Icann reveals new internet top-level domain name claims

Requests to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) include .porn, .ninja, and .ferrari.

Currently there are 280 ccTLDs but only 22 "generics" in the domain name system right now, but that is all about to change. The new gTLD application window opened on 12 January 2012 and closed on 30 May 2012.

(Icann) said it had received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.

By contrast there have been 40 such applications from the UK, 303 from the Asia-Pacific region and 17 from Africa.

Several top-level domains have been applied for by more than one party, including .sex, .home and .diy.

Both the US drug maker Merck & Co and its German rival Merck KGaA appear to have applied for the .merck ending, which may trigger an auction process.

The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and its affiliated agencies applied for the .akdn and.agakhan endings.

Bharti Airtel Limited from India applied for the .airtel ending, while UniForum SA (NPC) trading as Registry.Africa applied for .africa ending. Electronic Media Network Limited (M-Net) from South Africa applied for .africamagic apparently for its Africa Magic channels on DSTV offerings.

Samsung - which had objected to the process - has taken part, applying for both .samsung and its equivalent in the Korean alphabet.

However, Coca-Cola and the cereal manufacturer Kellogg's, which also signed a petition in protest, have abstained.

By contrast Google has applied for dozens of the generic top-level domain (gTLD) name strings.

Obvious choices included .google and .youtube, but there were also unexpected inclusions such as .and, .boo, .dad and .new.

The search giant has also requested .music, which has been claimed by seven other organisations including the online retailer Amazon.

Other gTLDs attracting multiple requests include .art, .book, .news, .play, .shop and .vip.

The most contested name is .app which received 13 applications.

Icann said that it had received a total of 1,930 requests for its first round of new net names - 166 of them were in alternatives to the Latin alphabet.

It has now invited anyone with an objection to any of the claims to lodge their complaint within the next seven months.

Icann then aims to make the new domains live in batches of about 500, with the first set going live some time after March 2013.

"The plan we have delivered is solid and fair," said Icann's chief executive, Rod Beckstrom. "It is our fundamental obligation to increase innovation and consumer choice."

However, critics have attacked the plan, noting the costs involved and the fact that bodies in the first batch to be processed may gain an unfair advantage.

Nations including Brazil, China and Russia have also suggested Icann's functions be passed to the UN or another body more under governments' control.

Applicants had to pay a $185,000 (£118,800) fee to take part in the application process. They also face a minimum $25,000 annual renewal charge to keep their suffix once it has been granted.

The BBC made one of 40 applications for a new top-level domain name from the UK

The big names of the internet have either invested massively or not at all. Amazon for example has applied for 76 names, Google for 101 and Microsoft 11. But there's no applications from Facebook or Twitter.

And neither did I see any applications from any of major players in Kenya, such as Safaricom or East African Breweries Limited.

Source: BBC and ICANN

Microwork: Making money from mobile phones

A problem shared is a problem halved, so the old phrase goes.

But today, in our hyperconnected world, a problem shared is more likely a problem distributed amongst hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

That is the basic principle of a growing trend called “microwork”. If you have heard of e-commerce giant Amazon's Mechanical Turk, then you are already familiar with the basic idea. People sign up to do bite-sized computer-based tasks, perhaps helping to translate chunks of text into different languages for an electronics firm wanting to localise its instruction books, in return for small amounts of money.

But what has until now largely been confined to computers is about to get a shot in the arm. An increasing number of projects are targeting mobile. After all, with almost seven billion mobile subscribers in the world today, you can potentially tap a massive workforce at the touch of a button. It also pays off for the mobile subscribers, who can exchange their work for money or phone credit – something that can potentially change lives, particular in areas of the world with very low wages.

It was that combination of ideas that struck Aadhar Bhalinge, as he drove through the streets of Mumbai in India. "I regularly travel by rickshaw and I always chat with the drivers," says the IT manager. "I know quite a lot about their problems, their economic status, the traffic, and their daily rent."

