Launched in February, Buzz enrolled all Gmail users into a social network based around their contacts.

The service was criticised because users initially had relatively little control over who could see their network of contacts.

Several Gmail users took Google to court over Buzz saying the network violated personal privacy.

The lump sum is at the centre of Google’s proposed settlement of the legal case, of which 30% will be used to pay legal fees, the seven Gmail users who brought the case will get $2,500 each and the remainder will be shared among organisations that promote online privacy.

The settlement also requires Google to do more to educate people about the privacy aspects of Buzz. The settlement has yet to win approval from the federal judge overseeing the case.

The initial rash of complaints about Buzz forced Google to bring in changes that made it an opt-in service and gave users control over who they maintain contact with.

Search suit

In a separate development, Google is facing an investigation by the attorney general of Texas into how it manipulates search results.

The investigation started in July and aims to find out if the way Google treats search results violates the state’s anti-trust laws.

Complaints by three firms – Foundem, SourceTool and MyTriggers – are thought to have kick-started investigation.

Don Harrison, deputy general counsel at Google, wrote on the company blog that the company was “looking forward” to working with the attorney general’s office as it was “confident” it was acting in the best interests of users.

Mr Harrison also suggested that arch-rival Microsoft was providing help and financing to the search firms making complaints.

Source: BBC

Many want all traffic to be treated equally under a “net neutrality” principle but some ISPs want to choose which data gets priority.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been conducting meetings with ISPs about the issue to resolve the deadlock.

The need to re-think the superhighway code came about when a court decided that the FCC did not have the jurisdiction to stop ISP Comcast throttling traffic.

In May, the FCC laid out a way round this restriction that would give it powers to oversee some of the things ISPs can do to net traffic.

This proposal kicked off a series of meetings between the FCC, service providers and web firms to find out what form of regulation was acceptable.

It prompted Google and Verizon to publish a plan that would keep restrictions on fixed line broadband but take a much lighter approach to net access via wireless where bandwidth is tight and data management issues more acute.

In its latest statement, the FCC said it wanted more information about the Google/Verizon plan and asked for public comment on its ideas to exempt wireless and some other branded services.

The plea for public input was criticised by lobby groups who want the row over net rules resolved.

“While the FCC continues to play the game of kick the can down the road, consumers are left unprotected,” said Derek Turner, director of lobby group Free Press.

The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there.

Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income.

Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account.

“Access to broadband in an affordable manner is our greatest challenge,” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, told BBC News.

The statistics were released ahead of the UN 2010 Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York on 19 September.

Remote care

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of targets intended to reduce global poverty and improve living standards by 2015.

Specific goals target education, fighting disease and promoting gender equality.

Access to communications technology is a part of one of the targets.

With five years to go until the deadline to achieve the goals, progress remains uneven. Some countries have achieved many of the goals, while others – mostly in the developing world – may not realise any.

Many development experts question how the goals will be achieved and how they will be paid for. Some even question whether the approach is neccessary or helpful.

But Dr Toure said that he believed technologies such as broadband could be used to “accelerate” progress on the goals and help countries achieve them.

“Unfortunately many observers will say that we run the risk of not meeting the goals. But I think the focus should be on how we meet the goals,” he said.

“I am putting ICT [Information and Communication Technologies] as an opportunity of meeting the goals.”

In particular, he said, broadband and connectivity could be used to develop e-health and e-education programmes.

He said broadband would allow people in rural and remote areas to access “state of the art” health facilities and doctors.

“You will also be able to ensure that students around the world will have access to the best universities at their fingertips,” he said.

“That can only be done if [connectivity] is accessible and affordable.”

Claire Godfrey, senior policy advisor for Oxfam, agreed that technology could help accelerate progress on the MDGs but said “the root causes of poverty must be addressed first”, including “access to clean water, adequate food, free healthcare and education”.

“Rich countries’ governments need to meet their aid commitments, with sustainable, well-targeted and predictable aid and they need to help poorer countries to make health care and education free,” she told BBC News.

Dr Toure said there had always been a debate about where the focus should lie.

“Do you have health as a priority or ICT? Do you have food as a priority or ICT? Do you have education as a priority or ICT?

“My answer to that is that ICT is a tool for all of those, for access at the lowest cost.”

The ITU estimates that fixed broadband penetration is below 1% in many of the world’s poorest countries, whilst access costs can be more than 100% of monthly average incomes.

By contrast, in the world’s most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income.

