Call for Action!

This is going to revolutionize international calls, voice mail, text mail.......

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?_...

visit http://verdesmoke.com/blog/about-yes-we-will-campaign-lawrence-ma

or the group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=36557682786

What is “Yes We Will Lawrence?” In late 2008, over 70 Lawrencians, convened by Lawrence CommunityWorks, came together for set of remarkable conversations that began with a reflection on the "new politics" represented by the 2008 presidential campaign. The conversation moved to the question of how we can bring some of that spirit and momentum to what will be a VERY important election year for Lawrence. These conversations culminated in a powerful and resonant message: that in Lawrence in the year 2009 we all want to work for...  "A New Community.. Based on a New Politics ... with a New Commitment." 

Last year I joined NeighborMedia, a civic media project at Cambridge Community Television. Click here to watch a video about the stories I have covered for the program.

NeighborMedia presents a special Panel Discussion, Monday, March 16, 7pm, at Cambridge Community Television, 675 Massachusetts Ave, Central Square (entrance on Prospect).

In recent years, civic media projects have increased in numbers around the world. Ordinary people armed with inexpensive production equipment are using the web to share news and information with others in their communities and beyond. What can mainstream media learn from these experiments in community news-gathering?

NeighborMedia, a civic media project at Cambridge Community Television, invites you to attend this special discussion which will be televised on CCTV. Veterans in the fields of print, television and online journalism will share their views and take questions from a live studio audience, of which we hope you can be a part.

Space is limited. Please RSVP by Thursday, March 12, by emailing colin(at)cctvcambridge(dot)org.

Moderator

Panelists

Participant Bios

Ellen Hume is research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at
M.I.T. and publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire, which she founded in 2007 while teaching at UMass Boston. She serves on the board of the Center for International Media Assistance and is an international media analyst and trainer. Hume was a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, executive director of PBS’s Democracy Project, and senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program. More information is available at www.ellenhume.com.

Laura Kuenssberg is one of BBC News' network political correspondents, reporting mainly for the UK's flagship TV news bulletins - the 6 and 10 o'clock news. She is a member of the Westminster Press Lobby, and has reported for BBC TV, radio, and online from all corners of the UK and many other European countries. Laura has worked on the last two US presidential elections, reporting from Washington DC and presenting the BBC's election night coverage from Times Square in 2008 for BBC One, BBC World and BBC America.

Persephone Miel recently finished a year as a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University where she directed the Media Re:public project, examining the impact of participatory journalism on the news and information environment. The project issued a series of publications in December 2008. She has returned as a Senior Advisor to Internews Network, an international NGO supporting independent media around the world, where she spent 12 years prior to her stint at Berkman. In her previous work at Internews, she designed and managed a variety of projects to support the growth of non-state news media, including TV, radio, print and online outlets, in the former Soviet Union and participated in program design and development for Internews projects in other parts of the world. From 1993 to 1994 she was also the host of an English-language morning news show there.

Kat Powers is the manager of the local news site, Wicked Local Somerville, despite her job title reading Somerville Journal editor. She has been in and out of the news business since 1991, starting off as a freelancer for the Somerville Journal, working at the Cambridge Chronicle and a turn on the overnight desk at the Daily Evening Item. In Somerville for the last eight years, she has been the Journal editor and for the last three years, has been making WickedLocalSomerville.com a breaking-news website that competes against the big dailies but also with local blogs.

"The Nile perch sector, once described as the saviour of Lake Victoria`s economy, is now collapsing as the global economic recession ravages Europe, leaving 300,000 Tanzanians without jobs..." Read More

Source: Sunday Observer via www.ippmedia.com

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/itw-pda-tt0211.html
MIT news
PDAs AREN'T JUST FOR CHECKING E-MAIL
Researchers use handheld devices to monitor TB patients in Peru

Anne Trafton, News Office
February 11, 2009

For patients who have drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis, it's critical to monitor the disease as closely as possible. That means monthly testing throughout a two-year course of powerful antibiotics, with injections six days a week for the first six months.

Keeping track of all those test results can be very time-consuming, especially in developing countries where health workers rely on paper copies. That's why graduate student Joaquin Blaya decided to try out a new tracking method: personal digital assistants.

In a project launched in Lima, Peru, the researchers found that equipping health care workers with PDAs to record data dropped the average time for patients' test results to reach their doctors from 23 days to eight days.

"You can monitor patients in a more timely way. It also prevents results from getting lost," says Blaya, a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Their work was reported in December in the online edition of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Blaya started the project after taking a year off during his graduate studies to return to Chile, where he was born.

