Monthly Archive

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Every so often I come across an article that really intrigues me. And this one below is one of them. It is a commentary on where Telstra stands as a Telco in today’s rapidly connected world. The thing though is that it is not the Telco’s that are connecting people but more people connecting themselves through whatever technologies are available and the future is really already here. The capabilities to help ourselves are already here, but obviously all overseas. Granted that because of PNG’s isolation both geographically and economically we have lagged immensely behind what is going on in the rest of the world. It is interesting to take a step back from our issues with Telikom locally here and to see that even overseas to our closest neighbour in Australia access to the internet is in many ways still tied up with the former or near monopolies like Telstra. Maybe it can be something for Telikom to think about as they continuously look at how Telikom is to position themselves for the new expectations of the PNG market.
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By Mark Pesce of hyperpeople

“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
– John Gilmore

….Censorship, broadly defined, is anything which restricts the free flow of information. The barriers could be political, or they could be economic, or they could – as in the case immediately relevant today – they could be a nexus of the two. Broadband in Australia is neither purely an economic nor purely a political issue. In this, broadband reflects the Janus-like nature of Telstra, with one face turned outward, toward the markets, and another turned inward, toward the Federal Government. Even though Telstra is now (more or less) wholly privatized, the institutional memory of all those years as an arm of the Federal Government hasn’t yet been forgotten. Telstra still behaves as though it has a political mandate, and is more than willing to use its near-monopoly economic strength to reinforce that impression.Although seemingly unavoidable, given the established patterns of the organization, Telstra’s behavior has consequences. Telstra has engendered enormous resentment – both from its competitors and its customers – for its actions and attitude. They’ve recently pushed the Government too far (at least, publicly), and have been told to back off. What may not be as clear – and what I want to warn you of today – is how Telstra has sewn the seeds of its own failure. What’s more, this may not be anything that Telstra can now avoid, because this is neither a regulatory nor an economic failure. It can not be remedied by any mechanism that Telstra has access to. Instead, it may require a top-down rethinking of the entire business.

I: Network Effects

For the past several thousand years, the fishermen of Kerala, on the southern coast of India, have sailed their dhows out into the Indian Ocean, lowered their nets, and hoped for the best. When the fishing is good, they come back to shore fully laden, and ready to sell their catch in the little fish markets that dot the coastline. A fisherman might have a favorite market, docking there only to find that half a dozen other dhows have had the same idea. In that market there are too many fish for sale that day, and the fisherman might not even earn enough from his catch to cover costs. Meanwhile, in a market just a few kilometers away, no fishing boats have docked, and there’s no fish available at any price. This fundamental chaos of the fish trade in Kerala has been a fact of life for a very long time.

Just a few years ago, several of India’s rapidly-growing wireless carriers strung GSM towers along the Kerala coast. This gives those carriers a signal reach of up to about 25km offshore – enough to be very useful for a fisherman. While mobile service in India is almost ridiculously cheap by Australian standards – many carriers charge a penny for an SMS, and a penny or two per minute for voice calls – a handset is still relatively expensive, even one such as the Nokia 1100, which was marketed specifically at emerging mobile markets, designed to be cheap and durable. Such a handset might cost a month’s profits for a fisherman – which makes it a serious investment. But, at some point in the last few years, one fisherman – probably a more prosperous one – bought a handset, and took it to sea. Then, perhaps quite accidentally, he learned, through a call ashore, of a market wanting for fish that day, brought his dhow to dock there, and made a handsome profit. After that, the word got around rapidly, and soon all of Kerala’s fisherman were sporting their own GSM handsets, calling into shore, making deals with fishmongers, acting as their own arbitrageurs, creating a true market where none had existed before. Today in Kerala the markets are almost always stocked with just enough fish; the fishmongers make a good price for their fish, and the fishermen themselves earn enough to fully recoup the cost of their handsets in just two months. Mobile service in Kerala has dramatically altered the economic prospects for these people.

This is not the only example: in Kenya farmers call ahead to the markets to learn which ones will have the best prices for their onions and maize; spice traders, again in Kerala, use SMS to create their own, far-flung bourse. Although we in the West generally associate mobile communications with affluent lifestyles, a significant number of microfinance loans made by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and others in Pakistan, India, Africa and South America are used to purchase mobile handsets – precisely because the correlation between access to mobile communications and earning potential has become so visible in the developing world. Grameen Bank has even started its own carrier, GrameenPhone, to service its microfinance clientele.

Although economists are beginning to recognize and document this curious relationship between economics and access to communication, it needs to be noted that this relationship was not predicted – by anyone. It happened all by itself, emerging from the interaction of individuals and the network. People – who are always the intelligent actors in the network – simply recognized the capabilities of the network, and put them to work. As we approach the watershed month of October 2007, when three billion people will be using mobile handsets, when half of humanity will be interconnected, we can expect more of the unexpected.

All of this means that none of us – even the most foresighted futurist – can know in advance what will happen when people are connected together in an electronic network. People themselves are too resourceful, and too intelligent, to model their behavior in any realistic way. We might be able to model their network usage – though even that has confounded the experts – but we can’t know why they’re using the network, nor what kind of second-order effects that usage will have on culture. Nor can we realistically provision for service offerings; people are more intelligent, and more useful, than any other service the carriers could hope to offer. The only truly successful service offering in mobile communications is SMS – because it provides an asynchronous communications channel between people. The essential feature of the network is simply that it connects people together, not that it connects them to services.

