to be as strong. Much of the cloud is based on open standards, which should make it easier to switch providers. To underline this point and to counter arguments that it is trying to lock users in, Google has set up the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers whose job is to devise ways of allowing people to transfer their data.

Unfortunately for Google, it is equally unclear whether the most open player will win, as Microsoft did last time. Many of Google’s new services have failed to take off. Having control over the software on the PC, smart-phones and other client devices, Microsoft can more easily create what it calls “seamless experiences”, for example by keeping a user’s address book and other personal information in step. Consumers may also prefer Apple’s tightly integrated, easy-to-use devices and services, despite the restrictions they impose. Lots of people buy iPods and download music from iTunes even though it is difficult to play the songs on other devices.

Second, all three giants have reliable sources of cash to sustain them. Windows may be under attack, not least because of the boom in cheap netbooks, which has forced Microsoft to reduce prices, says Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft, a newsletter. Even so, the operating system will keep on giving for some time. Microsoft has other strong divisions too, including business and server software. Google may lose some market share in search (and some advertising) to the combination of Bing and Yahoo!, but it is unlikely to be dethroned. Apple is still able to command premium prices, although others make hardware just as slick.

Full war chests
This means that all three will have ample resources to spend in the main areas of the fight: data centres, cloud services and the periphery. In data centres, Google is ahead, but Microsoft is catching up in size and sophistication. Apple has most to learn, but this, too, seems only a question of time and money. Just as much of hardware has become a commodity, knowing how to build huge data centres may not be a big competitive advantage for long. And data centres can get only so big before scale ceases to be an advantage.

In services too, Google is ahead. But in Bing Microsoft may at last have created a worthy rival. The “decision engine”, to use the company’s term, does a good job of helping people choose a new camera or book a holiday. The big question is whether Apple can catch up. Its iTunes and App stores are successes, to be sure, but for now they are highly specialised. Its broader suite of cloud services, MobileMe, is nothing to write home about.

At the cloud’s periphery, however, Apple has a strong position, thanks to the success of the iPhone. More than 30m have been sold so far, 5.2m in the quarter ending in June. Its share of the American market is pushing 14%. The App Store now boasts 85,000 applications and a total of more than 2 billion downloads. But recently Google’s Android has gained momentum. Several handset-makers have released smart-phones based on it, or will do so in the next few months. In early October it received the backing of Verizon, America’s biggest mobile operator. At the end of 2012, predicts Gartner, a market-research firm, Android phones will have a bigger share of the market than iPhones.

Microsoft’s mobile strategy, though, is in disarray. This could prove to be a serious weakness, as people increasingly use mobile devices to reach online services. Plans to build smart-phones of its own seem to be going nowhere. Its music player, Zune, will remain just that, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s boss, said recently. Pink, a project to develop phones based on technology from Danger, a start-up acquired by Microsoft in 2008, is said to face death by cancellation—even more likely after Danger lost personal data belonging to tens of thousands of its customers earlier this month. And the latest version of Windows Mobile is no match for the iPhone and Android. Some handset-makers, including Motorola, have ditched the software.

However, as with Bing, Microsoft has only recently been getting serious. It has put Windows Mobile under new management. Another version is expected by the end of 2010. Some analysts fancy Microsoft’s chances. According to iSuppli, a market-research firm, “Reports of Windows Mobile’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

What could disrupt the three-sided struggle? The antitrust authorities, possibly. Now that Microsoft has made peace, the other two are likelier targets. Most observers imagine Google would be first, pointing to the hullabaloo caused by a settlement with book publishers that allows Google to create a vast digital library. But Apple may beat Google to the dock. The firm’s tight control over its technology is no problem in markets where its share is small (in PCs, it is a mere 7.2%). But in mobile applications and digital music distribution Apple is by far the market leader. America’s Federal Communications Commission is looking into its refusal to carry Google Voice, a telephony and messaging application for the iPhone. Its bar on rivals’ devices connecting to iTunes may cause trouble too. Tellingly, Apple recently hired a lawyer with antitrust experience: Bruce Sewell, the former general counsel of Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, which the European Commission wants to pay a fine of more than €1 billion ($1.5 billion) for abusing its dominance.

