• briefing asia infrastructure aug 15, 2006 • briefing asia energy aug 15, 2006

invest more than $1 billion over five years to improve computing accessibility, Internet connectivity, and education in developing regions.
THE NEXT BILLION CONSUMERS
There are more than 800 million Net-connected PCs today, and Intel will reach former CEO Andy Grove's 1 billion goal in 2007, a quarter century after the PC's birth. Reaching 2 billion Net-connected computers is achievable within five years, thanks to the perpetual decline in computing costs. "Forty-one years ago, a transistor cost $5 to manufacture," Otellini said. "Today, that cost is one-millionth of $1. It's now cheaper to produce a transistor than to grow a single grain of rice."
Reaching that next billion users also will require a very different business model for Intel. The company has enjoyed profit margins of 60% or better on PCs, but if it's to meet World Ahead's aggressive price points, it will need to accept much lower margins.
Equipping the world's first billion users took decades because early PCs were underpowered and there was a dearth of compelling software. Intel and others have another factor on their side: Governments in the world's poorest nations, all of which would benefit from economic growth, are eager to cooperate. "Having computer skills can be the difference between making a decent living and forever being locked into poverty in some geographies," says Rob Enderle, a principal of the Enderle Group. "Most of these governments realize this and are very interested in getting computers out into their countries."
Intel has built three computing platforms for developing markets, primarily by using in-region computer makers and service providers that will sell the systems at 20% lower than prevailing prices. The systems will use Intel's mobile Core microprocessors, which are light on power consumption, and support broadband connectivity.
A "low-cost, full-featured" platform will be the first to hit the market. In a deal financed in part by the Mexican government and the Mexican Teachers Union, 300,000 of the PCs will be provided to teachers in that country, at a price of about $300 each. A second platform, the "community PC," is intended for markets such as rural India, where PC kiosks providing shared computing are prevalent. Those systems are expected to be priced at $500 to $600 and can be powered by a car battery. Next year, Intel plans to launch a third machine, a small notebook PC for students and teachers code-named Eduwise that will include interactive education software.
MARKET REALITIES
A billion-dollar investment in developing new markets might appear to be a big gamble, but if Intel could take in revenue of as little as $30 on each system sold, the net result would be billions in revenue if the company can reach hundreds of millions of potential new users, says Mark Beckford, general manager of Intel's emerging markets platforms group.
Enderle says Intel and AMD will have to accept lower margins if they expect to play in emerging countries. "The market is going that way anyway, so does Intel embrace it and try to benefit from it, or does Intel get hit right between the eyes?" he says.
Richard Brown, VP of corporate marketing for VIA Technologies, says the company views its pc-1 initiative as an extension of its research and development. VIA, a maker of processors and PC chipsets, has used pc-1 as a vehicle for developing complete PC reference designs and systems that it hopes will lead to millions of units sold annually within a few years.
"This is a two-way process," Brown says. "We are learning, and users are benefiting. This gives us a chance to test out our systems in the field and understand usage models. There's a huge potential demand out there, and you have to address it on a basis that is sustainable and profitable."
But entering emerging markets involves more than providing PCs for $250 or less. The systems go into regions that can be hot and dusty, and local service and support are spotty at best. Ruggedized designs and flash memory instead of fragile disk drives address the environmental challenges. These systems also are designed to work with alternative power options-not just car batteries, but also solar power cells and, in the case of the One Laptop Per Child computer, a crank that gives users 10 minutes of use for every minute they spend cranking.
The OLPC laptop will be equipped with a 2-watt AMD Geode processor, flash memory, built-in Wi-Fi, and a display that will be finalized after OLPC chooses among a dozen options headed to a June bake-off. The power crank has been moved from the laptop itself, as the original design specified, to a power adapter, reducing stress on the system. Although OLPC and its partners will work to ensure power capabilities at school installations, the crank is expected to be particularly useful to children using the systems at home, where there often is no power infrastructure.
OLPC's goal is to deploy between 5 million and 10 million laptops in Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Thailand by 2007. The first machines are likely to have a price close to 100 euros (about $128), but Walter Bender, president of software content for OLPC, expects them to hit $100 by 2008. OLPC intends to distribute 100 million laptops within two years.
The ultimate success of the "poor man's PC" will hinge not only on making it cheaper, but also on ensuring that the system meets the needs and expectations of users, says Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Certainly, people in developing markets are very price sensitive, but they have aspirations also, and they would like to have pretty much what we have," Kay says. "There are design elements that are specifically developing world-oriented, but one of the issues with cheap PCs is that if they are not full-featured, the user is going to be disappointed." -with Aaron Ricadela
Write to Darrell Dunn at [e-mail]. Visit our PC Tech Center: informationweek .com/hardware/desktops
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1986 AND ALL THAT...
1,211 words