This strikes at the heart of the most avaricious aspects of the carriers’ long-term plans, which center around increasing the levels of services on offer, by the carrier, to the users of the network. Although this strategy has consistently proven to be a complete failure – consider Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL – it nevertheless has become the idée fixe of shareholder reports, corporate plans, and press releases. The network, we are told, will become increasingly more intelligent, more useful, and more valuable. But all of the history of the network argues directly against this. Nearly 40 years after its invention, the most successful service on the Internet is still electronic mail, the Internet’s own version of SMS. Although the Web has become an important service in its own right, it will never be as important as electronic mail, because it connects individuals.

Although the network in Kerala was brought into being by the technology of GSM transponders and mobile handsets, the intelligence of the network truly does lie in the individuals who are connected by the network. Let’s run a little thought experiment, and imagine a world where all of India’s telecoms firms suffered a simultaneous catastrophic and long-lasting failure. (Perhaps they all went bankrupt.) Do you suppose that the fishermen would simply shrug their shoulders and go back to their old, chaotic market-making strategies? Hardly. Whether they used smoke signals, or semaphores, or mirrors on the seashore, they’d find some way to maintain those networks of communication – even in the absence of the technology of the network. The benefits of the network so outweigh the implementation of the network that, once created, networks can not be destroyed. The network will be rebuilt from whatever technology comes to hand – because the network is not the technology, but the individuals connected through it.

This is the kind of bold assertion that could get me into a lot of trouble; after all, everyone knows that the network is the towers, the routers, and the handsets which comprise its physical and logical layers. But if that were true, then we could deterministically predict the qualities and uses of networks well in advance of their deployment. The quintessence of the network is not a physical property; it is an emergent property of the interaction of the network’s users. And while people do persistently believe that there is some “magic” in the network, the source of that magic is the endlessly inventive intellects of the network’s users. When someone – anywhere in the network – invents a new use for the network, it propagates widely, and almost instantaneously, transmitted throughout the length and breadth of the network. The network amplifies the reach of its users, but it does not goad them into being inventive. The service providers are the users of the network.

I hope this gives everyone here some pause; after all, it is widely known that the promise to bring a high-speed broadband network to Australia is paired with the desire to provide services on that network, including – most importantly – IPTV. It’s time to take a look at that promise with our new understanding of the real power of networks. It is under threat from two directions: the emergence of peer-produced content; and the dramatic, disruptive collapse in the price of high-speed wide-area networking which will fully power individuals to create their own network infrastructure.

II: DIYnet

Although nearly all high-speed broadband providers – which are, by and large, monopoly or formerly monopoly telcos – have bet the house on the sale of high-priced services to finance the build-out of high-speed (ADSL2/FTTN/FTTH) network infrastructure, it is not at all clear that these service offerings will be successful. Mobile carriers earn some revenue from ringtone and game sales, but this is a trivial income stream when compared to the fees they earn from carriage. Despite almost a decade of efforts to milk more ARPU from their customers, those same customers have proven stubbornly resistant to a continuous fleecing. The only thing that customers seem obviously willing to pay for is more connectivity – whether that’s more voice calls, more SMS, or more data.

What is most interesting is what these customers have done with this ever-increasing level of interconnectivity. These formerly passive consumers of entertainment have become their own media producers, and – perhaps more ominously, in this context – their own broadcasters. Anyone with a cheap webcam (or mobile handset), a cheap computer, and a broadband link can make and share their own videos. This trend had been growing for several years, but since the launch of YouTube, in 2005, it has rocketed into prominence. YouTube is now the 4th busiest website, world-wide, and perhaps 65% of all video downloads on the web take place through Google-owned properties. Amateur productions regularly garner tens of thousands of viewers – and sometimes millions.

We need to be very careful about how we judge both the meaning of the word “amateur” in the context of peer-produced media. An amateur production may be produced with little or no funding, but that does not automatically mean it will appear clumsy to the audience. The rough edges of an amateur prodution are balanced out by a corresponding increase in salience – that is, the importance which the viewer attaches to the subject of the media. If something is compelling because it is important to us – something which we care passionately about – high production values do not enter into our assessment. Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube has remarked that the site has no “gold-standard” for production; in fact, YouTube’s gold-standard is salience – if the YouTube audience feels the work is important, audience members will share it within their own communities of interest. Sharing is the proof of salience.

After two years of media sharing, the audience for YouTube (which is now coincident with the global television audience in the developed world) has grown accustomed to being able to share salient media freely. This is another of the unexpected and unpredicted emergent effects of the intelligence of humans using the network. We now have an expectation that when we encounter some media we find highly salient, we should be able to forward it along within our social networks, sharing it within our communities of salience. But this is not the desire of many copyright holders, who collect their revenues by placing barriers to the access of media. This fundamental conflict, between the desire to share, as engendered by our own interactions with the network, and the desire of copyright holders to restrain media consumption to economic channels has, thus far, been consistently resolved in favor of sharing. The copyright holders have tried to use the legal system as a bludgeon to change the behavior of the audience; this has not, nor will it ever work. But, as the copyright holders resort to ever-more-draconian techniques to maintain control over the distribution of their works, the audience is presented with an ever-growing world of works that are meant to be shared. The danger here is that the audience is beginning to ignore works which they can not share freely, seeing them as “broken” in some fundamental way. Since sharing has now become an essential quality of media, the audience is simply reacting to a perceived defect in those works. In this sense, the media multinationals have been their own worst enemies; by restricting the ability of the audiences to share the works they control, they have helped to turn audiences toward works which audiences can distribute through their own “do-it-yourself” networks.

