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.

More information on the keynote here. More information on the NSDR 2008 program here.

After organizing the first ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR 2007) (with SIGCOMM 2007), we are organizing NSDR again this year. NSDR 2008 will be held with SIGCOMM 2008. You can have a look at last year's papers and presentations.

Check out ChOpaal - an SMS-based communication system that brings together people with similar interests (e.g. football, protest, IEEE). ChOpaal allows you to make 'tags' about stuff (e.g. earthquake) and then other people can join these tags to get updates. The system is currently functional only with cellular providers in Pakistan.

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.

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:

NY Times reviews the features of the $100 laptop, i must admit that some of the features are pretty cool.

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.

Hari Balakrishnan and Robert Morris are on the technical advisory board of Meraki, and what I personally found amusing was this line in Robert Morris's bio in Meraki's team profile:

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

For those who don't know that line actually refers to the Morris Worm. Quite an interesting way to refer to the Morris Worm!

Since Meraki wants to enable Internet access for the next billion by solving the "last mile" problem then their products could make a lot of sense in the urban population of the developing countries where last mile is the main problem?

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.

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.

The Development Gateway Foundation is calling for nominations from around the globe for the third annual Development Gateway Award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the lives of people in developing countries. More details here.