29 May 2006

Irish Independent

IINM

English

(c) 2006 Independent Newspapers Ireland Ltd
A new RTE series looks back on how Ireland has changed over the last two decades. DAMIAN CORLESS gives us 20 snapshots of a very different time
All through next week, RTE will broadcast a series of TV and radio programmes under the umbrella titleThe Time Of Our Lives: Ireland 1986-2006. The intention is to compare and contrast the Ireland of today with that of 20 years ago. Some of the following flashbacks and buzzwords are sure to feature.
1. BANJAXED
Gay Byrne ministered to the nation six days a week in 1986 and his moany mantra was: "The country is banjaxed." The economy was a disaster: the national debt had soared to its highest ever, there were 240,000 on the dole while a further 45,000 emigrated.
2. FISCAL RECTITUDE
The FG/Labour coalition was slashing back health and education, but a new party promised to lead the people to a land of even lower-fat milk and honey. Mary Harney of the PDs advocated making the jobless work for their dole.
3. HOUSING
In 1986, the average price of a house was €50,000. In 2006, it is over €300,000. More significantly, in 1986 a new house cost 4.3 times the average manufacturing wage. In 2006, that ratio has shot up to 9:1 for the country as a whole and 12:1 for Dublin.
4. CREDIT
In 2006, the typical Irish person owes in excess of one year's annual income. In 1986 credit was only extended to those who didn't need it, such as the well-heeled customers of Switzers store.
Before Finance Minister Alan Dukes's 1986 budget, adverts appeared for Switzers' new in-store credit card. The copy line read: "It's time he gave you one, Mrs Dukes." Dukes extracted an apology "to the women of Ireland".
5. MOTORING
Sales of new cars in 1986 had plummeted to 60,000 from 106,000 five years earlier.
This was a source of some comfort to FG's John Bruton who didn't want money leaving Ireland for Japan. He wanted tax on spare parts lowered to encourage owners to keep old cars on the road. Last year, 171,732 new cars were registered.
6. THE CATTLEBOAT
In 1986, Ryanair was one year old and struggling to establish itself as a no-frills rival to arm-and-a-leg Aer Lingus. The result was that the multitudes emigrating to Britain still went by boat and coach.
7. IMMIGRATION
Of 100 landlords sounded out by phone in 1986, not one would take either a single mother with child, or a black person. In the latter case, one typical comment was: "I couldn't take them. It wouldn't be fair on the other tenants. It would seem like they're taking over."
In 1986, 45,000 emigrated while 15,000 came to live in Ireland. In 2006, 16,000 are expected to emigrate and 70,000 to become resident.
The top five registered resident groups are Poles (150,000), Chinese (60,000), Lithuanians (45,000), Latvians (30,000) and Nigerians (28,000).
8. TRAFFIC CONGESTION
Dublin Corporation voted to halt work on a new roadway, partly because of a lack of funds, but also because traffic volumes along the proposed new route had fallen.
In 1986, the average worker travelled under 8km to work. In 2006, the average journey has doubled to 16km.
9. THE VIDEO NASTY
In 1986, an RTE 'Today Tonight' special exposed the threat to young people of slasher videos such as 'Driller Killer' and 'Evil Dead', which were being sold door-to-door from vans in the midlands.
10. APARTHEID
The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement was very active, run by Dr Kader Asmal who later become a minister in South Africa.
Dunne's Stores workers won a two-year campaign against handling SA oranges. A FG backbencher slammed this as "depriving our old people of their Vitamin C".
11. FOOTBALL
Midfielder Mark Lawrenson praised new Irish coach Jack Charlton for his competence, explaining: "When I first joined, you never knew if you were in the squad. You never got your letter until you got back from an international."
Lawrenson hoped the Republic might finally qualify for tournament finals, but he felt the best way was to merge with the NI squad.
12. POPULATION
In 1986, of a population of 3.5 million, 1.5 million were rural dwellers and two million urban. By 2006, the population has soared to four million but the number of rural dwellers stayed static.
The males/female ratio is also changing. In 1986, there was roughly one Irish-born male for every Irish-born female. In 2006, females outnumber males by roughly 27,000.
13. HEALTH CUTS
Savage health cutbacks since 1981 had shut down scores of hospital wards, leaving long queues for treatment. Fianna Fail won office in 1987 with the slogan: "Health cuts hurt the old and the poor".
14. RIP-OFF REPUBLIC
A columnist complained that Ireland in 1986 had nothing to offer tourists but rain, muggers, druggies and rip-off pubs and restaurants. By contrast, Greece and Spain offered sun, cheap food and drink, and "guilt-free sex like we don't get at home".
In 1986, the number of overseas visitors was 1.8 million. In 2006, it is expected to be six million.
15. DIVORCE
The '80s was a decade of bitter conflict between by-the-book Catholics and their a-la-carte brethren. 1986 brought a divorce referendum which was soundly defeated after the bishops intervened. A Divorce Action Group leader reacted bitterly: "The Irish people have disgraced themselves once again."
16. COMPUTERS
Personal and office computers were virtually unknown. At the Typist Of The Year awards, Education Minister Gemma Hussey called for more males to learn the trade. However, the Plessy firm was reported to be working on a voice-activated electric typewriter which would make typing redundant before 2000.
17. THE COMPACT DISC
The must-have item of 1986 was the CD player. CDs were marketed as offering perfect sound quality and being indestructible. A new craze hit Irish pubs, where revellers could sing along to backing tracks of hit songs. It was called Playback.
18. NIP & TUCK
19. THE MULLET
In 1986, the mullet hairstyle reached unbelievable proportions, as was showcased at Self Aid - a lame-brained Irish Live Aid to lower unemployment through song. The highpoint of the event came from a Dublin schoolboy who'd produced his own comic. A reporter asked where he'd got the idea? "From me head," came the withering reply.
20. THE MOOD OF
THE COUNTRY
With emigration rife, a favourite phrase of 1986 was: "Would the last one out of the country please switch out the lights?"
Magill convened a panel of experts to gaze 10 years into the future. They predicted "a smaller, older population", "continuing high unemployment", a "steady loss of young people through emigration" and "no end to violence in the North".
Tonight, a special 'Nationwide' programme at 7pm on RTE1 looks at the major shifts in Irish society over the last 20 years as part of a week-long series of TV and radio features.
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Outlook