These DIYnets are now a permanent fixture of the media landscape, even as their forms evolve through YouTube playlists, RSS feeds, and sharing sites such as Facebook and Pownce. These networks exist entirely outside the regular and licensed channels of distribution; they are not suitable – legally or economically – for distribution via a commercial IPTV network. Telstra can not provide these DIYnets to their customers through its IPTV service – nor can any other broadband carrier. IPTV, to a carrier, means the distribution of a few hundred highly regularized television channels. While there will doubtless be a continuing market for mass entertainment, that audience is continuously being eroded by a growing range of peer-produced programming which is growing in salience. In the long-term this, like so much in the world, will probably obey an 80/20 rule, with about 80 percent of the audience’s attention absorbed in peer-produced, highly-salient media, while 20 percent will come from mass-market, high-production-value works. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bet the house on a service offering which will command such a small portion of the audience’s attention. Yes, Telstra will offer it. But it will never be able to compete with the productions created by the audience.

Because of this tension between the desires of the carrier and the interests of the audience, the carrier will seek to manipulate the capabilities of the broadband offering, to weight it in favor of a highly regularized IPTV offering. In the United States this has become known as the “net neutrality” argument, and centers on the question of whether a carrier has the right to shape traffic within its own IP network to advantage its own traffic over that of others. In Australia, the argument has focused on tariff rates: Telstra believes that if they build the network, they should be able to set the tariff. The ACCC argues otherwise. This has been the characterized as the central stumbling block which has prevented the deployment of a high-speed broadband network across the nation, and, in some sense that is entirely true – Telstra has chosen not move forward until it feels assured that both economic and regulatory conditions prove favorable. But this does not mean that the consumer demand for a high-speed network was simply put on pause over the last years. More significantly, the world beyond Telstra has not stopped advancing. While it now costs roughly USD $750 per household to provide a high-speed fiber-optic connection to the carrier network, other technologies are coming on-line, right now, which promise to reduce those costs by an order of magnitude, and furthermore, which don’t require any infrastructure build-out on the part of the carrier. This disruptive innovation could change the game completely.

III: Check, Mate

All parties to the high-speed broadband dispute – government, Telstra, the Group of Nine, and the public – share the belief that this network must be built by a large organization, able to command the billions of dollars in capital required to dig up the streets, lay the fiber, and run the enormous data centers. This model of a network is an reflection in copper, plastic and silicon, of the hierarchical forms of organization which characterize large institutions – such as governments and carriers. However, if we have learned anything about the emergent qualities of networks, it is that they quickly replace hierarchies with “netocracies“: horizontal meritocracies, which use the connective power of the network to out-compete slower and rigid hierarchies. It is odd that, while the network has transformed nearly everything it has touched, the purveyors of those networks – the carriers – somehow seem immune from those transformative qualities. Telecommunications firms are – and have ever been – the very definition of hierarchical organizations. During the era of plain-old telephone service, the organizational form of the carrier was isomorphic to the form of the network. However, over the last decade, as the internal network has transitioned from circuit-switched to packed-switched, the institution lost synchronization with the form of the network it provided to consumers. As each day passes, carriers move even further out of sync: this helps to explain the current disconnect between Telstra and Australians.

We are about to see an adjustment. First, the data on the network was broken into packets; now, the hardware of the network has followed. Telephone networks were centralized because they required explicit wiring from point-to-point; cellular networks are decentralized, but use licensed spectrum – which requires enormous capital resources. Both of these conditions created significant barriers to entry. But there is no need to use wires, nor is there any need to use licensed spectrum. The 2.4 GHz radio band is freely available for anyone to use, so long as that use stays below certain power values. We now see a plethora of devices using that spectrum: cordless handsets, Bluetooth devices, and the all-but-ubiquitous 802.11 “WiFi” data networks. The chaos which broadcasters and governments had always claimed would be the by-product of unlicensed spectrum has, instead, become an wonderfully rich marketplace of products and services. The first generation of these products made connection to the centralized network even easier: cordless handsets liberated the telephone from the twisted-pair connection to the central office, while WiFi freed computers from heavy and clumsy RJ-45 jacks and CAT-5 cabling. While these devices had some intelligence, that intelligence centered on making and maintaining a connection to the centralized network.