"I went back to Chile and realized … the key was to focus on the population I wanted to help," he says. "Instead of saying, 'I'm a mechanical engineer, what kind of device can I build,' I should be saying 'Who are the people working in the settings I want to work in?'"

When Blaya returned to MIT, he took lecturer Amy Smith's D-Lab course and got connected with Partners in Health, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote health care in resource-poor areas.

Working with faculty members from HST and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Blaya launched the PDA project in Lima. He also worked closely with the Peruvian sister organization of Partners in Health, Socios en Salud. "The way to solve healthcare problems is by involving the community," he says.

Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results onto two sets of forms per patient -- one for the doctors and one for the health care administrators.

From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three weeks per patient. In some extreme cases, results were temporarily misplaced and could take up to three months to be recorded. There was also greater potential for error because information was copied by hand so many times.

With the new system, health care workers enter all of the lab data into their handheld devices, using medical software designed for this purpose. When the workers return to their office, they sync up the PDAs with their computers.

"The doctors get what they want, the administrators get what they want, and the team only has to enter the data once," says Blaya.

The new system dramatically dropped the average time to record results to eight days, and eliminated the few cases where results went missing for several weeks or months. "You can really prevent patients from falling through the cracks," says Blaya.

Getting timely and accurate lab results "is essential to determine if a patient is responding to treatment and, if not, to alert physicians to the possible need for medication changes," the researchers wrote.

Peruvian health care workers enthusiastically embraced the program, which started in two of Lima's districts and has now been expanded to all five. In addition to saving time, the handheld devices are also more cost-effective than the paper-based system, the researchers reported recently in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

The current version of the tracking software, OpenMRS, can be found at http://openmrs.org/wiki/OpenMRS. Blaya used an earlier version of the software for his Peru study.

Other authors of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases paper are Ted Cohen, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; Pablo Rodriguez, engineer at Socios en Salud; Jihoon Kim, statistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital; and Hamish Fraser, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

In The World is a series that explores how people from MIT are using technology -- from the appropriately simple to the cutting-edge -- to help meet the needs of local populations around the planet. If you know of a good example and would like the News Office to write about it, please e-mail dlc1@mit.edu.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 11, 2009 (download PDF).

http://www.weforum.org/en/events/GlobalAgenda/index.htm

The WEF's report on the future of mobile technologies and communications starts on page 192.
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/globalagenda.pdf
Future of Mobile Communications

Sessions in the Annual
Meeting programme related
to the Future of Mobile
Communications include:
•Digital Asia: A World unto Itself
•Power to the People — Politics
in the Internet Age
•Update 2009: Digital
Convergence Continues
•Social Computing —
Transforming Corporations and
Markets?
•From Adoption to Diffusion:
Technology and Developing
Economies
•Mobile Revolutions in the
Developing World
•Reality Mining: Changing
Behaviour
•Global Industry Outlook 3

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413407376461353.html

FEBRUARY 9, 2009, 11:27 P.M. ET
Rural India Snaps Up Mobile Phones
Demand Among Poor Farmers Keeps an Industry Growing as Other Sectors of the Economy Are Jolted

By ERIC BELLMAN

Even amid the global economic slowdown, one Indian industry continues to boom: selling cellphones to the rural poor.

Economists have slashed Indian economic growth forecasts for this year and the stock market is in the doldrums. But cellphone companies are signing millions of new subscribers a month, making India the fastest growing mobile-phone market in the world. There is no sign of a slowdown yet: figures to be released later this month are expected to show that new subscriptions in January reached a record 11 million.

The demand for cellphones is coming mainly from rural consumers, who typically earn less than $1,000 a year. These buyers haven't been affected by plunging stock and real-estate prices or tighter bank lending since they typically don't own land and don't borrow. A large majority of them don't have access to regular landline phone networks -- there are only about 40 million landline subscribers in India -- so once cellular coverage comes to their towns or villages they scramble to get their first phones.

In the village of Karanehalli, a cluster of simple homes around an intersection of two dirt roads about 40 miles from India's high-tech capital of Bangalore, Farmer K.T. Srinivasa doesn't have a toilet for his home or a tractor for his field. But when a red and white cellular tower sprouted in his village, he splurged on a cellphone.

While the way his family threshes rice -- crushing it with a massive stone roller -- hasn't changed for generations, his phone has changed the way he farms. He uses it to decide when to plant and harvest by calling other farmers, to get the best prices for his rice, coconuts and jasmine by calling wholesalers, and to save hours of time waiting on the road for deliveries and pickups that rarely come on time.

"Life is much better with the cellphone," he said from his rice paddy in the shadow of the new tower. "I bring it with me to the fields and anyone can reach me here."