BORDERLINE; It's Not About Maps

Moises Naim

1,413 words

28 May 2006

The Washington Post

WP

FINAL

B01

English

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
Acountry's borders should not be confused with those familiar dotted lines drawn on some musty old map of nation-states. In an era of mass migration, globalization and instant communication, a map reflecting the world's true boundaries would be a crosscutting, high-tech and multidimensional affair.
Where is the real U.S. border, for example, when U.S. customs agents check containers in the port of Amsterdam? Where should national borders be marked when drug traffickers launder money through illegal financial transactions that crisscross the globe electronically, violating multiple jurisdictions? How would border checkpoints help record companies that discover pirated copies of their latest offering for sale in cyberspace -- long before the legitimate product even reaches stores? And when U.S. health officials fan out across Asia seeking to contain a disease outbreak, where do national lines truly lie?
Governments and citizens are used to thinking of a border as a real, physical place: a fence, a shoreline, a desert or a mountain pass. But while geography still matters, today's borders are being redefined and redrawn in unexpected ways. They are fluid, constantly remade by technology, new laws and institutions, and the realities of international commerce -- illicit as well as legitimate. They are also increasingly intangible, living in a virtual and electronic space.
In this world, the United States is adjacent not just to Mexico and Canada but also to China and Bolivia. Italy now borders on Nigeria, and France on Mali.
These borders cannot be protected with motion sensors or National Guard troops.
Political unions, economic reforms and breakthroughs in technology and business came together to revolutionize the world's borders during the 1990s.
It was a decade during which a global passion for free markets erupted. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, politicians and their electorates felt that prosperity was possible by enticing foreigners to invest, tourists to visit, traders to import and export, banks to move funds freely in and out of countries, and businesses to operate free of heavy regulations.
It was also a decade when nations with long histories of conflict or animosity surprised the world by dismantling or rearranging their borders through political unions and trade agreements. The European Union kicked into high gear; Argentina, Brazil and rival South American nations formed a regional customs union; and Mexico joined Canada and the United States in their own trade agreement. These efforts sought to maximize economic growth and political harmony (or so the leaders hoped).
Meanwhile, new technologies were vastly reducing the economic and business importance of distance and geography. The only prices that dropped faster than shipping a cargo container from Shanghai to Los Angeles were those for sending e-mail, making phone calls, or rapid-firing text and images across borders.
With borders much more fluid, opportunities for profit multiplied and cross-border activity boomed. Suddenly it seemed normal to invest in Thailand, visit China, trade in exotic currencies, take seasonal jobs in different countries or download stolen software from Bulgarian Web sites.
Even something as simple as buying a counterfeit Prada handbag on the streets of Manhattan or Washington represented the final step in a long journey of border crossings. The bag's original design -- probably acquired or stolen in Europe -- was transported electronically or physically to China. There, the leather, zippers, belts and buckles were procured and assembled into tens of thousands of counterfeit handbags. The finished products were then smuggled onto containers officially carrying, say, industrial valves, to ports such as Naples or New York.
Once the handbags reached these final markets, street merchants took over -- often African immigrants who themselves were smuggled across borders by human-trafficking networks. Yes, the poorly paid street vendors are usually as illegal as the goods they're peddling. Meanwhile, the overall counterfeit enterprise reaped enormous cash profits that were converted into bank deposits and laundered across the globe electronically, again trespassing across multiple borders.
These changes reflected a severe and acute new asymmetry: Borders became harder for governments to control, and easier and more lucrative for violators to bypass. Anyone seeking to cross them found it easier to do so, while government agencies floundered in their efforts to regulate the new world they had helped create.