Then there are market forces. One of the three may come up with something “insanely great”, an expression used at Apple in times past to describe the original Macintosh computer. Apple itself may do so with a tablet computer, rumoured to be ready for release as early as January. Others have built such a dream device, but none has yet overcome the problem of input: typing on a screen is difficult and handwriting recognition has never really worked. If Apple has cracked it, it could upend the PC industry, as the iPhone did the handset market. If the tablet is also a good substitute for paper, the publishing and newspaper industries could be in for more upheaval. The blogosphere is abuzz with rumours that Apple is talking to publishers about offering their content on its device.

The final possibility is for another contender to emerge. The obvious candidates are Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, and Facebook, the leading social network. Amazon already has a cloud of sorts. It offers cloud computing services to other online firms and has developed the Kindle, an electronic reader, which is due to be available worldwide from October 19th. Facebook runs what is arguably the most successful cloud service, with more than 300m registered users. It provides a platform for people to communicate, share information and collaborate online—all things that businesses want to do, too.

Only one thing seems sure about the future of the digital skies: the company or companies that dominate it will be American. European or Asian firms have yet to make much of an appearance in cloud computing. Nokia, the world’s biggest handset-maker, is trying to form a cloud with its set of online services called Ovi, but its efforts are still in their infancy. Governments outside America may harbour ambitious plans for state-funded clouds. They would do better simply to let their citizens make the most of the competition among the American colossi.

Finishing the job
Sep 24th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Mobile-phone access will soon be universal. The next task is to do the same for the internet

HOW long will it be before everyone on Earth has a mobile phone? “It looks highly likely that global mobile cellular teledensity will surpass 100% within the next decade, and probably earlier,” says Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, a body set up in 1865 to regulate international telecoms. Mobile teledensity (the number of phones per 100 people) went above 100% in western Europe in 2007, and many developing countries have since followed suit. South Africa passed the 100% mark in January, and Ghana reached 98% in the same month. Kenya and Tanzania are expected to get to 100% by 2013.

Even 100% teledensity does not mean that everyone has a phone, because many people have several handsets or SIMs. But nor is everyone a potential customer: the under-fives, for instance, still usually manage without. But at current rates of growth it seems likely that within five years, and certainly within ten, everyone in the world who wants a mobile phone will probably have one. 3G networks capable of broadband speeds will be widespread even in developing countries, and even faster 4G networks will be spreading rapidly in some places. Then what?

The next task, says Mr Touré, is to ensure that everyone who wants to can use mobile technology to access the internet. Like many in the industry, he predicts that this will be done using low-cost laptops, or netbooks, connecting to the internet via mobile networks. “Mobile broadband will become a global phenomenon—it will be the dominant form of broadband,” says Informa’s Mr Jotischky. He thinks there could be 1.4 billion mobile-broadband subscribers by 2014.

Meanwhile, with the falling price and size of laptops and the advancing potential of mobile phones, the two seem to be converging in a new range of devices that combine the power and versatility of a computer with the portability of a phone. Already, netbooks can cost as little as $200, making them cheap enough to be given away with long-term mobile-broadband contracts in some countries, just as mobile handsets already are for some users. Mobile phones, it seems, are the advance guard for mobile-broadband networks that will extend internet access to the whole of mankind.

The combination of mobile broadband and cheap netbooks will resolve a long-running argument within the technology industry about the relative merits of computers and mobile phones as tools to promote development. Leading the computer camp is Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, the man behind the $100 laptop. He and his followers argue that bringing down the cost of laptops, and persuading governments in developing countries to buy and distribute millions of them, could have enormous educational benefits.

Critics of his scheme argue that it makes more sense to spend $100 on a schoolhouse, or textbooks, or teacher training, than on a laptop. And advocates of mobile phones, including Iqbal Quadir, who has sparred with Mr Negroponte on the subject, point out that mobile phones provide immediate economic benefits, which enables them to spread in a self-sustaining, bottom-up way, without the need for massive government funding. Mr Negroponte responds that mobile phones are not much use for education; Mr Quadir replies that thanks to economic development driven by mobile phones, parents can afford to educate their children. The argument, having rumbled on for years, has now ended in compromise.