Bhalinge started to wonder if there might be some way to use mobile technologies to make life a bit more productive for rickshaw drivers. What if those moments stuck in traffic jams could be put to good use? What if there were little tasks that could be performed on a mobile phone that might generate extra income for the driver? 

It was that thinking that resulted in an idea he calls the Smart Rickshaw Network (SRN). Using the system, drivers, armed with GPS enabled smartphones, would be able to send in regular check-ins from their routes via the internet or SMS. The information could be traffic updates, or information about a city's landmarks or tourist hotspots. "Rickshaw drivers cover most roads and areas," says Bhalinge, "and they are continuously on the move day and night. They are aware of most locations, and know which ones are currently popular."

In other words, if he could build the system, he would have a pool of skilled, knowledgeable professionals crowd-sourcing important information about the city. Information, Bhalinge notes, "that can be of great use to clients." You can imagine someone willing to pay for a subscription service to real-time traffic updates, or tourists wanting information about the newest hotspot, he says.

"With just a few taps on a touch screen, or with a voice command - when they are waiting at traffic lights, or dropping off a passenger - a driver could earn an extra two to three dollars a day," Bhalinge says.

Inspired, he entered his idea into a competition called m2Work. It's an initiative sponsored by infoDev, a partnership program with the World Bank, and Nokia. The project aims to find "models that no one in the microwork industry, or even our own experts, had thought of yet," according to infoDev's Tony Eliasz. The judges liked that what they heard. Bhalinge's "Smart Rickshaw Network" idea beat out more than 940 other entries to win the grand prize of $20,000.

His idea builds on several more established projects, such as Txteagle, founded in 2008 by Nathan Eagle, an MIT computer engineer. It was one of the earliest entrants into the mobile microwork market using technology that Eagel and his team created that allowed small amounts of money to be delivered to cell phone users. He subsequently formed partnerships with dozens of mobile operators around the world, allowing him to potentially send money to more than two billion people instantly.

He initially found interest from Indian companies who wanted to outsource digital work to Africa: things like form processing, data entry and the like. They didn't need a smartphone or an internet connection. But Eagle found that the demand to do the work caused the pay to drop to next to nothing. The company's core vision was getting blurred.

TxtEagle changed tack, and it's name. Now called JANA, it uses the same mobile technology, but is instead focused on using it to conduct research and marketing. Where txteagle pushed out microwork onto mobiles, JANA sends surveys. A woman in the Philippines, for example, can answer a few questions via text message about what laundry detergent she uses, and get 100 pesos ($2) in phone credit.

Companies, Eagle tells me, spend billions each year on market research in the developing world. "They fly people into the capital, rent land rovers, and then go out in the field to conduct face to face surveys." Eagle thinks JANA could cut company costs significantly, while also providing a bit of financial help to those who opt in to the survey.

The World Bank, Eagle notes, is also using the company's system in a similar way to track food prices around the world by asking people to send how much a kilo of rice costs in various communities. "We decided to focus on tasks that can't, by definition, be outsourced," Eagle says. In other words, the kinds of questions that can only be answered by human beings with local knowledge.

It is an idea that is familiar to Leila Janah, the founder of a non-profit called Samasource and the person widely credited with coining the term microwork.

From its beginnings in 2008, the organisation has grown to employ 2,680 full-time workers, mostly in Kenya and India who use computers to tag photos, or type in small bits of data or text. At the end of May, 2012, Samasource says it will have paid around $2m in wages to those workers. The non-profit now counts eBay, WalMart and Microsoft among its clients. It has grown so large, and so fast, that Janah says Samasource decided to build its own piece of "microwork" software, called the SamaHub, to deal with the workload.

Samasource doesn’t currently offer work on mobiles and is sceptical about the approach. Janah says she worries that the cost of mobile bandwidth will be too high in the countries where it operates, because much of its work requires an internet connection. She also worries about the form factor. "The biggest challenge is that you won't get the quality levels and speed without the keyboard," she says, although admits that tablets may eventually offer a happy medium between mobile and laptop for microwork.