“We have big disparities,” said Dr Toure.

As a result, in many poorer countries cheaper mobile communications have become the dominant way of accessing information.

Innovative projects have been set up to deliver healthcare and other key services such as banking via mobile and text message.

The ITU estimates that there are currently 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world.

However, the number of subscribers can be misleading as some people have more than one phone.

Even so, Dr Toure said that he believed there would be “global connectivity by 2012″ with everyone in the world able to access mobile communications. But access to broadband, remained key, he said.

“We are no longer talking about the digital divide in terms of telephony. We are trying to avoid a broadband divide.”

Mobile broadband was part of the solution he said, but the radio spectrum used for services was ultimately a finite resource.

“Fixed broadband will continue to be meaningful because of the bandwidth capabilities that it gives you,” he said.

Dr Toure is trying to encourage all countries to have a framework that enshrines broadband as a public service to which every citizen should have access.

Currently more than 30 countries have agreed.

“Access to broadband – access to information – should be a universal human right,” he said.

He says it is then up to profit-making companies to do the rest.

“Governments should put the right regulatory framework in place and leave it to the private sector to invest,” he said.

Source: BBC

The legal action against Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and eBay, as well as six other firms, asserts that web technologies first developed by Interval Licensing have been infringed.

The patents are key to how e-commerce and search websites worked, it says.

Google, Facebook and eBay immediately said they would fight the accusations.

“This lawsuit against some of America’s most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.

“Innovation – not litigation – is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world.”

A Facebook spokesman called the action “completely without merit”.

‘Key technology’

In the suit filed in the US District Court in Washington on Friday, Interval said it was seeking damages and a halt to the alleged violations of its patents.

The four patents concerned essentially involve using web browsers to find information; letting users know when items of interest appear; and enabling adverts, stock quotes, news update or video images to pop up on a computer screen while the user is engaged in another activity.

The company also alleges that it helped fund outside projects including research by Larry Page and Sergey Brin that resulted in Google.

The other companies named in the lawsuit are AOL, YouTube, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax and Staples.

Interval does not name a precise figure for damages, but a spokesman told the BBC that it would be “determined as this progresses”.

“We will do whatever is necessary. This is an important step. It is the first time that Paul Allen has filed a suit like this,” David Postman said.

“Some of the technology developed by people working for Paul Allen a decade ago is now key to this search and e-commerce space. It is part of our daily life on the web and has shown itself to be of value to the industry today.”

Patent activity

There has been a recent flurry of patent lawsuits involving Silicon Valley companies.

Apple, Nokia and HTC are involved in a long-running dispute over patent infringements involving smartphones.

Oracle has fired off its own legal action against Google, alleging that the search giant’s Android mobile phone operating system infringed patents Oracle now holds for the open-source Java programming language, acquired through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

There has also been an increase in people buying up companies to leverage the patent portfolio. But Mr Postman said that is not the case with Mr Allen’s action.

“We are not asserting patents that other companies have filed, nor are we buying patent originally assigned to someone else. These are patents developed by and for Interval,” he explained.

Mr Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, and later started Interval in 1992. At its height, the company employed over 110 scientists, physicists and engineers.

The Wall Street Journal said among those who worked there were Robert Shaw, a co-creator of chaos theory; Max Mathews, who wrote the first widely used computer programme for music; and David Reed, one of the founders of the TCP/IP internet protocol.

Mr Allen, who made billions of dollars from his Microsoft shares, recently pledged most of his $31.5bn fortune to charity.

Last year, he revealed he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Source: BBC

An Indian Home Ministry official told the BBC that “any company with a telecoms network should be accessible”.

“It could be Google or Skype, but anyone operating in India will have to provide data,” he said.

The move follows high-profile talks with Blackberry maker Research in Motion about ways to allow Indian security forces to monitor data.

The government is also likely to target virtual private networks, which give secure access to company networks for employees working away from their offices.

To-do list

Some have speculated that the Indian government’s new focus on its snooping powers is down to increased fears of terrorism.

Carsten Casper, a research director at analyst firm Gartner thinks it more likely that the government is simply “working its way down the to-do list”.

“It is based on the ICT Act of 2000 which was revised in 2008. This is about interpreting that act and offering guidance to companies. It is one thing to have a law, but companies don’t know how to configure their systems and these are more specific rules,” he said.

The tightening of the rules is likely to affect Google, which uses powerful encryption in its Gmail service, and internet telecom service Skype.