On the face of it, those in the mobile camp seem to have won. Mobile phones are now seen as a vital tool of development, whereas Mr Negroponte’s laptop project has failed to meet its ambitious goals. But although his engineers have so far only managed to get the cost of their elegant laptop down to about $150, they have shown what is possible with a low-cost design, and helped create today’s vibrant netbook market. If netbooks do indeed become the preferred devices to access the internet in the developing world, Mr Negroponte will have had the last laugh. But if those netbooks turn out to be, in effect, large mobile phones with keyboards that access the internet via mobile networks, as also seems likely, Mr Quadir and his camp can claim to have won the day. Technological progress in devices and networks seems to have rendered the debate moot: the important thing is that internet access will be on its way to becoming as widespread as mobile phones.

Obstacles remain even to universal mobile access, and beyond that to universal internet access. One problem is a lack of backbone links, particularly to Africa. But a series of new cables is in the works to improve Africa’s connectivity with the rest of the world, increasing capacity and reducing the cost of internet access. The first of these, the SEACOM cable, eastern Africa’s first modern submarine cable, was completed in July.

As international links improve and network equipment becomes cheaper and more effective, it will not be difficult to provide a low-cost mobile-broadband service, says Vodafone’s Mr Colao. The main challenge will be to reduce the price of access devices. “We need to come up with a mobile-data device that costs $60-80 maximum,” he says. “Netbooks are very good, but we need an emerging-market netbook that costs one-third of the price.” With phones, he observes, “we got real penetration when we got below $35. Netbooks must be below $100 in price to get real traction.” This will require advances in neighbouring industries, such as chipmaking and manufacturing, rather than telecoms, he points out.

The rise of the village netbook
In the meantime, notes the Grameen Foundation’s Mr Cantor, the internet equivalent of the village-phone model could provide a stepping stone to wider internet access in the poorest areas, just as village phones did for telephony. The Grameen Foundation has already experimented by giving netbooks to a few village-phone operators in Uganda so that they can sell internet access as well as telephony. Despite the relatively slow connection provided by Uganda’s 2G mobile networks, demand for the service proved to be stronger than expected, and revenues were double the level required to make the service self-sustaining.

Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang of the World Bank notes that internet-kiosk operators in India are charging small fees for access to government services online. This makes such services easier to get at, prevents officials from extorting bribes and provides an income for the kiosk operator, “so there is a revenue-generating model,” she says. It might make sense to offer microfinance loans to entrepreneurs to buy netbooks and provide information services. Many of the methods used to make mobile phones more widely available seem likely to be applied to extending internet access in the future.

As Ms Qiang’s research shows, access to the internet can provide an even bigger boost to economic growth than access to mobile phones. But to make the most of the internet, users have to have a certain level of education and literacy. Its effect on development may be greater in the long term, but is unlikely to be as sudden and dramatic as that of the spread of mobile phones in the first decade of this century.

In the grand scheme of telecoms history, mobile phones have made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology. They have spread the fastest and proved the easiest and cheapest to adopt. It is now clear that the long process of connecting everyone on Earth to a global telecommunications network, which began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of being completed. Mobile phones will have done more than anything else to advance the democratisation of telecoms, and all the advantages that come with it.

Login to The Economist to read this special report on ‘telecoms in emerging markets’.

Medicine goes digital
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The convergence of biology and engineering is turning health care into an information industry. That will be disruptive, says Vijay Vaitheeswaran (interviewed here), but also hugely beneficial to patients

INNOVATION and medicine go together. The ancient Egyptians are thought to have performed surgery back in 2750BC, and the Romans developed medical tools such as forceps and surgical needles. In modern times medicine has been transformed by waves of discovery that have brought marvels like antibiotics, vaccines and heart stents.

Given its history of innovation, the health-care sector has been surprisingly reluctant to embrace information technology (IT). Whereas every other big industry has computerised with gusto since the 1980s, doctors in most parts of the world still work mainly with pen and paper.