Recently, advances in software have produced a new class of devices which create their own networks. Devices connected to these ad-hoc “mesh” networks act as peers in a swarm (similar to the participants in peer-to-peer filesharing), rather than clients within a hierarchical distribution system. These network peers share information about their evolving topology, forming a highly-resilient fabric of connections. Devices maintain multiple connections to multiple nodes throughout the network, and a packet travels through the mesh along a non-deterministic path. While this was always the promise of TCP/IP networks, static routes through the network cloud are now the rule, because they provide greater efficiency, make it easier to maintain the routers, diagnose network problems, and keeps maintenance costs down. But mesh networks are decentralized; there is no controlling authority, no central router providing an interconnection with a peer network. And – most significantly – mesh networks now incredibly inexpensive to implement.

Earlier this year, the US-based firm Meraki launched their long-awaited Meraki Mini wireless mesh router. For about AUD $60, plus the cost of electricity, anyone can become a peer within a wireless mesh network providing speeds of up to 50 megabits per second. The device is deceptively simple; it’s just an 802.11 transceiver paired with a single-chip computer running LINUX and Meraki’s mesh routing software – which was developed by Meraki’s founders while Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The 802.11 radio within the Meraki Mini has been highly optimized for long-distance communication. Instead of the normal 50 meter radius associated with WiFi, the Meraki Mini provides coverage over at least 250 meters – and, depending upon topography, can reach 750 meters. Let me put that in context, by showing you the coverage I’ll get when I install a Meraki Mini on my sixth-floor balcony in Surry Hills:

From my flat, I will be able to reach all the way from Central Station to Riley Street, from Belvoir Street over to Albion Street. Thousands of people will be within range of my network access point. Of course, if all of them chose to use my single point of access, my Meraki Mini would be swamped with traffic. It simply wouldn’t be able to cope. But – given that the Meraki Mini is cheaper than most WiFi access points available at Harvey Norman – it’s likely that many people within that radius would install their own access points. These access points would detect each others’ presence, forming a self-organizing mesh network. If every WiFi access point visible from my flat (I can sense between 10 and 20 of them at any given time) were replaced with a Meraki Mini, or, perhaps more significantly, if these WiFi access points were given firmware upgrades which allowed them to interoperate with the mesh networks created by the Meraki Mini – my Surry Hills neighborhood would suddenly be blanketed in a highly resilient and wholly pervasive wireless high-speed network, at nearly no cost to the users of that network. In other words, this could all be done in software. The infrastructure is already deployed.As some of you have no doubt noted, this network is highly local; while there are high-speed connections within the wireless cloud, the mesh doesn’t necessarily have connections to the global Internet. In fact, Meraki Minis can act as routers to the Internet, routing packets through their Ethernet interfaces to the broader Internet, and Meraki recommends that at least every tenth device in a mesh be so equipped. But it’s not strictly necessary, and – if dedicated to a particular task – completely unnecessary. Let us say, for example, that I wanted to provide a low-cost IPTV service to the residents of Surry Hills. I could create a “head-end” in my own flat, and provide my “subscribers” with Meraki Minis and an inexpensive set-top-box to interface with their televisions. For a total install cost of perhaps $300, I could give everyone in Surry Hills a full IPTV service (though it’s unlikely I could provide HD-quality). No wiring required, no high-speed broadband buildout, no billions of dollars, no regulatory relaxation. I could just do it. And collect both subscriber fees and advertiser revenues. No Telstra. No Group of Nine. No blessing from Senator Coonan. No go-over by the ACCC. The technology is all in place, today.

Here’s a news report - almost a year old - which makes the point quite well:

I bring up this thought experiment to drive home my final point: Telstra isn’t needed. It might not even be wanted. We have so many other avenues open to us to create and deploy high-speed broadband services that it’s likely Telstra has just missed the boat. You’ve waited too long, dilly-dallying while the audience and the technology have made you obsolete. The audience doesn’t want the same few hundred channels they can get on FoxTel: they want the nearly endless stream of salience they can get from YouTube. The technology is no longer about centralized distribution networks: it favors light, flexible, inexpensive mesh networks. Both of these are long-term trends, and both will only grow more pronounced as the years pass. In the years it takes Telstra – or whomever gets the blessing of the regulators – to build out this high-speed broadband network, you will be fighting a rearguard action, as both the audience and the technology of the network race on past you. They have already passed you by, and it’s been my task this morning to point this out. You simply do not matter.

This doesn’t mean it’s game over. I don’t want you to report to Sol Trujilo that it’s time to have a quick fire-sale of Telstra’s assets. But it does mean you need to radically rethink your business – right now. In the age of pervasive peer-production, paired with the advent of cheap wireless mesh networks, your best option is to become a high-quality connection to the global Internet – in short, a commodity. All of this pervasive wireless networking will engender an incredible demand for bandwidth; the more people are connected together, the more they want to be connected together. That’s the one inarguable truth we can glean from the 160 years of electric communication. Telstra has the infrastructure to leverage itself into becoming the most reliable data carrier connecting Australians to the global Internet. It isn’t glamorous, but it is a business with high barriers to entry, and promises a steadily growing (if unexciting) continuing revenue stream. But, if you continue to base your plans around selling Australians services we don’t want, you are building your castles on the sand. And the tide is rising.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

NASFUND has been impressing me allot lately. For a PNG Superfund they certainly are not shy to invest in technology which in my experience has always been a sector that Superfunds from here have been reluctant to do. But Rod and Ian are going all out guns blazing. The DataNets acquisition was a start but through that company they have now gobbled up phone equipment company NEC (in PNG) and today I learn from Jason Gilai from BSP Capital that NASFUND had invested AUD$40 million in a tourism search website called roamfree.com (Global Accommodation Search)

AFL fans may know the guy behind roamfree.com, who is former Sydney Swans ruckman, Tony Smith. Tony Smith has a track record of success in tourism, starting with marketing Schoolies holidays and then creating management rights business BreakFree, which listed on the stock exchange and later was sold for about AUD$750 million, so he’s no stranger to tourism. You can hear a podcast interview with him here. So it sounds like NASFUND has hooked up with someone reputable. On top of that APN News & Media Limited have paid $AUD20 million for a 20% interest in the website as well. So all in all NASFUND maybe on to a winner here.

