Monthly archives: August 2004

Business World reports about the entry of the 2-billion Finland-based Elcoteq, the world’s third-largest supplier of handsets to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Director (business development & marketing) Henry Gilchrist has been to India 24 times in the last three years. In the last 10 months he has spent 50 per cent of the time here. As Gilchrist puts it, “I have spent more time with India than with my family.”

Last year 16 million handset were sold and expected to double this year but none of the mobile handsets were manufactured in India. Motorola & Flextronics had shown some interest in the past but were put off by the indian red tapes. In india telecom operators like Reliance Infocomm and Tatas are very bullish with telecom roll out & implementations and the network is growing very fast. India is already home largest base to the FWP (Fixed Wireless Phones) installations. LG is giving tough competition to Nokia in number of handset sold & growth rate by dominating in the CDMA handset market with its association with Reliance Infocomm.

China right now is the world leader in manufacturing handset, if not beat can atleast india join the race?

Register.co.uk reports about this yet to be launched Interesting(?) service by Star38.com which will allows licensed private investigators and bill collection agents to spoof a number and call you. You wont be able to realize who is calling you and may pick up the phone innocently and become the prey to this tactics. The article also provides the two expert’s view on the legal possibility of this service.

SecurityFocus took the site for a test drive, and found it worked as advertised. The user fills out a simple Web form with his phone number, the number he wants to call, and the number he wants to appear to be calling from. Within two seconds, the system rings back, and patches the user through to the destination. The recipient sees only the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Any number works, from nonsense phone numbers like “123 4567″ to the number for the White House switchboard.

Jepson says the backend system doesn’t rely on the most common methods of Caller ID spoofing – PRI lines and VoIP – but otherwise declined to comment on how it operates, for fear that competitors will launch copycat sites.

Mahesh Jethani mentions his own experience of Unethical practices by Hutch India collection agents who called up his friend to ask Mahesh to pay up the bills. Soon to follow :

- Your Doctor will call your friend to tell that you should take your AIDS medicine daily
- Your wife will call your fiend to tell that yesterdays ‘act’ was not so good
- Your Lawyer will call your friend to pay up your due fees, otherwise he would take him deposit instead.

And never mind those tele-marketing calls recieved by tele-marketing girl who doen’t even know to spell telephoon. Sir Mai Kya Bol Raheli Hai, Aap ek aur Credit Card Le Lenge to Aap ke Baap Ka Kya Jayega ?

[ Via Emergic] Exceprts from an interview with Ethan Zuckerman founder of Geekcorps.org

In free market journalism you’re allowed to print whatever stories your audience wants to read. And because you know your audience is more interested in Michael Jackson than Jesse Jackson, you’re going to run fewer stories on policy and more on the abuse of boys on Neverland Ranch. Unless you get some extremely strong current of countervailing opinion, your coverage tends to fall towards the lowest common denominator. That’s why the international news hole in domestic television coverage has shrunk to almost nothing in recent years. The assumption is that no one’s interested.

That’s why a blogging community that pays attention to the rest of the world is so important. If bloggers talk about what’s happening in Africa, say, that not only means that more people have access to information about what’s going on there, it also means that there’s a countervailing force which shows the editors at the New York Times that people are interested enough in these issues to read about them.

One of the kinds of bridges I’d like to build is between talk radio and blogging. For much of the world, talk radio shows are their blogs: you have something to say, you find a platform to say it on, lots of people can hear you say it and they respond to it. Encouraging people to blog in Ghana is all well and good, but at the moment, most of the interesting debate there is happening on talk radio.

What’s interesting about digital technology is not just that it lets you create tools and hand them out to large audiences, but that once you figure out how to use those tools you’re able to build new tools for your own local, specific purposes, but in ways that contribute to the rest of the world as well. It’s not just about getting computers into hospitals and schools. What it’s really about is ensuring that we have software developers all over the world who can help those doctors and teachers design the tools they need.