But now, in fits and starts, medicine is at long last catching up. As this special report will explain, it is likely to be transformed by the introduction of electronic health records that can be turned into searchable medical databases, providing a “smart grid” for medicine that will not only improve clinical practice but also help to revive drugs research. Developing countries are already using mobile phones to put a doctor into patients’ pockets. Devices and diagnostics are also going digital, advancing such long-heralded ideas as telemedicine, personal medical devices for the home and smart pills.

The first technological revolution in modern biology started when James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA half a century ago. That established the fields of molecular and cell biology, the basis of the biotechnology industry. The sequencing of the human genome nearly a decade ago set off a second revolution which has started to illuminate the origins of diseases.

The great convergence
Now the industry is convinced that a third revolution is under way: the convergence of biology and engineering. A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says that physical sciences have already been transformed by their adoption of information technology, advanced materials, imaging, nanotechnology and sophisticated modelling and simulation. Phillip Sharp, a Nobel prize-winner at that university, believes that those tools are about to be brought to bear on biology too.

Robert Langer, a biochemist at MIT who holds over 500 patents in biotechnology and medical technologies and has started or advised more than 100 new companies, thinks innovation in medical technologies is about to take off. Menno Prins of Philips, a Dutch multinational with a big medical-technology division, explains that, “like chemistry before it, biology is moving from a world of alchemy and ignorance to becoming a predictable, repeatable science.” Ajay Royyuru of IBM, an IT giant, argues that “it’s the transformation of biology into an information science from a discovery science.”

This special report will ask how much of this grand vision is likely to become reality. Some of the industry’s optimism appears to be well-founded. As the rich world gets older and sicker and the poor world gets wealthier and fatter, the market for medical innovations of all kinds is bound to grow. Clever technology can help solve two big problems in health care: overspending in the rich world and under-provisioning in the poor world.

But the chances are that this will take time, and turn out to be more of a reformation than a revolution. The hidebound health-care systems of the rich world may resist new technologies even as poor countries leapfrog ahead. There is already a backlash against genomics, which has been oversold to consumers as a deterministic science. And given soaring health-care costs, insurers and health systems may not want to adopt new technologies unless inventors can show conclusively that they will produce better outcomes and offer value for money.

If these obstacles can be overcome, then the biggest winner will be the patient. In the past medicine has taken a paternalistic stance, with the all-knowing physician dispensing wisdom from on high, but that is becoming increasingly untenable. Digitisation promises to connect doctors not only to everything they need to know about their patients but also to other doctors who have treated similar disorders.

The coming convergence of biology and engineering will be led by information technologies, which in medicine means the digitisation of medical records and the establishment of an intelligent network for sharing those records. That essential reform will enable many other big technological changes to be introduced.

Just as important, it can make that information available to the patients too, empowering them to play a bigger part in managing their own health affairs. This is controversial, and with good reason. Many doctors, and some patients, reckon they lack the knowledge to make informed decisions. But patients actually know a great deal about many diseases, especially chronic ones like diabetes and heart problems with which they often live for many years. The best way to deal with those is for individuals to take more responsibility for their own health and prevent problems before they require costly hospital visits. That means putting electronic health records directly into patients’ hands.

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Rural India powering economic growth
Brajesh Upadhyay
BBC News, Delhi

Indian telecom executive Abhinav Trivedi has travelled to remote villages and dealt with armed retailers in regions known more for bandits than their markets.

“We sold phone connections in areas where life moves at a snail’s pace,” says Mr Trivedi.

But business has been brisk.

His phone company boosted its revenues because of a rise in sales in these farming villages.

Experts say while the world economy is reeling under recession, India’s continuing economic growth has been fuelled by its farm economy – Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has projected growth of “six percent plus” for the financial year to March 2010.

Major force

Government ministers believe the rural market will be a major driver for future growth.

The mobile telephone market is taking off in rural India. Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of telecom company, Bharti Group, says people in rural India now aspire to buy all the good things their urban counterparts have enjoyed.

No wonder corporate India is now deploying some of its brighter recruits to conquer these hinterlands.

Experienced, dynamic and university educated professionals like Mr Trivedi are at the forefront of the campaign.

