Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Intel, Mobile And The Global South

Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
Lowering the price is always a great innovation in my book. That is the only way to truly reach the masses.

But this is more about Intel and less about the "developing market." Intel won the PC handily, but totally lost out on mobile.

Will the Developing World’s Smartphones Have Intel Inside?
The chip is designed to power Android phones that are cheap compared to those devices sold in rich countries such as the United States. ..... Latin America, Africa, China, South East Asia ... Low-cost smartphones have already begun selling in large numbers in Africa and elsewhere .... those models have been built on processors significantly less advanced than those used in high-end smartphones. Intel believes its new processor will strike the right balance between price and performance
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Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Data Centers And Light Phones

World map depicting Asia Esperanto: Mondmapo b...
World map depicting Asia Esperanto: Mondmapo bildiganta Azion EspaƱol: UbicaciĆ³n de Asia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If the data centers are pervasive enough and powerful enough, your phone can be light as light. The two extreme ends feed on each other. Larry Ellison is right. There is no cloud. What we refer to as cloud is really these data centers. I am surprised Google lags so far behind in Asia. And I am guessing it lags even further behind in Africa and Latin America. Come on, Google, you can do better than this.

New Google Asia servers expected to bring 30% speed boost when they go live later this year
the new servers could provide up to a 30 percent improvement in the speed of Google services in Asia .... Google already operates seven data centers in the US and facilities in Finland, Belgium and Ireland, but the lack of an Asia center has likely inhibited the company’s potential for growth in the region
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Sunday, October 28, 2012

African Hopes

Satellite image of Africa, showing the ecologi...
Satellite image of Africa, showing the ecological break that defines the sub-Saharan area (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The coining BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India, China - did not have A for Africa in it. But Africa is on the march now. That is swell. This is not the Africa of unfair history, or false stereotypes. But Africa still has a lot of political homework to do. There is much cleaning up that remains.

Africa rising
Over the past decade six of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere's slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia...... With fertility rates crashing in Asia and Latin America, half of the increase in population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginning to develop. ........... Most Africans live on less than two dollars a day. ... Some countries praised for their breakneck economic growth, such as Angola and Equatorial Guinea, are oil-sodden kleptocracies. Some that have begun to get economic development right, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia, have become politically noxious. Congo, now undergoing a shoddy election, still looks barely governable and hideously corrupt. Zimbabwe is a scar on the conscience of the rest of southern Africa. South Africa, which used to be a model for the continent, is tainted with corruption; and within the ruling African National Congress there is talk of nationalising land and mines ..... around 60m Africans have an income of $3,000 a year, and 100m will in 2015. The rate of foreign investment has soared around tenfold in the past decade. ...... China's arrival has improved Africa's infrastructure and boosted its manufacturing sector. Other non-Western countries, from Brazil and Turkey to Malaysia and India, are following its lead. Africa could break into the global market for light manufacturing and services such as call centres. ...... It has more than 600m mobile-phone users—more than America or Europe. ..... Around a tenth of Africa's land mass is covered by mobile-internet services—a higher proportion than in India. ..... productivity is growing by nearly 3% a year, compared with 2.3% in America. ..... Africa still needs deep reform.


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Friday, July 27, 2012

Open English: Online Teaching

Image representing Open English as depicted in...
Image via CrunchBase
80,000 students for $43 million does not jive. The number of students needs to be much higher.

Open English raises $43 million to teach English online across Latin America
Open English was founded in 2006 and launched commercially in 2008. Since then, it has expanded all across Spanish-speaking Latin America and Brazil, while Flybridge invested $4.25 million in its May 2011′s Series B round. ..... more than 50,000 students in 20 countries, it now plans to use its new funding to reach the 80,000 student milestone by the end of the year
Why only English? This can and should be applied to any subject, at any level.
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