Like most children I learned from my school days that the Philistines were, well Philistines, which they were not; that the nineteenth century machine-wrecking Luddites in England were against technological progress, which they were not; and that an imbecilic King…

What do Crimea and the Internet have in common? They have both become the terrain of political struggle. And the protagonists are pretty much the same. To be geographically inexact about it, East vs. West, well in Europe. Refusing to…

WhatsApp is up, by USD19 billion all told. Why? Why did Facebook pay more than the nominal GDP of 84 of the poorest countries in the world, starting with Honduras (USD18.6 billion) and descending all the way down to tiny…

2013 was a Year of Revelations. Of those that will have recurring repercussions, the revelations of Edward Snowden must take the prize. Not just for the scope of the surveillance revealed, but perhaps especially for the “workaround” of safeguards and…

This month 2 images caught my eye. First, the outpouring of grief and admiration for Nelson Mandela. There has rarely been a man who has captured so emphatically in his lifetime the essence of what it means to rise above…

In the 1950s Manila was the banking capital of Asia. The Philippines had more telephones per head than Hong Kong. The Philippines looked resurgent. Then came military dictatorship, assassinations of opposition politicians, including the father of the current President and…

Bilateral, regional and global trade agreements are all part of the modern landscape of international economic relationships. They are based upon a simple premise, that free trade is a good thing. At the purely theoretical level this is a tautology.…

There is little point in saying something for the sake of it. A journo, a politician, a blogger, is often faced with the problem because they’ve got to come up with something. Is it therefore an exercise in hubris when…

I have just finishing reading the posthumously published lectures of British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm who died October 2012. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (Little, Brown: 2013) is a good example of never judging a book…

In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two respected Harvard economists, shot to fame for publishing a paper that seemed to support the view that once a national debt had crossed the 90% GDP threshold it would impact negatively on…

Words. Here is an example of some, imaginatively (and unexpectedly) cited by the ITU’s Trends in Telecoms Reform 2013. (And as an American friend remarked “anyone who takes an Alexander Hamilton quote from the 18th century and can relate it…

In the world of social media and instant online news feeds, what actually constitutes ‘news’ is rather problematic. The 140-character ‘news item’ planted on Twitter by hackers in April that bombs had gone off in the White House injuring President…

In March, two announcements were made pointing in opposite directions. First, Google announced the closing down of Google Reader, a news-feed app widely used by the cognoscenti of the up-to-date in everything. Yahoo! followed by announcing the purchase for nearly…

2013 is the year of the Water Snake in the Chinese zodiac. Water is considered to have the colour black, which conjures up the high levels of river pollution in China, so 2013 is also said to be the Year…

At Davos this month Tim Berners-Lee, regarded widely as the father of the World Wide Web, warned of silos that were disabling users from sharing their postings across websites. Giving the example of users placing their photo albums online, he…

2012 ended on a discordant note for the Internet. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the forum at which governments propose regulations and standards for telecoms. Many member states of the ITU regard the Internet as something which should be…

Nate Silver is a clever man. Using “quants” he correctly predicted the outcome of the US presidential race in every single state bar none. Interest in “business analytics” that uses algorithms that detect trends and key relationships in vast amounts…

A recent report by the US Senate warned that entry of telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei into the US market would be a Trojan horse for China’s spy network. For good technical reasons telecoms has always been viewed by governments and…

No one wants to risk using a drug that is not fully tried and tested and accredited by the relevant health standards body. The fact that many people do just that is telling. Of course, the major reason for doing…

Regulatory capture was a concept developed by economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago, but it was already a well observed phenomenon in the USA where powerful industrial and commercial interests exercised undue influence over the agencies and the…

It used to be the case that a dental patient wanting a crown for a tooth needed to sit through an uncomfortable process of having a damp polymer stuck over their tooth and waiting for it to dry before the…

On May 7th hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watched the exciting climax to the English Premier League football championship match between home team and clear favourites Manchester City and QPR who were fighting to avoid relegation. If…

2012 is scheduled as the year Facebook goes public. It has been well advertised that Facebook does not need the money and the Inland Revenue is also pretty indifferent as to whether the taxes are paid by a private individual…

The IT world is getting faster all the time. Telcos are upgrading to high speed broadband NGNs; the processing power of ever smaller chips in ever smaller devices continues exponential growth; and apps and services rely upon ever faster searches…

On 18 January 2012 the Internet went on strike. Wikipedia and a whole host of Internet sites went dark for a day in protest again SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). The sponsors of these two…