Today's borders are violated, enforced and remade not only on the ground but also in cyberspace, multilateral agencies and the virtual world of international finance.
Consider the most mundane of examples: the ATM machine. When an immigrant living in the United States sends her ATM card to her children in the Philippines and they draw money from her U.S. checking account, where has the transaction taken place? Did the kids cross a border to tap the funds from an American bank? In a sense, they did -- the ubiquitous ATM has become a powerful, easy-to-use, border-crossing tool. Often, such crossings are perfectly legal. But not always.
National boundaries are also being transformed by new -- or newly empowered -- international institutions. For example, when the World Trade Organization's 149 member states agree on the reduction of tariff rates around the globe, our time-honored beliefs about controlling sovereign borders are upended. On trade, the borders that matter may be drawn at the WTO headquarters in Geneva as much as anywhere else.
The fluid, unpredictable nature of modern borders is evident even among the most geographically isolated and remote nations on earth. Try landlocked Bolivia and Afghanistan. Their rugged geography and poor roads make internal travel exceedingly difficult and time-consuming. Yet narco-traffickers regularly and swiftly connect Bolivia's remote Chapare region, where coca is cultivated, with Miami or New York, where cocaine is consumed (with a processing stopover in the jungles of Colombia and a transshipment detour to a deserted beach in Haiti). And in Afghanistan, opium traffickers seamlessly link the Deshu district in the lawless Helmand province with elegant consumers in London or Milan.
Even for experienced travelers, reaching Chapare or Deshu is a tough proposition. But location and geography now matter less and less for traffickers or for anyone seeking to violate national borders. In major cities across the globe, the availability of banned merchandise stands as a monument of sorts to nations' eroding sovereignty -- no matter the billions of dollars that governments spend seeking to keep such goods from reaching their shores and penetrating their borders.
In 2004, the Guardian published a dispatch from the banks of the Yalu River, on the border between China and North Korea. "Here and there shadowy figures can be seen on both sides of the misty river quietly carrying out an illegal -- but thriving -- trade in women, endangered species, food and consumer appliances," wrote Jonathan Watts.
If a paranoid police state such as North Korea is incapable of controlling its borders and deterring illicit trade, there seems to be little hope for open, democratic and technologically advanced nations seeking to uphold their sovereign borders. This issue gained urgency in the United States in particular after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when security concerns became paramount.
Yet the paradox of policing borders in a high-tech, globally integrated era is that today, less sovereignty may equal more protection. In order to reinforce national boundaries and combat terrorism, one of the most effective tools a government can deploy is collaboration with other nations -- in effect, ceding or "pooling" certain aspects of their sovereignty.
That is no easy task. It requires partnering with less efficient, less democratic and less trustworthy nations and sharing information, technology, intelligence and decision-making power. In many quarters -- Washington and beyond -- the notion of diluting national sovereignty verges on treason.
But if sovereignty is indeed a hallowed concept, it has become a somewhat hollow one, too. Traditional borders are violated daily by countless means, and virtual borders seem even more permeable and misunderstood. "Closing the border" may appeal to nationalist sentiments and to the human instinct of building moats and walls for protection. But when threats travel via fiber optics or inside migrating birds, and when finding ways to move illegal goods across borders promises unimaginable wealth or the only chance of a decent life, unilateral security measures have the unfortunate whiff of a Maginot line.
[e-mail]
Moises Naim is the editor of Foreign Policy magazine and author of "Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy" (Doubleday).

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