Why US should not worry much and why India should not be very proud of, it’s just trade stupid…. There is nothing cheap in the world and especially in the trade where intellectual property is involved.

Cost of A Coffee example:
I came through this wonderful example through Niranjan Rajadhyaksha’s article in Business World (India) article – Thoughts over a Cup of Coffee. He bases his article on the finding of two Dutch economists, A K. Chapagain & A. Y Hoekstra that 140 liters of water is needed to make a cup of coffee . That is, whatever agriculture you produce and boast you exports, you must basically realize that what you are exporting water, the most precious thing in the world and may be the reason for 4th , 5th or 6th world war (depends on how Mr. Bushes of this world do in between)

What’s the point? :
So when a job gets exported from X Country to Y Country it does not mean that Coffee of X is given to Y and Coffee of Y is given to X. In coffee’s case you would just drink it or throw it, but what about the Water? Now we should not get into the debate that whose coffee cup was bigger and who has 100 liters of water and who has 140 liters of water? One should ask how the water is being utilized. The smarter one multiplies and dumb one divides the water, it can be a win-win situation, win-loss situation, super win-win situation and win-super win situation, anything is possible.

So some blames are for real and some are not, but in any case the water is not cheap. One of the sides on the coffee cup exchange table is cheap.

What is Water? Water is knowledge
A Java programmer’s job gets transferred from USA to India. So what gets transferred the programming job or the technology?
Similarly an Indian engineer does the coding in Java and many others also join the race and start doing Java jobs (due to population and outsourcing avalanche). So are they contributing to Java as a job or Java as a technology?

Take this example: UTstarcomm is a company which is listed in BusinessWeek’s Infotech 100 and growing at the rate of 60% annually in the telecom business where American telecom giants like Nortel are loosing. UTstarcomm, an American company is growing because of the heavy telecom usage and deployments in Asian countries. In this case water is still with both the countries but in different & new hands and new cultivation. UTstarcomm has a customer in India, development
center in India & profits in America.

So is the market moving or is the market expanding? And if the market is really expanding won’t it create a small change in the density, per capita so and so job? A gives something to B, B gives something back to A, A now gives something more to B and now B gives something more back to A. Somewhat similar to a feedback amplifier in electronics.

So even if a job basic call center job gets transferred to some Li or Rajesh who rapes your mind with his mediocre English & support. Even in such cases you have exported English as a language to that country and would reap the benefits of feedback amplification. Same as importing oil and getting fuel; exporting English and getting Scientists in NASA. Thus Wikipedia becomes the largest online English Encyclopedia with the open contributions from Tom, Dick & Harish / Hussain / Hu. So is the open source or open trade.

On the other hand, people in India call these new workers inside the ITES’s Outsourcing, BPO & Call Center as Content Coolies, Code Coolies and Cyber coolies. I think this coolism is better than scratching your bums as a civil servant (government employee) or molesting the accounts as white collar tight-ass consultants in some big X Consultancy Company. By the way what does a top-notch MBA do? They do a great favor to creativity by selling soaps, colas and detergents for top multinational brands.

And I am not counting any political opinion on this. Because in developing countries where the governments have not guaranteed safe drinking water (due to corruption and inefficiency), how can it dictate whether to drink Coke or not? If Accenture is good for me or not?

Some other experts cry about the ill-effects of health, the identity crisis and the night shift. This is called changing times, once upon a time our forefathers hunted for their food, do we now? We have to adjust, modify our biological clocks even have to give up something in lieu of this change. Haven’t we given up our tail to evolve as the humans of today? How useful would have been our tails, both as an instrument to do some work or to satisfy some kinky fetish fantasy.

In short it is everything about the water management, preserving underground water and forests and discovering alternative methods like rain-water harvesting.

So if you are feeling thirsty in India or America, please find out who has played Enron with your water first. Your water is not costlier or cheaper than somebody else’s water.