“Skype has a similar issue to Blackberry, in so far as it uses a proprietary protocol and no-one knows what is under the hood,” said Mr Casper.

A Google spokesman told the BBC it had not yet received any communication from the government.

RIM has been given 60 days to come up with a way to open up its data to Indian law enforcement authorities.

It has been reported that it is proposing setting up a server in India as part of the solution.

But Blackberry said that locating its servers locally would make no difference.

“All data remains encrypted at all times,” it said. “Locating Blackberry infrastructure in a particular geography does not in any way aid or offer access to the encrypted information that flows through the Blackberry infrastructure.”

The decision to delay the ban in India could be linked to the hosting of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October.

Blackberries are widely used in the country, with 1.1 million customers, and a ban could cause serious communication problems during the games.

Source: BBC

But this summer, a second cable snaked along the West African coastline, ending at Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos. It has more than five times the capacity of the old one and is set to bring competition to a market where wholesale Internet access costs nearly 500 times as much as it does in the U.S.

It’s the first of a new wave of investment that the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union says will vastly raise the bandwidth available in West
Africa by mid-2012.

“Africa is sort of the last frontier here,” said Paul Brodsky, an analyst at the research firm TeleGeography in Washington. The effects are already being felt in Ghana. Kofi Datsa, general manager of Internet service provider DiscoveryTel Ghana, said it has seen the monthly cost of the access it buys from larger telecommunications carriers drop more than a quarter to $1,625 per megabit per second, from $2,250, in recent months. The carriers, fearing they could lose customers, have started cutting prices ahead of the new cables landing in the country. Datsa expects his bandwidth costs to drop further in a couple of months, to $350 per megabit per second. By the end of 2011, when two other cables will have gone live, that could go as low as $225, he believes.

But that’s still high. In the U.S. and Europe, wholesale Internet connections cost $5 to $10 per megabit per month in major cities, according to research firm TeleGeography.

It’s not clear exactly when the cheaper prices will trickle down to the consumer level, but Datsa expects that to happen fairly quickly, as there’s plenty of
competition, with 25 registered ISPs in the country.

According to the Ghana Internet Service Providers Association, a typical DSL package costs $32 a month, about two-thirds of the average monthly income in the country. It’s far slower than DSL service in the U.S., which costs about the same.

The ITU found that 32 million sub-Saharan Africans, or 3 percent, had Internet access in 2008 _ the latest figure available. But that number was growing at almost twice the world average rate. “Internet growth in Africa has been phenomenal and has not shown any signs of being diminished by the worldwide slump in the economy,” said Prince Radebe of South Africa’s Telkom SA, which has a stake in the older cable. “The investment in international submarine cables will further unlock this growth.”

Even with added international communications capacity, Africa still faces another problem: In many places, it doesn’t have the fiber cables necessary to carry the signal from the shores inland, said Abiodun Jagun, a lecturer at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand.

And in the countries where there is an expansive network of terrestrial fiber optic cables, such pipes are controlled by telecommunications operators that close them to rivals or charge a hefty premium for Internet traffic.

“There is this mentality, this monopolistic mentality that is hardwired into telecom operators,” Jagun said.

Cell phones can help bring Internet access into the hands of consumers, but even wireless networks are dependent on long-haul fiber-optic cables, as the signal travels over the air only for a few miles.

The old cable connecting West Africa to the world, called South Atlantic Telecommunications Cable Number 3/West African Submarine Cable, or SAT-3, is controlled by incumbent telecom operators.

The new $250-million MainOne cable is owned by a consortium of Nigerian banks and financial institutions, South African investors and other African entrepreneurs, none of whom are telecommunications operators. The cable, which has a maximum capacity of 1.92 terabits per second, went live in Ghana and Nigeria last month and has several branching points along the West African coastline ready to connect six other countries. The other cables in the works are Glo 1, which is owned by Nigerian mobile phone service provider, Globacom Ltd. It will connect Nigeria and its neighbor Ghana with Europe and is expected to go live this year. South Africa-based mobile phone company, MTN Group, is leading another project called West Africa Cable System, which is scheduled to be completed next year. France Telecom is leading another consortium, Africa Coast to Europe, whose cable should be completed mid-2012. And on the eastern Africa coast, it is leading a separate submarine cable project _ LION 2.

Apart from extra capacity, the new cables will bring much-needed reliability to communications in Africa. Undersea cables are prone to being damaged by fishermen and earthquakes and take weeks to repair. When SAT-3 broke last summer, it took several countries completely offline for a while, and Nigeria lost 70 percent of its international capacity as it fell back on satellite connections, which are slower and even more expensive than SAT-3.