But whether on laptop, mobile or tablet, all microwork has its critics, who contend it does little to help people develop new skills, and that the wages paid are exploitative. Leila Janah disagrees.

Others contend that microwork is not a sustainable source of income for workers.

Technorati Tags: microwork,Amazon's Mechanical Turk,Smart Rickshaw Network (SRN),m2Work,infoDev,Txteagle,JANA,Samasource

Source: BBC

More mobile devices than people 'within five years'

The number of devices connected to mobile phone networks will overtake the number of people on Earth within five years, according to the technology group Ericsson.

There will be 9bn mobile subscriptions by 2017, up from 6.2bn at the start of this year, while the US census bureau predicts the globalpopulation will have reached 7.4 billion in five years.

Driven by demand for video, internet usage and storage of electronic files in the "cloud" rather than on home or office computers, traffic over mobile networks will grow even faster than subscriptions.

Ericsson, which builds and manages networks, monitored the traffic on its own circuits to produce its second Traffic and Market Report. It predicts data traffic – as opposed to voice calls – will grow 15 times over by 2017, by which time 85% of humanity will live within range of a mobile broadband signal, up from half of the population today.

Within that time, half of us will be in range of superfast, 4G mobile networks, up from 315 million today.

"In 2008, there were 4bn mobile subscriptions," said Ericsson's chief executive, Hans Vestberg. "By 2017 there will be close to 9bn subscriptions. With this kind of mobility and connectivity everywhere, there will be no differentiation between a business user and a private user."

Ericsson found three types of smartphone were responsible for most of the internet traffic from handsets. Internet usage is highest among owners of iPhones, followed by Android and Windows Phone subscribers.

For these "high traffic" phone owners, the first fix often begins before getting out of bed. Some 40% of all smartphone owners access the internet and their apps before putting their slippers on, and usage peaks during the daily commute at 70%.

With Android and Apple phones having become mass market consumer goods in western nations over the past year or two, the impact on networks has been sizeable. Mobile data traffic almost doubled between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012.

Mobile broadband subscriptions have grown 60% year on year to 1.1bn, with 5bn predicted by 2017. By then, the number of mobile laptops and tablets is expected to be level with the number of fixed broadband lines, at around 650m subscriptions.

Increasingly, most people's experience of the internet will be through a mobile phone, and the number of handsets with an internet connection is expected to grow from 700m at the end of last year to 3bn in five years.

Screen size affects internet use, which is four times as much on laptops than on high traffic smartphones – two gigabytes versus 500 megabytes per month. In five years, traffic will have grown to an estimated 8GB for laptops versus 1GB for smartphones.

In the first quarter of this year, there were 6.2bn mobile subscriptions, less than the estimated 7bn world population. However, with individuals owning multiple devices, the number of subscribers stood at 4.2bn.

Western Europe already has 126% penetration, while Africa has just 55%, with families or villages often sharing a single phone. Africa already has more subscriptions than Europe, however, with 680m compared to 540m for Europe.

China has 1bn subscriptions, and along with India accounted for the majority of the 170m new subscriptions in the first quarter.

Source: theguardian

Google enters Kenya’s payment market bringing NFC along

Internet giant Google has made a quiet entry into Kenya’s electronic payment systems scene, signaling an impending battle for the sub-sector.

The company has introduced a transport payment card on Citi Hoppa buses plying Nairobi routes using near field communication (NFC) technology.

The Beba (which means to carry or to transport in Kiswahili) Card allows users to load money and make fare payments by tapping on a hand-held device in the buses. The Beba cards are free of charge and are available from Beba agents in certain locations. Google is using Top Image – the same company that markets M-PESA- to market the Beba cards. You need a Gmail account to activate and load your card with money from a Beba agent. Beba’s main selling proposition is to help people save money. The bus conductors and matatu (public service vehicles) touts have been known to hike up bus fares the moment it starts raining or when there is traffic. This is the problem that Beba is solving for commuters.