Sir, Lawrence Summers and Samuel Brittan, in the “Capitalism in Crisis” series, complement each other in important ways. Prof Summers (“Current woes call for smart reinvention not destruction”, January 9) manages to reduce a modern capitalism economy to two sectors,…

Early in 2011 it was revealed that China was going ahead with an experiment to set up an Internet Special Administrative Region (SAR) similar in concept to the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) of the 1980s that started the process of…

As various free trade negotiations hit the headlines –AFTA, TPP, BTAs, etc – ASEAN seems to be finding a new lease of life.  It already has well established institutions, and with Myanmar apparently on the road to reform there is…

Obituaries are best written before death, and in the media they are. They can be written in relative calm and closer to the truth; after death the temptation is to use superlatives and become superficial. But in the case of…

The need for regulation arises for 3 reasons: to assign scarce resources; to protect citizens; and to promote public policy. In the case of telecoms, these equate to, for example: (i) assigning radio spectrum, or rights-of-way; (ii) enforcing public health…

Anyone following technology markets cannot have missed the growing use of patent wars to cripple or extort or hamper or simply bully competitors into technology agreements or into paying high fees. Patents are a lawyer’s dream and a consumer’s nightmare,…

The demise of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World in the UK had nothing directly to do with competition from social media. On the contrary, it was a profitable news “rag” appealing to the lowest common denominator of readership, and…

The profits warning by KPN (Netherlands) in Apr set off alarm signals. When the CTIA, the wireless telecoms industry association of the US, announced that SMS traffic had grown only 8.7% in 2010, the lowest growth figure for a decade,…

In the latest in an ever growing number of massive cyber security breaches the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) and Online Entertainment Services were hacked for more than 100 million names, addresses, IDs, passwords and possibly credit card numbers, according to…

In 1381 the nobility of England were rocked by the Peasants Revolt. There was no Facebook. In 1848 the ruling classes of Europe were rocked by worker uprisings. There was no Facebook. In 1968 student protests swept much of Europe,…

Natural disasters are at one and the same time to be expected and yet shock us to the core when they occur. The world of ICTs tends to be one of optimism, hope, anticipation of ever better things to come.…

Finally it happ Win Ex Wife Back After Divorce ened. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has run out of IPv4 numbers. The world now has 2 choices. Either source IPv4 numbers that have been issued but are…

The Wall Street Journal (16 Dec 2010) cited an interesting research paper from the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo on China’s trade balance with the USA. The researchers examined the trade in parts for an iPhone. The traditional measure…

Let’s put WikiLeaks into some sort of perspective. In the UK from the 1960s onwards Private Eye became a satirical magazine beloved across the political spectrum from left-wing revolutionaries and anarchists to right-wing Bonapartists and Monarchists alike for its scurrilous,…

The net neutrality issue has raised its head again, and this time Asia is getting involved in the debate. the best cigars According to Verizon (November 2010): “A key reason why the FCC doesn’t consider the activities of those who…

As the global economy slowly pulls itself out of the greatest recession since the Second World War, the role of ICTs has transformed the critical relationship between technologies and business operations. For decades professors at universities and business schools taught…

Next time President Obama visits the Arab Gulf States, he can leave his Blackberry at home. Because of its unique P2P security protection which allows neither RIM nor the carrier to read the content of a user’s communication, the Blackberry…

Google has recently patented an algorithm that identifies search subjects that are under-represented on the Web. For companies such as Demand Media this could spell trouble. Demand Media uses similar algorithms to identify topics for its small army of freelance…

The famous off-hand remark by Lord Thompson of Fleet who in 1960 described his Scottish TV station as a “licence to print money” became a defining moment in the history of the business of TV. As sources of news and…

Singapore is the latest to face the problem that is technically referred to as ‘conditional access’, meaning the conditions that apply to allow someone to access their favourite TV show. Free-to-air, no problem. Want a single cable TV or IPTV…

Sometimes the headline occurs to the writer before the story, which is usually not a good sign for what is to follow. But cloud computing does seem to beg more questions than answers at this stage, so whether it remains…

Cyber attacks are becoming more common, or at least are receiving more public attention. They range from the loan hacker to the highly organized and orchestrated. Google’s problems in China are in that sense just the most public to date.…

Building high speed broadband networks (HSBN) has become a signature theme of national information infrastructure policies around the globe. The Asia Pacific is not short on the issue. Japan and South Korea have long vied to become the most connected…