With multiple cables, French-speaking Senegal may be able to expand its outsourced call centers, and English-speaking Ghana would have a better chance of implementing its plan to get into that business.

Joseph Mucheru, Google Inc.’s regional lead for sub-Saharan Africa, sees great opportunities for West Africa with improved communications, despite the problem of finding enough skilled workers, the lack of security and other challenges.

“I would, however, say all this is outweighed by the opportunities West Africa presents,” Mucheru said. “A vibrant, youthful population and thirst for growth and great technology adaptation.”

By TOM MALITI
Associated Press Writer

Source: LAGOS, Nigeria (AP)

Ghana’s Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) will focus on extending improved ICT access to rural areas, says Kofi Attor, the fund’s CEO.

Attor was speaking at a recent Commonwealth African Rural Connectivity Initiative (COMARCI) In-Country capacity building workshop in Ho in the Volta Region.

He said that by the end of this year, people in the rural areas “won’t be afraid of the computer”. Among other initiatives, GIFEC has erected 52 masts in areas that are inaccessible to telecommunications companies to enable them to provide services to the people.

In addition, 20 community information centres in the country will be equipped with computers to promote the learning of computer, 38 Colleges of Education will also be provided with ICT facilities to train students to acquire the necessary skills in the technology, and by the end of this year, all technical, vocational and youth leadership institutes will be equipped with ICT. ICTs will also be rolled out to 15 Post Offices around the country.

Next year, all Nurses Training Colleges and Secondary-Technical institutes will also be hooked to ICT next year.

Source: GINKS

First NASSCOM delegation to Africa (Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya)
8:00 AM To 5:30 PM
22 September To 22 September, 2010Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya

As a part of NASSCOM’s Global Trade Development Initiatve to explore new geographies for its members – NASSCOM is organizing its first delegation to Africa. The delegation is scheduled from 22 – 28th September 2010. The emphasis of the NASSCOM delegation would be on creating awareness among the local companies about India, identifying potentials companies for partnership and building a long term engagement program.

Over the past three years, Africa has been one of the faster growing markets worldwide in ICT adoption and communication technology and has the potential of becoming one of the most important markets for the Indian IT industry. The liberalization of Africa continues and most countries have established regulatory bodies to ensure a fair, competitive and enabling environment.

NASSCOM strongly belives that this is the right time to explore Africa as it has a huge unmet ICT demand and Governments and business that were apprehensive till some time back have realized the potential of ICT and are willing to invest in this sector. Africa’s IT market is headed for growth in 2010, and market levels are expected to reach $22.53 billion in 2010, setting in motion a number of key trends that will reshape the IT landscape in Africa.

The delegation will visit Nigeria and Ghana in west Africa and Kenya in east Africa. Nigeria is the second biggest economy in Africa and is the largest in terms of its population and opportunity. Ghana, though a smaller economy but it offers the most suitable investment climate in the region and is often referred as the Gateway to West Africa. Kenya is the most aggressive ICT economy in the eastern region with the government being proactive and willing to invest in the sector. This entire trip would give ample exposure and flavor of the entire African continent.

The monitoring of international calls is being undertaken by Haitian-based Global Voices Group (GVG) under a Consolidated International Gateway project to ensure that the State does not lose monthly revenue of US$6 million due to the nefarious activities of criminals who are exploiting the lax controls in the telecom sector.

The Minister said this yesterday at the 5th Annual Connecting Rural Communities Conference in Accra.

The Conference is under the auspices of the UK-based Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation, to chart a way to enable rural communities in Africa to have access to telecom services for the betterment of their standard of life.

Government has fixed a price of US$0.19 – an increase of US$0.07 – to be charged by all telecom companies in the country for the termination of all inbound calls through the installation of an Intelligence Signalling Management System.

Out of the US$0.19 call charges, the local operator that terminates the call gets US$0.8, the third party call monitor, GVG, gets US$0.6 and government gets US$0.5.

Mr. Iddrisu said the government is backing the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) to improve the access telecom services.
“The government will in the course of the year provide funding from the proceeds of the Consolidated International Gateway project to enable the Ministry of Communications undertake more universal access projects in the communities across the country,” he said.

