Reuters reports that AT&T plans on acquiring BellSouth of Atlanta, one of its only rivals in the long-distance telephone and DSL business. At a price of $67 billion, AT&T will have “residential customers stretching from Florida to California and business customers comprising more than half of the Fortune 1000.” This is an alarming trend for…
Category: Information Society
New Design for $100 Laptop?
I was getting pretty attached to the mean green machine (left image) I thought was the approved designed for MIT’s “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. But Gizmologia shows a couple of other winning concept designs (right) that look quite different from the green model debuted at the WSIS by Nicholas Negroponte. Most notable is the…
1,600 Tunisian dissidents released from jail, groups call for others to be freed
Sounds like there are some rays of hope in Tunisia, as well as need for further reforms as more than 1,600 prisoners of conscience were released from prison recently, while others remain incarcerated. The US Government, Amnesty International, and Tunisian Monitoring Group of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) welcomed the release of the…
My Talk on NGOs and New Media for NYU Class
My friend Jeff Huffines of the Bahai United Nations Office invited me to address the class he is teaching on the operations of NGOs at New York University. Here’s my notes on my lecture. It was quite a treat talking with students looking in a more academic and robust way at the functioning and structure…
Verizon and Time Warner want to break the Internet
I’m listening to Free Press’s latest conference call on “network neutrality” policy issues, and I have to say it’s scary stuff. Laurence Lessig, Ben Scott and Jeff Chester outlined the machinations of the nation’s cable and telephone companies to challenge the fundamental “end-to-end” principle of the Internet. As I understand it, the Internet as we…
Υποδοχή στην Ελλάδα: Internet Gov Forum meeting in Greece this October
I heard from Prof. Wolfgang Kleinwachter that the dates of the first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum have been set. Wolfgang passes on the info that the IGF is scheduled for October 24-26 in Greece. No firm location, but he says probably Athens or Rhodos. Sounds like a fine place to talk about spam…
FON wants to “revolutionize” broadband access
A new Spanish company called FON intends to upset the traditional broadband access model by creating a global network of linked hotspots. FON is a member-based service that piggy-backs their software onto existing wifi hotspots being operated by regular home users. At the most basic level, anyone with a wifi transmitter can be a “Linus”…
Atari’s for all the world children! My WSIS briefing at the UN
The following is the talk that I gave for the Department of Public Information NGO Briefing yesterday at the United Nations. DPI/NGO Briefing on WSIS \2 February 2006 Remarks by Rik Panganiban Atari Story When I was eight years old, what I wanted more than anything in the world was an Atari video game system….
Gates supports cells phones for the 3rd world
The New York Times reports that Microsoft thinks that cell phones are the key to bringing the benefits of the Information Society to the Third World. In a direct response to Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” project, Bill Gates proposed at the World Economic Forum yesterday that a hybrid “cellular PC” would be a more…
UN backs $100 laptop project
I have previously blogged about MIT’s $100 Laptop project for the developing world. Yesterday, the United Nations announced that it has joined in support of the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. This will hopefully give the project much more of the attention and support it deserves. Kemal Dervis, head administrator of the UN Development Program,…