Mobile

The traffic from South Trinidad today was a bit worse than yesterday, and there was a notable exception: The Prime Minister's motorcade made everyone move aside as he cut through the traffic along the Solomon Hochoy Highway like a hot knife through butter. This made me wonder whether he would consider traffic a priority to be addressed if he had to sit in traffic like every other citizen. Allegedly, a Prime Minister is supposed to work for the people. I didn't have a strong feel of that when he blew past us as we all moved out of the way.

And that made me wonder what else Ministers and the Prime Minister do not experience and thus do not believe is a priority. Some Minister or the other said recently that traffic demonstrates development. What sort of development, he did not say - but I have a few ideas. After leaving South Trinidad at 7:30 a.m., I arrived at the Crowne Royal hotel for the conference at 9:23 a.m. Perhaps the 23 minutes are because of the Prime Minister's diversion. Fortunately, the Chair of the first session didn't ask me for a note from the Prime Minister regarding my tardiness.

Mobile Internet Access Provision

Mr. Nigel Cassimire of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) chaired this session; the first part I missed for the most part. Mr. Donnie De Freitas, Director of Technical Services of the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority, gave me a direct look in the eyes as I wandered in with the Prime Minister on my mind. He was giving a status report on mobile delivery modes in the Caribbean, which I am sure that I would have found interesting. Next time maybe I'll get the Prime Minister to drop me off. { Read more }

Continuing after the first half...

After the lunch break, we had two more sessions for the day.

Caribbean Innovations For The Mobile Internet

Dr. Kim Mallalieu, the Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (UWI) and Researcher, Dialogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Informacion, chaired this session and started off by adding depth to the topic in exploring what innovation is and weaving in some of the projects done within the Caribbean. This is where those slides of the Alert Retrieval Cache had ended up, and they were in good company.

The fact that the focus for innovation was the community made me feel a little warm and fuzzy. That's one of my greatest contentions that has survived a few decades in technology, one which has survived readings of Henry David Thoreau and other humanities. The other projects mentioned were very worthwhile.

Mr. Kevon Andrews and Mr. Wayne Sarjusingh, Development Engineers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UWI, were up next and explored their own innovation - creation of SMS text messaging for the Claxton Bay Community (Trinidad) as one of their two examples allowed people to query for people of job descriptions by text messages. With a simple mobile phone connected to a laptop, they had gotten much done - and much more learned, which they shared with us. The most interesting part for me was their 'after action' report - something that few people do. Their analysis of limitations of their systems was well worth sitting through. Great work. { Read more }

As I drove up to the Caribbean Internet Forum (2008)'s start, I was struck by the amount of traffic I was stuck in between 7:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. Normally I avoid going to Port of Spain on weekdays during those hours, but today was an exception - and, as usual, I thought of a few things while stuck in traffic. One thing that came to mind as I read a relaxing sign on a walkway that suggested I enjoy my traffic drive was that there are different rates of development within Trinidad and Tobago, as with any other nation, and traffic is actually an indicator of this. What do I mean by that? That's probably a separate entry, but it is topical in that Internet penetration probably looks the same to ISPs.

I digress.

Despite the long drive, I managed to arrive on time. Spoiler: It was worth it. The first day got crammed in a bit, as most first days at conferences are. There's no way I will claim objectivity, so I'll simply give my observations and let the sim cards fall where they may. Here's some fodder on the 4 sessions of the day followed by my overall thoughts.

Opening Session

Ms. Bernadette Lewis Secretary General of the CTU and Board Member of Dialogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Informacion (DIRSI) chaired the first session. It was good to see her again; I'd first met her at the Caribbean Internet Governance Forum in 2005. { Read more }

The Caribbean Internet Forum, 2008, which starts tomorrow, will be focusing on 'The Mobile Internet for Development'. In communication with the organizers of the forum, the topic of the BBC article on the Alert Retrieval Cache came up - and since I'm in the Caribbean, it qualified for a few slides somewhere in the forum. I'm not sure where - when asked to provide some information, I did in Microsoft Word format (using OpenOffice.org, of course). I did my best to keep it to bullets.

A few days ago, someone who was involved in putting the slides together asked my input on a few things and I came to the realization that because of the concept's necessary vagueness of definition, it is difficult for people to grasp. A generic 'send SMS text messages to email and RSS', which has become commonplace through things like Twitter and addons for Drupal, is still not used as effectively as it could... or even by the people who could use it to save lives. Thus, over the last few days I have been considering this in more depth since I am no longer as interested in it being used. My philosophy has shifted to, "It's an idea - take it or leave it".