Roamfree has also secured a deal with Australian and New Zealand auto clubs, which will see it provide the technology to power their websites. The clubs provide an accommodation service to about 8.4 million members. More acquisitions by Roamfree are allowing the company to grow in the Pacific, and I’m glad that our NASFUND is onboard to sail that way.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more technology moves are in store for NASFUND.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I only joined Facebook 3 weeks ago, but my natural urge to feel loved, to feel like I belong and just to be able to ‘reach out and touch somebody’ has ensured that like most of my friends it has become a highly addictive pastime. I’m currently up to 91 friends, which made this article below interesting for me, because although it feels good to have all these wonderful and varied friends, do I really have the time to keep in touch with all of them, everyday? Are they ‘Real’ friends? And what is a ‘Real’ friend anyway?

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By Heather Brooke for the

What would Aristotle make of Facebook? The great thinker had a lot to say about friendship that is newly relevant with the rise of social networking sites. The founding father of the scientific method, western philosophy and logic would likely have hundreds clamouring to join his Facebook friend list. Perhaps he might even rival comedian Stephen Fry’s reported 20+ friend requests an hour or be forced to hire an assistant to manage his online social networks as some busy execs do.

But Aristotle was no Lindsay Lohan, a US-starlet renowned for her mega-friend list. Not for him the craven popularity contest – though he saw its necessity – but rather the pinnacle of friendship based on moral goodness.

Friendship, as defined by Aristotle, is “mutual reciprocity of affection and purpose.” Liking someone from afar is not enough: “Being a friend of many people at once is prevented even by the factor of affection, for it is not possible for affection to be active in relation to many at once.” Hence when numbers get into the thousands we’re talking stalkers and/or admirers not friends. Barack Obama has it right – he’s changed his 91,495 Facebook ‘friends’ to ‘supporters’. Fry has decided to set up a separate friendship group for strangers who would like to be his friend.

Aristotle studied biology as a youth and brought the same techniques he used to analyse the plant kingdom to human behaviour. His findings on friendship outlined in Eudemian Ethics would make a useful FAQ for those coming to Facebook for the first time. He began his analysis with close observation, which led him to conclude there were three types of friendship: those based on utility, pleasure and goodness.

Utility is the most common basis of friendship he observed and exists between two people who are mutually useful to each other. Indeed, Aristotle thought the primary goal of political science was to make citizens useful to each other and so plant the seeds of friendship and goodwill: “While the moral friendship is more noble, utility is more necessary.” So he would have loved the way social networking sites make people useful to one another.

As for friendships based on pleasure, he also understood the core Facebook user group. Only the young have “a sense of what is pleasant” Aristotle thought, whereas older people become serious with responsibilities. As characters fix, so too do friends.

The ultimate friendship, and the one Aristotle put above the others is that based on goodness, where the balance sheet of reciprocity is thrown away and each provides affection and support without expectation of payback. Yet in a lifetime a person can find only a handful of such friends. How come so few?

“There is no stable friendship without confidence, and confidence only comes with time; for it is necessary to make trial, as Theognis says: ‘Thou canst not know the mind of man nor woman/ E’er though has tried them as thou triest cattle.’”

And life is too short to try many cattle (or friends). One would have to live with many people to test their character and their simply isn’t enough time or opportunity. “Those who become friends without the test of time are not real friends but only wish to be friends; and such a character very readily passes for friendship because when eager to be friends they think that by rendering each other all friendly services they do not merely wish to be friends but actually are friends. But as a matter of fact it happens in friendship as in everything else; people are not healthy merely if they wish to be healthy.”

So don’t expect your Facebook friends to rush to your aid in time of tragedy or emergency. Most of us know that already. But recriminations are likely to arise most often when we mistake friendships based on utility or pleasure for those based on goodness. Thus Aristotle advises that the more immediate friendships should have a legal underpinning to avoid misunderstanding. Time for the Facebook friendship contract perhaps? We could at least introduce some Aristotilian icons such as the handshake (indicating a utility friendships), a smiley face (for pleasure) and the gold star (for goodness).

By Emmanuel Narokobi

There’s apparently a huge undersea communications cable coming through the Pacific Ocean. So Telikom and Arthur Somare, you think we can get a slice off this pie for some competitive internet pricing?? Could the cable hit PNG or run by us before it gets to Australia from Guam or Hawaii?? Read more below…

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Posted: 21 Sep 2007 02:16 PM CDT: http://www.techcrunch.com

Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, according to a report from Commsday.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, and Google is said to have met with Telstra (Australia’s largest telco) and Asia Netcomm in Sydney last week. The cable would run to Australia via Guam and Hawaii.