“What I learnt at management school was of no use in these areas. It’s the field experience that counts,” says Mr Trivedi, who was rewarded with international holidays for his efforts.

He says he met people who had never travelled outside their village, had never seen a train and using a mobile was something they found technically challenging.

“I told them there are just two buttons – one green (to receive a call) one red (to disconnect) – and that worked for them,” says Mr Trivedi.

Close to 70% of India’s billion-strong population live in villages.

Over the last decade or so, the reach of television has ensured exposure to a more prosperous urban lifestyle and companies are learning fast to tailor their products to meet these new demands.

Pre-paid mobile phone top-up cards now sell for 10 rupees (20 cents), shampoo and toothpaste pouches for 50 paisa (two cents).

Further up the supply chain, cheap washing machines are now available throughout rural India as are sophisticated cooking stoves and heavily discounted Reebok shoes.

Ajay Gupta works for a website that deals with companies working in the rural sector and says more than half of the demand today is for fast moving consumer goods, especially in the telecom sector.

“There has been no evidence of recession on incomes in this sector,” he says.

Boosting incomes

Analyst Gopal Naik says successive good monsoons and higher prices for agricultural output over the past few years have boosted rural purchasing power.

This, in turn, had helped kept the economy chugging along.

“It was a mix of both luck and some serious effort to invest in the social sector by the government that made it happen,” says Mr Naik.

In the past four years there was an almost 15% rise in the Minimum Support Price (MSP), the price at which government purchases produce from farmers. This put more money into their hands.

The national jobs for work scheme has helped as it generated employment in the rural non-farm sector as well.

The Wall Street Journal recently said rural income in India will rise from around $220bn in 2004-2005 to US $ 425bn by 2010-2011.

But can the rural economy continue to thrive after a number of states have been hit by drought?

Analysts like Gopal Naik say despite the drought in certain areas, villagers living off irrigated farms would be enough to earn, spend and sustain growth.

Clearly, India’s rural economy has never looked so rosy.

Politics can bring the greatest change in India: Mittal
By siliconindia news bureau
Wednesday,14 October 2009, 19:59 hrs

Bangalore: While the world cribs on the darker side of political realm, the leader of Bharti Airtel, Sunil Mittal emphasized that only through politics the biggest positive change in India can be brought. Though a son of a politician, Mittal never meandered into the sphere, however he maintains that people through politics can shape the country for good. “Through politics the biggest change in India is possible, but our leaders are yet to show the change,” he said.

The Govrnment should steer their focus towards social change, instead of meddling with business issues. The agriculture sector needs to be organized and private companies can help in it, if the government allows FDI partnership,” he said. The telecom czar expressed his opinions in an interview with NDTV, while speaking on the various affairs in the telecom industry, ranging from Bharti’s recent futile merger attempt with MTN to the delay in the 3G spectrum auction. “The MTN deal has wasted everybody’s time. It has failed seven times consecutively and we will not move for any more talks on the same in the near future,” Mittal said. He observes that MTN has to sort out their internal issues for any successful deal.

The telecom czar witness the delay in 3G auction to be a bigger setback for everyone and maintains the delay to be a work of the rivals. “The entire 3G spectrum has been politicized. There is a large amount of spectrum available in India, which is lying unused in the hands of public sector and defense. Though a huge need for broadband and wireless is seen in India, the private sector cannot move forward as the amount of spectrum opened up is too less to meet the demand,” the Airtel’s chief said.

As the leader of the telecom industry, Mittal has always preferred technological advancement in the sector to be fast paced. For instance, for many years there were people who said GSM is a lost case, but people like Mittal braved such mindsets establishing the importance of the GSM technology in the country. There are too many levies in indian telecom sector and so the sector demands a unified license structure and a comprehensive plan. “We need to fix our telecom policies. One day I wish, when I wake up all these regulatory curbs would vanish,” said Mittal.

He acknowledges that the right spirit of entrepreneurship can help the industry to grow at a fast pace. “Entrepreneurs should be like deers, alert and active,” he said. According to him, the auditors too can play their part in the growth through better and transparent audits.