Mr. Srinivasa, like close to half the 800 people in his village, uses Idea Cellular Ltd. as it was the first to bring them service. He paid the equivalent of about $60 for his Nokia phone, and spends about $6 each month for service. Like most rural users, Mr. Srinivasa uses his phone to make voice calls -- he doesn't know how to text message or to download emails. On average rural Indians use their phones around 8.5 hours a month, up 10% over the past year.

The story is the same across rural India, home to more than 60% of India's population of 1.2 billion. China, Indonesia and Brazil also continue to show solid growth in cellphone sales.

The continued expansion of the cellphone industry in India stands in sharp contrast to most other industries here. Textile and software exporters are struggling. India's brand new malls are sparsely populated and the sales of cars, trucks, tractors and motorcycles have declined in recent months.

But the cellphone industry recorded more than 10 million new subscribers in December, up from eight million a year earlier. The industry's overall subscriber base grew 48% in 2008 to 347 million customers.

Rural customers "have been hungry for mobile phones for a long time, so demand will remain unaffected," by the global jitters, said S.P. Shukla, chief executive officer of the mobile business at Reliance Communications India Ltd., India's second-largest cellular company by number of subscribers, after Bharti Airtel.

Reliance launched a new $2 billion nationwide network in January that reaches more than 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages.

International wireless giants are clamoring for a piece of the action. Last year, Vodafone Holdings PLC took over India's fourth-largest cellular company by number of subscribers. In December, Japan's NTT Docomo Inc. announced it will pay almost $3 billion for a 26% stake in Tata Teleservices Ltd.

While the average amount subscribers spend has slipped as less-affluent consumers get connected, profit growth and margins have remained healthy thanks to economies of scale, according to investors and telecom executives.

For example, Bharti Airtel saw its profit in the three months ended Dec. 31 climb to 22 billion rupees ($452 million), up 25% from a year earlier, as it drew in a record number of new subscribers. And with a national penetration rate of less than 30% as of December there is still a lot of untapped demand. In contrast, in the U.S. more than 80% of the people have mobile phones. In China the penetration rate is more than 40%.

In Khairat, a village 45 miles outside Mumbai that is only accessible on foot or by motorcycle, buffalo farmer Mohan Zore makes around $80 a month but figured he still needed a phone once his village got coverage. He doesn't have to walk into the market to find out the price of buffalo milk, he now just dials friends at the market from his phone. And he can easily call his son from the fields when he is out grazing his herd.

He used to spend 300 rupees and three hours on a bus to visit his daughter and grandchildren. Now he can catch up with them for one rupee a minute. "The phone saves me money," he says from his mud-walled home, which he shares with his 20 buffalo.

Mr. Zore can afford a phone because Indian cellular services are among the least expensive in the world. Incoming calls are free and making a call usually costs less than 2 cents a minute. Most of the rural subscribers use prepaid cards for service rather than monthly plans, topping up as needed.

The companies are pushing ahead with multibillion dollar build-out plans to expand their networks to smaller and smaller villages.

"We are still experiencing strong growth in all areas," said Amit Ganani, chief executive officer for Tower Vision India Pvt. Ltd., a New Delhi based company that builds cellular towers and then rents them out to multiple service providers. It built the tower that brought cellular services to Karanehalli. It plans to raise the number of sites it has in India to about 5,000 by the end of the year from about 3,000 now. "If you go to the remote areas you don't have to be a genius to record huge growth," Mr. Ganani said.

The villagers in Karanehalli say the cellular tower was one of their first opportunities to plug into what was happening in the rest of India, and the world. They can name America's new president -- "Obama!" a group of villagers shout when asked. They know that the global slowdown has hurt the price of coconuts as well as silk.

They know that their relatives that work at the nearby Toyota Motor Corp. factory have lost their jobs recently. They also understand that their agriculture-based economy is not hurting as bad as that of their high-tech neighbors in Bangalore. "After the global crises," said Mr. Srinivasa, the farmer, "I think we are in better shape."

Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B1

The Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley is pleased to announce the Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge.

Recent innovations in science and technology, especially mobile technologies, have provided human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists with new tools to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and disseminate this information in real time throughout the world. Cell phones, combined with GPS, cameras, video, audio, and SMS are transforming the way the world understands and responds to emerging crises. Handheld data collection devices, such as PDAs, provide researchers with new ways of documenting mass violence and attitudes toward peace, justice, and social reconstruction in conflict zones.
How it Works

The Human Rights Center is sponsoring a challenge to encourage innovations for applying mobile technologies for human rights investigations and advocacy. Through a NetSquared Community vote, 10 finalists will be chosen. All 10 finalists will be invited to present their ideas at an international conference, “The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media,” at UC Berkeley, May 4 and 5, 2009. A panel of judges, selected by the Human Rights Center, will choose three winners, to be announced at the conference. Winners will receive cash awards of $15,000 (first place), $10,000 (second place), and $5,000 (third place) to implement their ideas.

