Tag Archives: strategy

The Future of HDTV: UHDTV & 3DTV

Posted on by
Reply

Dr. Yumita, the Executive Engineering Director of NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, in English, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) was a panel member in the last session of the ITU World Telecom 2009 Conference. During the panel discussion he outlined his vision for the next generation of TV currently in development. He explained that Japan is working extremely hard to develop the world’s first 3D television broadcasting system capable of running across the new generation of UHDTV or “super high vision” TV planned for introduction in the next couple of years in the country and around the world. The new broadcasting system would allow ultra HDTV (the next generation of HDTV) to display 3D video that will not require the cumbersome yet traditional red-blue glasses.

He explained how the broadcasting system will require enormous amounts of digital bandwidth between the broadcaster and the TV receiver and will be based on existing IP protocols but requiring next generation digital networks.  Dr Yumita also cited the significant progress made on “wide field” TV imagery, a display system which allows TV pictures with a 100-degree field of vision or more to be broadcast and displayed. Today’s widescreen TV typically displays a field of vision less than 30-degrees or so but humans often depend on at least 100-degrees of view. He explained that the new broadcast protocol is being designed to prepare for wall and ultra-large screen TV formats.

Investment in Fixed-Line Broadband

Posted on by
Reply

I arrived in Geneva this morning greeted by blue skies, an azure Lake and a gentle, warm summer breeze – oh and Aziz a very friendly and helpful taxi driver! I spent most of the morning discussing international trends in ICT and how developing and emerging economies are (or are not) observing these trends with the acting head of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Mr Mohammed Sharil Tarmizi. The MCMC is a corporatized arm of the Government of Malaysia responsible for regulating the media and communications industry in the country. The MCMC is similiar in nature and function as the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

What Mr Tarmizi and I agreed was that a number of developing and emerging economies have enjoyed tremendous boosts to productivity as a result of mobile telephony adoption and now high penetration rates – Malaysia for example in as little as six years has 100% mobile penetration – but these countries need to re-invest the returns from some of this productivity back into greater internal network and international gateway capacities, to avoid slipping back again once developed countries surge ahead. We discussed the boon to the economy that the Multimedia Super Corridor project had to the Malaysian economy: between 2000 and 2006 the ICT sector in Malaysia grew from 20 billion ringgit to 100 billion (about AU7 billion to AU33 billion). We also discussed how Malaysia undertook this project through visionary leadership and proper resourcing and implementation of the policy commitment made in the late 1990s to craft the Malaysian ICT sector to feed particular national economic comparative advantages. Malaysia is likely to emerge from a developing country status within the next decade.

‘Near-shore, off-metro’, an alternative to offshoring

Posted on by
Reply

I spent a number days meeting with US technology recruiters to discuss recent employment trends and to help identify their most significant needs. The aim being to look at how to facilitate linkages to a number of foreign technology markets. What they reported was not unexpected. Recruitment opportunities are fewer, downward pressure on wages has increased, the quality of people looking for work has diminished – it is not usually the top people in a company’s technology shop that are the first to go when times are tough.

The trend to offshore technical projects may be over as the difficulty of wrestling with timezones, communications and quality disturbances might have become to costly after all. The latest movement in technical project management and sourcing is ‘near-shore, off-metro‘. This means locating the technical project teams outside of capital cities, but within the shores of the parent organisation. This model offers a compromise of lower costs, ease of communications and improved quality (due to better manageability) than that of the pure offshore model.

A number of companies in the US have been doing this since the 1990s, when Internet access was not as fast as it is today but when it became obvious that ‘off-metro’ staff would be cheaper to engage – one might say the near shore movement is a return to a model that worked. I am hopeful that the current cut in employment will be short lived in the technology sector as other industries scramble to improve productivity with higher degrees of business automation and technology. The ‘near shore, off-metro’ model is likely to be applicable until such a time as when collaborative tools for distributed team management are seamless and ubiquitous and truly blur the lines of space and time for the small- and mid-sized technology shops.

Google App Engine

Posted on by
Reply

Google App EngineToday I experimented with the creation of an application in Python to run on the new Google App Engine (GAE) infrastructure. Things couldn’t have been easier. I whipped up a .yaml file, created a couple of Python classes, a simple CSS stylesheet and HTML form (to give the application a face) then ran a single command line command (“appcfg.py update myapp”) and a few seconds later, there it was! An online, robust, scalable web application operating on the Google infrastructure. I use Eclipse IDE because of its extensibility and because there exists a plugin to develop GAE applications in either Java or Python. I am a fan of python because of its efficient data types like lists and dictionaries. I was however curious as to why I need to locate all resources in a sub-folder called “src” under the application – why couldn’t the source files be located in the root directory of my local file system folder for the application? Anyway, something to test out another time. I am going to dig a little deeper into the data structures available to a GAE application tomorrow – I’ll let you know how it goes :-)

ICT in Education Strategy

Posted on by

 

A Port Moresby Telecentre

A Telecentre in Port Moresby

Papua New Guinea is developing an ICT in education strategy to guide resource allocation and prioritisation in the sector. Squarely focused on international trends, the strategy aims to use ICT to leverage particular national comparative advantages, emphasize energy efficiency and new technologies such as thin-client architecture, virtualisation and flash-based computing. The strategy also elevates the XO-PC to a more permanent position in the school system. A number of consultations have taken place to formulate the strategy and a draft is expected by December 2009. The ICT strategy will offer a summary of international trends in ICT and particularly a summary of how education systems are taking advantage of ICT. The strategy paper will provide a situational analysis and finally will present a tactic for better adoption and utilisation of ICTs in the education sector.