The first thing that's interesting to me is that Dan Lane and myself did not contact the BBC to do the article - the third person was trying to get some glory out of it. Dan and I were interested in it being used to save lives. That this pre-dated Twitter is not lost on me - Twitter arrived a year later, doing the same thing and not being used for much other than sending 140 character globules of spit around. Twitter never interested me for the same reason - and yet, about a month ago, Andy Carvin and I had a brief email discussion about it. It ends up, he tells me, Homeland Security was interested in using Twitter but they were having problems with designing headers, etc.

Mea Culpa { Read more }

When I wrote about Mobile Phones as a Technology Platform, I was writing about something that at least a few people on the planet have been aware of for at least 4 years - perhaps 5. We can add Google's employees - at least some of them - to that mix: Google's For the Birds. It seems that Google is a part of group which plans to 'deploy world’s first high-speed, low-cost satellite system to transform communications access for billions worldwide'. O3b Networks, supported by Google, Liberty Global and HSBC, tackling the digital divide.

Clark Boyd chimes in:

...Fine, but broadband speed data access? Greg Wyler, founder of O3b, says these sats will fly lower, which will reduce the latency, the lag time between when you click, and when you get the webpage. Now, to be clear, O3b is not selling service directly. Instead, it's going to sell wholesale to local WiMax, 3G, and eventually 4G providers. So, not just for data, but for some of that cell phone backhaul.

Glenn Strachan, an independent IT consultant with extensive experience in rolling out wireless broadband in the developing world, sees some real sticking points. He notes that while some countries like Kenya and Rwanda have liberalized their ISP and cell phone provider markets, the same does not hold true for many African countries. "In Senegal," he told me, "the controlling monopoly is Sonatel. And they're not about to disperse, at low cost, this new Internet access. There's no regulatory environement in Senegal that would allow alternative ISPs to gain access." { Read more }

After some communication about my concerns related to the Caribbean Internet Forum, an error on their website was made apparent - people within Trinidad and Tobago do not require a bank draft to register; they may pay with a regular cheque/check. And cash at the door is not ruled out - but they do wish to have people registered beforehand so that they know how many to expect.

So I registered, and they'll be correcting the error on the website today, I am told. I also suggested taking credit card payments, which I am told will go to the organizing committee for the next time around. While it has become apparent that Trinbagonians have a better chance of attending without the inconvenience of going to a bank and assuring a bank draft is done, I cannot imagine that the inconvenience I saw being any less for people outside of Trinidad and Tobago.

It looks to be a good forum in the making. You can read about it here, but the thrust of it seems to be mobile and wireless access - something which bodes well in the Caribbean due to the small geographic nature of islands.

If you're going to be there, drop me a note below.

From Cubans win OK to buy cellphones (cash only):

HAVANA -- Cuba said Friday that it would allow all Cubans to buy and use cellphones, the latest step by new President Raul Castro to improve access to consumer goods.

Cuba has the lowest rate of cellphone use in Latin America. The service had been restricted to foreigners and government officials and employees...

Aside from the fact that Reuters doesn't seem to realize that Cuba is an island in the Caribbean (really!), this is a pretty cool article about an issue that I didn't know existed.

Remember that UNCTAD report? The one that said cellphones were making a lot of progress? Well, it seems Cuba has stepped into the development arena as far as that goes. I didn't realize it was a problem in Cuba; my acquaintances in Cuba never really said anything about it. Why would they?

Computers. DVDs. You mean, it took Fidel Castro's stepping down for this to happen? What else is going on in there?

I wrote an email to a list this morning that I invested a lot of time into - about 1/24th of the day - and I believe it ended up being a gem. I have edited it for sharing with a web audience who would be unfamiliar with the thread of discussion I was participating in (this was my last post of many in a long thread):

Governmental democracy is one aspect of democracy, and we all know (or should) that present governmental democracies are less than perfect. One way to put it would be that dictators are sometimes democratically elected. Another way to put it is that sometimes someone with the popular vote doesn't win an election because of technicalities - a number of seats, etc. Putting aside the obvious example that most are familiar with due to the media (the United States), I'll point out that the last election in Trinidad and Tobago had 3 parties running. 1 party won the most seats. 1 party won the least seats. 1 party won the popular vote. The party with the most seats won the election. The party with the least seats is in Opposition. The party with the popular vote didn't even win one seat.

So yes, there are issues of governmental democracy. The core principles of democracy seem a little lost when we look at implementations of democracy. That is why I try to avoid discussing democracy with government as the example of democracy. Jacques is right about today's governmental democracies. Anyone who thinks that they are working properly probably hasn't really looked at the world lately. { Read more }