You can view all the transactions you have made from the beba website – that is, the date, amount and location where you loaded the beba card with money, the bus company you used, the amount you paid and the final destination where you alighted from the bus. You can easily claim for a refund in a case where a conductor over charges you because all the evidence is there in your account.

Google-Kenya’s communication manager, Ms Dorothy Ooko, said the project was still in its pilot phase and that an official launch with more partners was in the offing.

The Beba Card is the brainchild of Google-Ireland, a fact that Ms Ooko declined to comment on.

NFC is a wireless technology that allows devices to exchange information when in close proximity. It has most commonly been installed on smartphones, which are then used to make payments in retail outlets.

NFC devices can be used in contactless payment systems, similar to those currently used in credit cards and electronic ticket smartcards, and allow mobile payment to replace or supplement these systems. For example, Google has pioneered Google Wallet, which has been hailed as the West’s answer to mobile money allows consumers to store credit card and store loyalty card information in a virtual wallet and then use an NFC-enabled device at terminals that also accept MasterCard PayPass transactions. Germany, Austria and Latvia are already trialling NFC ticketing systems for public transport. And China is using it all over the country in public bus transport. In India NFC based transaction is being implemented in box offices for ticketing purposes. However, tech companies have been reluctant to launch the technology in Africa, citing low penetration of smartphones and other supporting infrastructure.

Electronic payments processor, Visa, has repeatedly declared its intentions to enter the Kenyan market with NFC technology while at the same time decrying technological and infrastructural development as hindrances to the plan.

Visa’s country director for East and Central Africa Victor Ndlovu said the company was ready to roll-out NFC in Kenya but was waiting for a financial partner to bridge the technological gaps in the retail and transport industries.

Google seems to have surpassed the infrastructure challenge by installing NFC technology on a card.  Technology commentators reckon that this is a strategic move on the company’s part.

As of December last year, 130,000 units of the Huawei IDEOS phone running on Google’s Android platform had been sold in Kenya.

According to last year’s data collected by technology research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), 27 per cent of Kenyans intent to buy a smartphone while one out of five mobile phones in Africa is a smartphone.

Kenya’s electronic payment sector is dominated by mobile money. According to the Central Bank of Kenya, mobile cash transactions accounted for Ksh 1.2 trillion (USD 1.4 billion) in the year ending December 2011.

During the same period, the value of card transactions was estimated at about Sh521 billion (USD 611 million).

Sources: Daily Nation, think m-pesa, Diaspora Messenger, Bei Yangu

Kenya not among top 50 outsourcing destinations

The Global BPO sector was worth $ 1.6 trillion in 2011 showing no growth from 2010. Top BPO sectors include customer service at 53 per cent of the sector, finance and accounting at 22 per cent, human resource at 16 per cent and training at 7 per cent.

Presenting data from India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), Anil says that India’s BPO sector last year made US $14.5 billion from exports and US $3.1 billion from imports. India employs 850,000 people directly in the BPO sector and 4.5 million indirectly. India's BPO sector grew 7.1 per cent in 2010 and 7.5  per cent in 2011.

Meanwhile, Africa’s IT market is expected to be worth over $ 22 billion by 2020. Anil lists key growth sectors as telecoms, banking and Government. The telecommunication sector does a lot of outsourcing . Africa currently has 650 million subscribers who are slated to hit 1 billion by 2016.

At the moment, Spanco handles over 300,000 voice calls per day in call centre outsourcing for its African unit. Banking is expected to grow from 11 per cent of Africa’s Gross Domestic Product by 2009. Anil says low margin and capital intensive retail banking will account for 40 per cent of the continent’s banking revenue by 2020.

Government  outsourcing will be driven by eGovernment  and embracing of IT in various government services. Factors contributing to outsourcing are sheer volumes of transaction, differentiation in terms of quality of service, regulatory environment where the law requires businesses to implement some common functions  and the costs per transaction such as in telecommunications and banking.