Interchange cable fees have always been a large issue for Australasian telco’s, with accusations from Australia and Asian countries that they are treated unfairly by US providers in terms of cost for data. In Australia at least, the cost of internet access is significantly higher that in the United States. Google’s move to provide a competitive Pacific Cable service could slash data costs for countries including Australia, Indonesia and even Singapore and Malaysia.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I told a fellow PNG’ean that I felt something special about todays game, I told him last night and he shook his head and said he didn’t believe we were ready…well bro look at the score board!!!!

Adrian Lam, my hat goes off to you mate. To the players, admin and all who played a part in todays game against Australia’s Prime Minister’s XIII at PRL, just wanna say ‘mi kaikai lewa blong yupela’!!!!! (and a special mention to my Bro Nigel Hukula, brada top stuff!!!).

24 all….are we gonna build on from this, can we go further??? A definite improvement from their 28-8 loss against Australia’s Prime Minister’s XIII last year.

by Malum Nalu of http://malumnalu.blogspot.com/

The overwhelming response to my two articles on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Papua New Guinea, from both within the country and abroad, shows the urgent need for the country to improve its ICT in this rapidly-globalised world.
I was overwhelmed by the responses to my articles in The National on Friday September 7 titled “Building your own website” and the one last Friday titled “Internet cafes and the digital divide”.
This week, I’d like to share with the readers of this column, some of the many responses to my articles over the last two weeks.
I was inundated by the constant stream of SMS text messages and emails from people, particularly small business men and women wanting to build their own websites, as well as those complaining about the very high Internet usage fees being charged in PNG.
A good friend of mine built his own website free of charge after reading my first article without having to pay exorbitant fees for a website designer, a domain name, or Internet Service Provider (ISP) rentals.
It was a dream come true for this friend who has been trying for years to have his own website, only to be met with the brick wall of high costs.
A handful of individuals and small business men and women are now in the process of building their own websites, while I am advising several others about how to build their own, without being ripped of by unscrupulous companies and individuals.
Second-year Divine Word University IT student Julia Komoru commented: “We have completed a unit on website developing recently, and it’s not at all difficult to create a website.
“It’s really hard to understand why individuals and organisations charge so much for doing something so simple.”
Last Friday’s article on the very high Internet rates in this country, particularly those being charged by ISPs in Port Moresby at their cafes, brought back a swift and emotional response.
I particularly compared the high rates charged by Data Nets and Datec to the low rates being charged at the RH Hypermart and the Sports Inn.
“I read with interest your article in the Weekender Section on ‘Internet cafes and the digital divide’,” wrote Data Nets general-manager Sundar Ramamurthy
“The piece that caught my eye was your basic comparison between our Cafe pricing (as an ISP) and those at the Sports Inn and RH.
“The question that is asked is ‘Why are our prices much higher than your favourite places i.e. Sports Inn and RH?
“Answer:
“1) Like any business the charging is market-driven. It could very well be that RH and Sports Inn subsidise their Internet access so people come in and have a drink or buy goods. This is often called a ‘loss leader’ that attracts customers to come to their shop to buy other goods whilst they are on the Internet.
“2) One needs to compare the speed. Fifteen minutes at a more expensive place might be equal to 30 minutes at a slower cafe. So price needs to be compared to performance. In Internet terms this means speed and throughput and value.
“In broad terms, there is broad concurrence that cost and reliability (power and telecommunications) are critical to the future of PNG’s communications requirements.”

atec general-manager Tony Westaway wrote: “I read with interest your article in the National on Friday 14 September 2007.
“You talked of a need to develop and expand the ICT industry and the country keeping in touch with world standards.
“You mentioned that students need to be educated on the potential of ICT.
“Datec is holding a Technology Expo over the 12th and 13th of October 2007 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Port Moresby.
“We will have a significant number of International exhibitors in attendance.
“It will provide an opportunity for business people, IT specialists, and most importantly students, to see the most recent developments in Information & Communication Technology.
“Datec has already distributed over 1000 free tickets to students in technical colleges, UPNG and TAFE, and other institutions in Port Moresby.

By the way Datec is currently reviewing its charges for the Internet Café in Port Moresby.”
An anonymous reader wrote: “Internet access in PNG is much more expensive than you probably realise.
“For example Datec charges K100 for 80MB Wireless Internet access.
“In New Zealand KOL charges K100 for 10GB or 10,000MB Broadband Internet access.
“That is, PNG is 125 times more expensive! Further the speed is considerably slower!
“My understanding is that these ridulously high charges are because of the ridiculously high charges Telikom charges Datec and other ISPs.

I can only afford very limited Internet access in PNG compared to what I used to be able to afford in New Zealand.”
Sam Roth wrote from Japan: “Thanks for keeping us informed on the development of ITC in PNG, especially with Internet.
“I have a good collection of your latest articles on IT and am quite pleased with your work.
“Keep up the good work and know that you have fans all over the world.
“In fact, it is an area of interest for me especially my Masters Thesis, and I am amazed that I am not alone in this to make our beautiful country catch up with the rest of the world in ICT.”
Sam signed off with a quote from Einstein: “Among every impossibility lies an opportunity.”