Slashdot discusses about the view put by Catherine Mann, from the Institute for International Economics, who has a put up her viewt What Global Sourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers and for the U.S. Economy at acmqueue.com. Here is the warm up :

Every reader of Communications likely knows someone who has lost his or her U.S.-based IT job since the technology bubble popped four years ago. Most of these job losses came when Y2K projects were completed and investment in IT hardware, software, and services plunged. But others have come as some firms have outsourced the production of IT hardware, software, and services to other U.S. firms and to firms in other countries. What are the gains to the U.S. economy and to its IT workers from global sourcing? What are its costs? And what, if anything, should be the policy response?

It may come as a surprise, but global sourcing in the 1990s, by reducing the price of IT hardware, yielded increased investment in IT and more jobs for U.S. workers with IT skills. Going forward, the global sourcing of software and IT services will further reduce the price of these products, yielding a further increase in jobs demanding IT knowledge and skills. The problem of global sourcing, then and now, is that new IT jobs may not require the same skills or be in the same sectors of the economy.

A Slashdot discussion about Geekcorps.org
GeekCorps : A US-based, non-profit organization, that places international technical volunteers in developing nations. Also contributes to local IT projects while transferring the technical skills needed to keep projects moving after their volunteers have returned home.

cynical writes “WorldChanging has a new interview up with Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and editor of BlogAfrica, the best source of access to African bloggers around. Zuckerman talks about the growing role of blogging in the developing world, fighting corruption and censorship online, the emerging world of “social source software,” and a lot more. It’s a long, wide-ranging conversation; clearly, this guy is thinking big about the power of the web, especially outside the United States.”

NYT reports about the latest phenomenon in the global telecommunications; Telecom Majors from India , China and other non-American countries are acquiring Telecom Networks at fraction of the cost of the original investment. According to Sam Paltridge, an economist at Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris –
Some $30 billion in international telecommunications infrastructure owned by United States companies was sold to foreign-owned entities from 2000 to 2004 for a total of about $4 billion.

Take our very own example Reliance Infocomm has acquired FLAG telecom and now it is competing with TATA-VSNL for the aquistion of Tyco International’s global fiber-optics network, 37,000 miles long and connecting three continents. On the other hand , Bharti Enterprises and Singapore Telecommunications have teamed to build a cable called i2i.

Related Story :
* IHT | U.S. loses dominance in global telecoms [ Asian firms lead rush to buy assets of ailing American giants ]

According to Gartner as reported by Business Standard Cellular data services Revenue in India will account 20.5% of the total cellular revenue by 2008 and i.e around 71,800 Crore INR from total revenue of 14,760 Crore INR. Gartner also expects compound annual growth rate of 28.3 per cent during the next five years in Cellular Service in India.

Kobita Desai, principal analyst, telecom, Gartner India, said: “Indian cellular operators are realising that voice-only services are not generating adequate revenues and are exploring ways to offer more value-added services to increase the ARPU. EDGE networks will pave the way for UMTS deployments, supporting both data and voice streaming with great efficiency by optimal use of spectrum. E-mail is the driving application for most mobile workers and as it becomes more pervasive, e-mail is also becoming more comprehensive.”

According to Gartner as reported by Business Standard Cellular data services Revenue in India will account 20.5% of the total cellular revenue by 2008 and i.e around 71,800 Crore INR from total revenue of 14,760 Crore INR. Gartner also expects compound annual growth rate of 28.3 per cent during the next five years in Cellular Service in India.

Kobita Desai, principal analyst, telecom, Gartner India, said: “Indian cellular operators are realising that voice-only services are not generating adequate revenues and are exploring ways to offer more value-added services to increase the ARPU. EDGE networks will pave the way for UMTS deployments, supporting both data and voice streaming with great efficiency by optimal use of spectrum. E-mail is the driving application for most mobile workers and as it becomes more pervasive, e-mail is also becoming more comprehensive.”