Couldn't help posting:)
At least this one is harmless...

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1874375,00.html
Answers for 50 Cents: Testing the New KGB
By CLAIRE SUDDATH Tuesday, Feb. 03, 2009

The KGB's agents are everywhere. They're with me when I go for a walk, they follow me home after work, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, they're just a phone call away.

I'm talking about the Knowledge Generation Bureau, of course. The Knowledge Generation Bureau is a text message-based information service, that, for 50 cents a text, will answer any question you have as accurately as possible. The New York-based company has been a major player in the directory assistance market for years; whenever you dial 4-1-1, chances are good that KGB will answer.

But people don't call for information anymore, says Bruce Stewart, KGB's CEO of mobile and digital. They text. "When you want to know something, you text your friend or someone who might know. We are looking to be that someone." After launching a successful texting service in the United Kingdom, KGB decided to bring it to the U.S.. The beta test launched last fall and already the company has thousands of "agents" ready to provide you with anything from movie times and train schedules to the type of pen Bob Dole holds in his hand. (Answer: sometimes it's felt-tip, sometimes ballpoint, and occasionally it's a pencil.)

Agents work from home on their own schedules and make 10 cents a text (5 cents if they simply forward a computer-generated response, like driving directions or phone numbers). Applicants must pass a "Special Agents Challenge" that is a trivia game mixed with a standardized math test for middle schoolers. Since applicants can cheat by using the Internet, failing is a challenge.

The KGB acronym isn't accidental. Knowledge Generation Bureau's television commercial — in which an older gentleman interrogates a young recruit about the capital of New Zealand and the song "Sugar Sugar" — never tells you what the company is selling, and it deliberately tries to associate the "KGB" initials with mystery and conspiracy. "We wanted to rebrand the KGB," says Stewart. "We're democratizing information, giving knowledge out to the broad public instead of taking it. Contrast that to the historical one, and people say, 'Oh, I get it.'"

Despite Stewart's claim, The Global Knowledge Network is also taking plenty of knowledge for itself, since the more users text, the more KGB can discover about its customers. For now, there are now plans to sell the information to marketers, but, says Stewart, "We see what are people asking about. What movies are they asking to see, what restaurants are they interested in going to, what sports teams they like, what merchandise looking to buy — there is an interesting level of insight about what people are thinking."

In the Internet age there are very few questions that can't be answered with a simple Google search. And with web-capable cell phones, there really isn't any need for KGB or the similar service ChaCha (which is free but more annoying because its messages are riddled with ads). So KGB has to distinguish itself by the accuracy and speed of its answers. To find out if the company's service is of any use, we put it to the test, sending different questions at different times throughout the day to 542542 (or "KGBKGB"). Below are the unedited texts, and KGB's responses. >> Read further --

Co-Founder/Editor, MobileActive.org

Katrin Verclas is co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones in social change work. She was, until recently, also the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States.

Katrin is passionate about the use of technology in democratic participation, economic empowerment, community organizing, and government accountability.

She believes in the importance of community, the power of networks, the good will of people, our ability to collaborate for a common good, the inherent political-ness of everyday life, and the power of people using technology to better this world.

Katrin has a strong background in IT management, IT in social change organizations, and in philanthropy. Prior to NTEN and MobileActive, she has led several nonprofit organizations, and served as a program officer at the Proteus Fund for six years, focusing on the use of technology in civic and democratic participation, and in government transparency.

She is currently engaged in researching and writing a publication on mobile use in civil society with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Group, among other projects.

Katrin has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation and civil society organizations, open source software in the nonprofit sector, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in development. She is the editor of a forthcoming book on IT Leadership in organizations published by Wiley & Sons, and is the author of an essay in a book to be published in 2008 on the use of technology in engaging young people in democratic movements. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications.

Katrin serves on the boards of Mobile Voter and NTEN, and is a member of IEEE Computer Society and the Development Executive Group.

MobileActive.org is a global network of practitioners using mobile phones in social change work. MobileActive.org features a community blog with the latest case studies and analysis of the use of mobile phones in civil society organizations; data on mobile penetration worldwide, and a comprehensive directory of projects, vendors, and tools using mobile technology. The network organizes a popular conference for practitioners and technologists at the cutting edge of using mobiles in social change work around the world.

Katrin can be reached at kverclas [at] techstrategy.org or katrin [phat] mobileactive.org.