Dritte

Kenneth Keniston is scheduled to give the keynote address at NSDR this year. The keynote will focus on key issues like lessons learnt from previous efforts e.g., in India, understanding the current ICT4D boom, and future directions for ICT professionals and researchers. Kenneth Keniston is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Human Development at MIT and Director of the MIT India Program. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. He received his D. Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and MIT. He is the author of nine books including IT Experience in India: Bridging the Digital Divide and The State, IT, and Development.

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's issue of New Scientist has published an article on our research on Poor Man's Broadband. This project has resulted in a modified version of a P2P system (BitTorrent) designed to bypass the "bottleneck of the Internet" in the developing-world. The system employs direct point-to-point POTS connections to exchange data at the maximum speed afforded by a modem. This project was funded by Microsoft Research's Digital Inclusion Grant.

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Waiting for the "GPhone"? Well keep waiting because it will never come out, atleast not in the form that you thought it would. Say hello to Android instead - an open, and free mobile platform. There is a USD 10 million incentive (or bribe) for developers to start hacking on Android, called the Android Developer Competition (ADC). Applications in service of global economic development are included in ADC. For more information about Android, check out the demo below:

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meraki is coming ... well almost. Founded by Ph.D. candidates from MIT (Sanjit Biswas and others), Meraki Networks is hoping to provide consumer wireless mesh Internet network designed to “unwire the world,” and bring Internet access to the next billion. Meraki recently closed a $5 million funding with Sequoia Capital and Google is also financing them. Read their SIGCOMM ExOR paper to get an idea of the underlying technologies behind Meraki products. This paper actually got the best paper award at SIGCOMM'05.

"In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Muhammad Yunus the founder of Microcredit concept and Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. Yunus has been a supporter for technology research for developing countries and now with the Nobel Peace Prize in his hand he could help bring the attention of world leaders towards ICT for developing countries. Read the CNN news article here.

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The power of Open Software Development comes to the Mobile Phones market with Trolltech announcing the first Linux-based mobile development device that would open the doors to "unlimited" software innovation. Although it seems that the target market for this effort is not developing countries but I believe that this could have an enormous impact on technologies for developing regions. While the fate of the MIT $100 laptop is yet to be decided, some critics (including myself) believe that "somehow" using mobile phones as the primary computing device in third world regions might be the way to go. The Greenphone effort by Trolltech is an encouraging step towards this direction. Completel story here.

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)