For comments and feedback, email the author at malumnalu@yahoo.com or SMS 6849763.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Just letting everyone know about Roaming information for Digicel. Link to page is here.

Roaming Rates:

Networks that Digicel PNG customers can roam on:

Networks that can roam in PNG Using Digicel PNG Network

(RTTNews) - Citing unidentified sources, South China Morning Post has reported that CNPC Exploration, a joint venture between China National Petroleum Corp. and PetroChina Co. (PTR, PCCYF.PK), is planning as much as US$5 billion offer for Oil Search Ltd. (OISHF.PK, OISHY.PK). The report also noted that some European oil companies are also studying Oil Search. However, responding to South China Morning Post’s article, Oil Search has said that it has not received any formal approaches by any party in regards to a take-over. Further, Oil Search said it ‘continues to discuss potential participation in a range of proposed gas developments in PNG with a number of international companies,’

For comments and feedback: contact editorial@rttnews.com

By Emmanuel Narokobi

If you fail to plan then you plan to fail. So I had a plan, a plan I hatched before the Independence weekend. I wanted to extract from Gavuone village 40 bags of coral for my new house which I’ve been renovating. For those of you that know Central Province, Gavuone is about 5 minutes drive from Kupiano (hope I spelt that right). Lucky for me, my good sister Beats (or Betty) is from there so with her family and friends we set out to visit her village for the PNG Independence weekend (and of course so that I could get my bags of coral).

So I hired a big 4 tonne Mitsubishi Fuso ‘Fighter’ truck, a driver for the truck and I bought 47 50kg bags from Erima to collect my coral. (The coral is to be used for my footpath at my new house, but my new house is another story for another day). The plan was simple, drive to the village and to it’s beach. Load coral in the bags, then chuck it on the truck, have a swim and then come back to POM Sunday afternoon in time to watch 60 minutes on EMTV.

But the best laid out plans can always come undone (not that mine was one of those best laid out plans). For starters it began to rain. I mean what is that?? After a dry spell for some months now it decides to start raining on the day we want to hit the Hiritano Highway. Again I say what is that??

The traveling group consisted of two cars. The Fuso and Betty’s partner Sherman’s Hilux. Now this is where things get interesting. After we passed Kwikila and we had started on the dirt road the battery in the Hilux started to show signs it was dying. Well that was it, before you could say ‘Good Golly Gosh we’re Going to Gavuone’ the lights, aircon, radio, windscreen wipers everything except for the engine (thank God) went out. The only lights we had to follow now were the blinkers on the Fuso. In addition to that we had to have someone hang on the side of the car to wipe the windscreen outside, someone inside to wipe the condensation and someone out the back giving directions to avoid potholes, trees and just to stay on the road.

What was planned to be a 3 hour trip turned into a 9 hour journey. So that teamwork of outside window wiping etc went on for 5 hours straight until we got to the Gavuone village. Then at the village we had more problems the Fuso had the wrong set of tyres on so they weren’t gripping the mud and so after allot of revving and human power pushing the truck we were able to get it moving up a muddy hill and that took 2 hours to do. We ended up going to bed at 6am on Saturday morning, we were stuffed…

After a nice rest, woke up on Saturday morning (again) to have some breakfast and to explore the village and of course for me to get that coral I came looking for. Was a bit tired but hell after coming all that way I was determined to get what I came for and to have some fun, dammit.

Now as I said before I though the coral extraction plan would be as simple as driving up to the beach and loading the bags. Unfortunately what I found out was that we had to take a dingy into the mangroves 15 minutes away, fill up the bags and then cart them back to the beach. Then from the beach we would have to carry them up to the truck which was unable to get to the beach. Sounds okay, but not when you consider that each bag with coral in it weighs about 25kg and I was looking at getting 40 bags back to Pom. So I finally settled on 27 bags instead and it took us 2 dingy trips to get the coral to the beach from the mangroves.

And in case you’re wondering yes I did carry the bags as well (and they’re not very light either). The coral was deposited in the mangroves so it’s pretty much just a big heap of coral just lying there for us to dig up.

After gathering my bags of coral with the kind and generous help from Betty’s relatives, I spent the rest of the day just site seeing with our trusty guide Denzil and swimming and taking pictures. It really is a beautiful place and it’s just great to be able to get out of Pom for a couple of days. There’s a great picnic island out there which we didn’t have time to visit, but I get the feeling I’ll be back there sometime soon.

So all in all, mission accomplished. I got my coral and I got a little holiday. To Betty, Denzil, Halet, Taera and the wonderful relatives of Gavuone, thank you for the wonderful weekend (and coral). You can see all the pics on my Flickr account.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I wrote a post about this earlier this year when I saw it on TV, but finally Jenny from Save PNG has sent me the 2x YouTube versions of it. I wasn’t going to put them up since I already wrote about it but then I noticed that although the vidoes have been up for some months, at the most they’ve only been viewed about 1,500 times, which I don’t think is allot considering the gravity of the issue.

