Glo Mobile Ghana Limited today launched a number reservation campaign to kick-start activities marking the launch of its commercial services in Ghana.

The campaign dubbed ‘Reserve Your Number’ gives one million minus one (999,999) Ghanaians the chance to reserve their special 023-3 numbers on the Glo Mobile Network by texting their preferred number to the Glo SMS code 0230010100.

Chief Operating Officer of Glo Ghana Mobile Ghana, George Andah told journalists in Accra that the ‘Reserve Your Number Campaign’ marks the first of series of launch activities earmarked for the entry of the Glo Network into the Ghanaian telecoms market.

Mr. Andah urged Ghanaians to take advantage of the excitement and benefits of the number reservation exercise, and join the Glo network which promised superior quality and value offerings at competitive rates.

He said the reservation was free, apart from the normal SMS cost and it would be on first-request-first-served basis.

“In accordance with National Communications Authority (NCA) guidelines on Number Registration, no single individual subscriber shall be permitted to reserve more than five (5) Glo Mobile numbers and the numbers will be activated upon the commencement of commercial operation,”

The Glo COO said people will start experiencing the Glo Mobile Ghana network from today because the number reservation campaign is going to run on the Glo mobile sms platform, adding that the full experience of all the bouquet of exciting services on the network will start once the reserve your number campaign reaches the desired threshold.

Mr. Andah pledged that Glo Mobile Ghana would be the champion of values in their products, pricing and service delivery, saying “that is the social contract we wish to sign with you from today”.

Mr. Andah said to date, Glo had invested over $750 million into deploying and installing the latest broadband technology, Next Generation Networks, over 1,600 state-of-the-art Base Transceiver Stations (BTS), four ultra modern Switches with capacity for up to 10 million lines with congestion-free service, 18 Base Switching Centres (BSC), 800 3G Node Bs, an ultra-modern Call Centre and 25 GloWorld outlets.

Glo is the sixth operator to enter Ghana’s dynamic and challenging telecom market, which watchers and players have not made a secret of the opinion that it is ready to receive a sixth operator.

Glo comes at a time when the market is almost saturated at more than 80% penetration; with the five existing operators commanding more than 21 million subscriptions in a population of 24 million.

Some telecom CEO have said Glo does not have many options in the voice market, and could only survive on the back of data services, but George Andah has said the speed with which Ghanaians are reserving their numbers shows Ghanaians are ready for Glo and that presented great opportunities for growth.

Source: : Ghana Business News

Google CEO Larry Page announced that the company’s social network, Google+, is off to a strong start.

Google’s infant social network experienced a recent growth spurt.

Google+ has more than 90 million registered users, Google CEO Larry Page said during the company’s earnings presentation on Thursday. That more than doubles the 40 million that Google reported in October.

“We’re very excited about the growth we’ve had, and we’ve certainly seen a tremendous number of people added every day,” Page said. “That notion of identity is a deep part of what we’re doing.”

Google launched its social network last June. Since then, it has added toolbars and other buttons on its websites to aggressively promote the service. Google stirred up controversy last week when it began giving prominent placement to Google+ pages in results delivered by its search engine.

On average, Google engineers have introduced a new feature related to Google+ every day since its launch, Page said.

It took Facebook about four years to reach 90 million users, according to Facebook’s public statements. After starting as a students-only service, Facebook now has 800 million people checking their accounts at least once a month, about 10 times that of Google+.

Analysts say Google+ was built specifically to challenge Facebook’s growing dominance on the Web. Google and Facebook generally do not collaborate. Another rival social network, Twitter, complained that the recent changes to Google search favor Google+ and harm Twitter’s ranking on results pages.

“We provide a lot of third-party data in search, and we would love to have more,” Page said in response to an analyst’s question. “Generally, companies have been walling that data off.”

People who register for Google+ tend to be dedicated users of Google’s search engine, e-mail and documents services. More than 60% of them use Google products every day, and 80% visit a Google site at least once a week, Page said.