Paul Kukubo, Kenya ICT Board CEO, says the board has been supporting the industry from when it was formulated. While there are no concrete statistics on Kenya’s BPO industry, Kukubo estimates that Kenya’s BPo industry currently directly employs 9,000  people, way below a target of 15,000 that the board had set . The sector has lost some firms along the way, including a few that had previously received ICT Board subsidies.

“We had hoped for one or two Tier 1 BPO providers in the industry by now, though this has not happened. However, we had not planned for the many developers that we have,"  he said. He further states that Kenya has no hope replicating India's BPO success model, as its dynamics are different. The ICT Board CEO estimates that the country has about eight large IT firms and about 400 other IT firms spread across various sectors.

Kukubo advises the outsourcing sector to use local businesses to develop competency, which can then be used used to serve other firms abroad. “Other firms have partnered with foreign firms in areas where they aren’t experts, or brought Kenyans who are experts in those areas from abroad, “ he says.

The Board will be supporting the outsourcing industry through the establishment of a centre for excellence for outsourcing businesses. The centre is expected to train 5000 people annually. In addition, The Board plans to establish an incubation unit  that will cater for about 10 “high performance” firms.

Source: CIO East Africa

K-Pad Ghana's Answer to Ipad?

Alltel Limited's flagship product, K-Pad tablet, is gaining worldwide attention due to its increased patronage, affordability and locally developed free web applications for users, according to its manufacturers.

It runs on Google's Android operating system as well as Microsoft's Windows 7 and 8.

SPECIFICATION: 9.7inch K-PAD tablet with Android  OS, Multi–touch screen, LCD screen, Freescale i.MX515 CORTEX A8 CPU, 2G Flash memory, Bluetooth, WIFI support 802.11b/g, 1.3 mega pixel webcam, supports word, excel, PowerPoint, PDF and TXT, supports most video and audio player formats, USB, e-learning and e-books.

The 'K' in 'K-Pad' stands for Kludgeson. Kofi Kludgeson, the Executive Chairman of Alltel Limited, a Ghanaian IT company.

Talking to newsman this week, he said, "After five years of technical development, we have come out with a product that is a major breakthrough in the world of technology. We have come out with K-Pad and in three months the product has hit the world market in a mighty way."

The product, which comes in 7, 8, 9.7 and 10.1-inch variants, allows people to enjoy many free web applications like never before, most of which are local content developed to suit the Ghanaian and African environment.

It has high definition videos, precise touch screen technology, camera with high images, downloadable software, e-learning material, advanced picture quality and the latest blue tooth application.

"Our focus on K-Pad", said Kludgeson "is to look at the rural communities because there they have problems with data.

In the health sector for instance, we want nurses to use K-Pad to record the basic data requirement for patients in order to make healthcare more accessible and efficient."

He said K-Pad has transformed into an African project and the goal of Alltel is to target only five per cent of each economy's population.

"In the last few months, we have had a lot of the international press, some from Belgium Television, Reuters and BBC wanting to know more about Alltel and its products, especially the K-Pad."

One major advantage K-Pad has is that it is an open system device with USB. "From generation to revelation, we have factored all on the K-Pad. We have negotiated for the right to have free web applications for our customers because in our part of the world affordability is a major concern."

Another innovation Alltel is going to introduce in the next two weeks is a product called "K-Phone".

K-Phone, is mobile phone with an android operating system and dual SIM that will give 24/7 internet service to users. In addition, Alltel hopes to develop a 4G network in Ghana.

Alltel's mission, Mr Kludjeson noted, is to encourage Ghanaian youth to go into web application development so that they can be self-sustaining and create jobs for themselves and other people through the devices they develop.

"In the next three years, we should be able to create and empower skills development for about one million youths in Ghana. The country is growing currently at 15% and a lot is happening and if we do not take advantage of the knowledge and technology gap, a time will come when only foreigners will do that for us."

Alltel intends to list on the Ghana Stock Exchange in the next 12 months, where it aims at giving about 100,000 people the right to become part owners of the company.