Jen has told me also that the urgent issue for the people of the Cateret islands right now is that they need about K500,000.00 for their relocation and not allot of assistance from the government has come their way.

by Malum Nalu of http://malumnalu.blogspot.com/

Several companies and individuals in Papua New Guinea are profiteering from the ignorance of our little people by charging them huge amounts of money to build a website for their small businesses.
And after being ripped off by these companies, the little people then feel the brunt of paying excessive fees for a domain name, regular rental to the Internet Service Provider (ISP), as well as Internet usage fees to Telikom.

In a small economy such as that of PNG, small businesses cannot survive with such exorbitant costs.
This should no longer be the case, as it is quick and easy to design a website using templates freely available on the Internet, where you do not have to pay for a domain name or ISP rentals.
Your just have to pay for your Internet usage fee at the nearest Internet café if you don’t have Internet access in your office.

More often than not, these small PNG business men and women, are not Internet-savvy and will not know basics like uploading their website onto the Internet or registering their website with Internet search engines and web directories.

The situation for many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) all over the world, including PNG, is that an entrepreneur owns a small or medium enterprise.

The company produces an interesting product such as organic coffee or arts and crafts, or provides a novel service such as taking tourists across the Kokoda Trail.

The problem: How do we use the Internet to sell the product or service?
The general methodology is to plan, analyse and enact E-marketing activities. This methodology can be used by anyone who wants to use the Internet to access customers.
Components include:

• Goals - What do we wish to achieve through E-marketing?
• Resources - What resources can we expect to support our actions?
• Actors - Who are the marketing actors in the E-marketing process?
• Spaces - Where will our E-marketing take place online?
• Actions - What specific E-marketing actions should we take?
• Outcomes - What outcomes should we expect from our E-marketing activities?

Competing on the Internet is different because it is highly fragmented and holds more than 8 billion web pages. The Internet features a “winner-take-all market” where a few winners get a lot of traffic while most sites get low traffic

A short-term goal may be stated in this way: “Our goal is to attract 100,000 visitors to the page in one week.” A long term goal may be described in this way: “Our goal in the next one year is to get 3 million visits and 50,000 downloads of application forms for new accounts.”
Typical goals include:

• Traffic to a website - How many hits, unique visitors?
• Product purchase - How many visitors buy the product?
• Brand excitement - How many visitors write about the product and tell others?
• Repeat visits - How many visitors come back to buy more?

Existing resources should include the website and staff.New resources to be considered include:
Do you have a marketing budget to attract more customers to your site?
Do you have a technology budget to build a better website and other digital services?
Actors’ orientation towards the company will be friendly, agnostic, or hostile.
The important decision is should you create your own website or go through a platform?
When you create your own website, it is hard to build awareness and traffic, and is a risky investment.

On the other hand, it is not a sure bet to go through a platform, and you must share revenue with the platform.

Making a free website these days is fast and really easy, which is certainly good news for SMEs all over PNG. Government departments, statutory organisations, non-government organisations, sporting teams, provinces, villages, families, individuals, and many more should also be looking at seriously building their own website if they don’t already have one in this rapidly-globalising world.
Each of our 109 MPs should have their own website to share information with their voters and the people of PNG.

You can also create your own online Blog - which basically is an online diary - free of charge in which you can broadcast your views to the whole world. I have my own Blog http://malumnalu.blogspot.com/ in which I feature some of the stories I have written about PNG and I have received response from around the world.

You can also send short video clips to YouTube, one of the most-popular and fastest-growing websites in the world, free of charge. Many world leaders, including Australian Prime Minister John Howard, use YouTube to broadcast their video clips.

All over this increasingly-globalised world, a massive Information Revolution is taking place as economies use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a passport to what economists call the “New Economy”.

I have said before, and will say it again, that the ICT monopoly in PNG, exorbitant telephone and Internet costs, as well as lack of knowledge about ICT and E-business all contribute to this digital divide.
Papua New Guinea will continue to remain light years behind the rest of the world if we do not jump on the ICT bandwagon in this globalised world.
The digital divide within PNG is an enormous barrier to the ability of the people to participate in and benefit from the digital economy.
Access to Internet, adequate infrastructure, human capacity building and appropriate policies on ICT are central issues in addressing the digital divide.

Success in this globalised world is predicated on ICT knowledge and successful knowledge-based economies will be based on the efficient and widespread use of ICT by all sectors within any given country.
Small and medium enterprises, the backbone of the PNG economy, must be prepared with ICT knowledge.
If they are not ICT-savvy, they will not receive the benefits of globalisation and they will be left behind the rest of the world.

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By Emmanuel Narokobi

Just some pics of the big game on the weekend. We won 20-nil against Defence, making it a back to back premiership win. I can imagine that things will only get harder for us Piggies next year and full respect goes out to all the other teams we played against to get here.

A big thank you to the University of Papua New Guinea, the Vice Chancellor, Pro Vice Chancellor, The Burser and all staff who helped over the weekend. Thanks also to all the supporters and families that have come to support and help us out this year. A special mention to Willie Rikis, Coach JP, Api Kassman, George Hoki, Ray Romolus, Veva Hoki, Mums Jenny and all the other senior boys in the club for helping out with the club both on and off the field. Also a big thanks to our womens rugby team for their support and enthusiasm in their maiden year.

We’ll have a function in a month or two where I’ll say more but here are some pics for now. Click here for the rugby pics.