Page, who posted his comments on his Google+ page, did not say how often or what percentage of users specifically visit its social networking service. “Engagement on Plus is also growing tremendously,” Page said. A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Source : Myjoyonline

Philip Sowah – Managing Director of Airtel Ghana

The fastest growing network with the most innovative products, Airtel Ghana, has officially launched the upgrade of its 3.5G service to 3.75G.

The upgraded service is to offer world class third generation experience to consumers.

In a speech, the Managing Director of Airtel Ghana, Mr Phillip Sowah, said the newly launched 3.75G technology is a platform that will enable communities to expand their social and commercial horizons.

This he said,was part of the company’s plans to develop new and exciting data bundles to address the data needs of its consumers.

He said the first telecommunication company to launch the 3G service in Ghana, Airtel, and currently operating in all ten regions in the country, now has the 3G capability which allows users to make video calls, watch live TV, send and receive emails and download music from internet enabled devices.

Mr Sowah noted that the latest 3.75G technology championed by the company is the latest global HSPA+ technology with 21mbps, also being rolled out in Europe and the USA.

The head of Corporate Communications and External Affairs of Airtel Ghana, Donald Gwira, said the 3.75G platform will enable subscribers to combine the vast potential of the internet with the convenience of other devices including cellular phones.

“For the small and medium business, it will enable the entrepreneur to embrace a highly mobile way of working with high speed access to email and internet, and it will allow large companies to increase productivity through vastly enhanced mobile internet speeds and access to record and allow for communication via video calls on handsets,” he noted, explaining that the availability of the 3.75G has deepened Airtel’s coverage and speed level.

Source : Myjoyonline

According to Glo, the rescheduling has arisen due to logistics constraints.

GLOBACOM had earlier indicated plans to finally launch its operations in Ghana as the sixth mobile phone service provider on November 17, 2011.

This was to follow the commercial launch of its GLO-1 submarine cable officially last August.

However, officials of Glo met with journalists this morning to announce that its launch has been rescheduled.

Checks with developments in the telecom industry also say that Glo’s new move could be a way of outwitting its competitors but Mr. Obesitan, the Events and Promotions director of Glo, downplayed such assertions.

He said “We are confident that with the infrastructure we have deployed and the amount of work we have put in to this, we will meet the expectation of Ghanaians.

“They [Ghanaians] have been waiting and we are doing a great job; it’s not a joke to build one thousand six hundred towers because we don’t intend to be a regional network but a national telecom operator from day one. ”

He added that technically, the company was ready to take off by way of receiving calls on the network, thus could cater for about ten million subscribers.

Meanwhile responding to concerns that the seemingly overstretched heightened expectation of Glo’s launch could work against the company, Mr. Obesitan said the delay was not deliberate and assured that the company was eager to begin operations.

Glo has, on another hand, commissioned an ultra-modern Call-centre at Spintex in Accra.

The fully built-in Call-centre has the capacity to handle close to 10 million customers and is also expandable. The facility operates in 4 languages; English, Twi, Ga and Hausa.

There are already test runs from various regions of the country through the call-centre to ascertain the operators’ readiness for the market.

GLOBACOM was granted the country’s sixth mobile license in June 2008 and has since been working tirelessly to launch its operations.

Source: Citifmonline

Prior to the rebranding of Kasapa to Expresso, the then MD, Bob Palitz resigned and Hisham Ayoub took over as MD. But months afterward, a new MD by name El Amir Ahmed El Amir Yousif has surreptitiously taken over from Hisham Ayoub, who was equally transferred quietly to another Expresso operation outside Ghana to serve in another capacity yet to be confirmed. A reliable source close to this paper said Mr. Yousif was introduced to workers at a special durbar held in his honour at Alisa Hotel at North Ridge, Accra.

He said Mr Ayoub was replaced because of poor performance, characterised by the consistent loss of subscribers from about 400,000 when Bob Palitz left, to the current 200,000 plus.

Mr Ayoub promised to shed of the rather reserved image of the company by being aggressive.