He praised telecom operators for dedicating one percent of their annual revenue to support the activities of GIFEC in funding projects that will connect rural communities to telecom services in the country.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisations, Dr. Ekow Spio-Garbrah, called on governments of the continent to recognise Public, Private and Peoples Partnership (PPPP) as one of the possible ways of solving the continent’s telecommunication networks challenges.

He said the success of projects intended to connect rural communities will depend on the profits that will be generated from the investment, planned public awareness programmes, local language content, building on national and regional networks, among others.

“We must see agro-based cooperatives, traditional rulers, religious bodies, commercial and rural banks, special funds such as GETFund and universal service funds like GIFEC as potential PPPP partners,” he said.

Dr. Spio-Garbrah added that the CTO will by the end of this year launch the Commonwealth Telecommunication Development Fund to support telecom infrastructure development and development of local content through national ICT incubator programmes.

By Evans Boah-Mensah

Source: BFT

He said connecting rural communities on the continent to tackle challenges in education, health and governance required a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society.

President Mills made the call in a speech read on his behalf by Communications Minister, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, at the opening session of the Fifth African Regional Conference on Rural Communications in Accra.

The conference, organised by Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), is under the theme: “Connecting Rural Africa on a Cost-Effective, Sustainable and Profitable Basis through Government-Led Public Private Peoples Partnerships.”

President Mills said government was committed towards developing ubiquitous broadband infrastructure for e-government services to cover all district assemblies to provide opportunities for affordable ICT services to the citizenry.

He gave the assurance that government would provide funding to enable the Ministry of Communications to undertake added universal access projects in the communities and across the country.

President Mills expressed the hope that the conference would provide the framework for cooperation of public, private and the grassroots to identify clear roles of all stakeholders and focus on profitable ICT services rather than the display of technology or processes.

He emphasised on the need to make ICT services  affordable for the rural communities and support manpower development and employment.

Mr James Victor Gbeho, President of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, observed that Africa lagged behind other countries in terms of technological advancement and socio-economic development.

He stressed that ICT offered the realistic chance for Africa to bridge the knowledge and technological gap with the rest of the world, citing emerging economies of South East Asia and Latin America, particularly India, China and Brazil, as shining examples.

Mr Gbeho noted that the unreliable and costly energy situation the continent was bedevilled with constituted another drawback to connectivity.

“Erratic electricity supply and the dearth of cheaper alternative energy sources hamper the optimum use of mobile telephony, ICT and connectivity. This challenge is most acute in the rural areas,” he said.

He expressed dissatisfaction over the low content with regard to programming and weak indigenous human resource base adding that the fledgling ICT industry found it cheaper to import low quality programmes and products than to invest in local programming.

“The high level of illiteracy and innumeracy in the region is even more accentuated in the rural areas, thus depriving the industry of readily available local skills,” he added.

Mr Gbeho said Africa needed to fast-track the roll out of energy and telecommunications infrastructure, as a matter of urgency, to harmonise legislation, launch a sustained awareness drive and develop a vibrant local human resource base by building local skills.

Dr Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of International Telecommunications Organisation, underscored the importance of focusing on using and building on local contents in terms of programming and human resource development in the telecommunication industry to protect the rich cultural heritage the continent was endowed with.

Dr Ekwow Spio-Gabrah, Chief Executive Officer of CTO, said his outfit was an inter-governmental organisation made up of information and technology companies, ICT equipments, manufacturers, vendors and stakeholders that provided consultancy and advisory services for both national and international bodies.

He said in recent times, CTO focused on forging rural ICT programmes to connect rural communities in Africa on a cost-effective sustainable and profitable basis through public, private, peoples and partnerships (PPPP).

Dr Spio-Gabrah expressed worry that in spite of major ICT advances, more than 70 per cent of Commonwealth developing citizens, mostly in rural areas, were unconnected.

He noted that though Africa had improved its political and economic activities to that of a more democratic climate, much needed to be done to harness the potential of ICT for development.

Dr Spio-Gabrah said 60 per cent of African countries were more democratic compared with less than 20 per cent in 1980s.

He added that exports from Africa had increased from 40 billion dollars in 1990 to over 150 billion dollars in 2009 adding ICT growth had become a crucial part of strategic plan which drives an economy.

Mr Brett Goschen, Chief Executive Officer of MTN, a private international telecommunication provider, called for ICT infrastructure sharing and partnerships to be formed as part of prudent measures of managing the industry.

Participants at the conference included stakeholders in the telecommunication industry, service providers, vendors and experts in the ICT industry.

GNA