He introduced the Cliq modem for starters, which is currently one of the most competitive on the market in terms of prices, tariff and speed, but that was not enough to keep him in office.

The source also said even though many subscribers were lost under Hisham Ayoub, he also sacked a number of valuable staff from the company, including top management staff, some of whom are now working with Enterprise Insurance Company Limited.

In line with this, the new MD has been compelled to put the substantive Marketing Manager, Fred Quainoo in charge of Operations, and Devices in addition to his duties at Marketing Manager.

Meanwhile the ExpressoCliq modem has been temporarily withdrawn from the market and has been under review for months now, while tens of thousands of customers are said to be on a waiting list for their modems.

The source noted that the Cliq modem is practically the cash cow for the company with each individual sales person sometimes making sales of up to GH¢4,000 per day.

But the company’s current review of the Cliq modem is denying them of all the that potential money.

Prior to Espresso’s launch, its predecessor, Kasapa was at the forefront of the campaign for Mobile Number Portability (MNP), but Expresso under Hisham Ayoub went completely flat on MNP, possibly because they suddenly realised that they would need to give new phones to people who port to their CDMA network.

The company has been losing customers consistently every month since the introduction of MNP.

“As we speak now all the computers at the High Street branch of the Expresso have all broken down for months now and staff there are not able to get into the company’s data system to enter daily transaction so the manager there records all transactions in books and sends them to the Dansoman branch everyday for entry.

“Management is not thinking about how to fix all these challenges to bring us back on track to get customers and make some money but they are quick to write query letters to customer service staff and are rather running quizzes for customer service staff every week as if the customers service staff are the problems,” the source said.

Expresso is the only CDMA operator in Ghana and the smallest operator in terms of subscribers, holding some 204,153 subscribers as at September ending this year, which is less than one per cent of the market share.

“Since the new MD came into office, he made all departmental heads do a presentation of their strategies and he practically damned all the strategies saying they were not competitive strategies,” the source noted.

“It looks like Mr Yousif is going to bring some positive change, but some of the old guys at Expresso have entrenched themselves into their positions through all kinds of means so I am not too sure if he will succeed,” the source said.

El Amir was appointed Chief Executive of Expresso Senegal in July 2009. He is focused on building and growing the business in Senegal by implementing a highly motivated and loyal customer-centric team.

The highlight of his stewardship so far has been the successful launch of 3G services in June 2010.

El Amir, who has over 22 years experience in the telecommunication sector, started his career in 1987 with Sudan’s national carrier, Sudan Telecommunications Public Corporation, now known as Sudatel Telecom.

Along with many project management roles during his career at Sudatel, he was a Planning Manager for more than eight years.

He was also part of the original team that launched Sudatel’s first mobile network, now known as SudaniOne.

In 2007, El Amir was appointed the Chief Technology Officer of Chinguitel in Mauritania where he was responsible for the installation and launch of the CDMA network. Later in the same year he was appointed Chief Executive of Chinguitel. El Amir graduated from the Sudan Telecommunication Institute with a High Diploma in Telecommunication Engineering.

Source : Daily Guide

The world’s most overpriced tech products

When coming up with my list for the most overpriced tech products, I had to set some ground rules. Simply slapping some diamonds and platinum on an iPad wouldn‘t count — anyone could do that. The product had to be designed by the company selling it and the product price needed to far exceed the intrinsic value of the materials. I also selected products where the overpricing is made even more obvious by having much cheaper options available that are just as functional (or in some cases more so).

In the end, I came up with six products that are so outrageously overpriced they just had to make the list. Here they are:

6. Vertu Constellation Quest Smartphone ($8,299)
Vertu, a division of Nokia, has built a brand around super-luxury cell phones for the Hollywood glitterati and Russian oligarchs of the world. The Vertu Constellation Quest is a beautiful phone, with hand-tooled leather, sapphire keys and other luxury features. But at the end of the day, it’s still just a phone, and not a very advanced one, either. Running Nokia’s dated Symbian operating system and with a tiny 2.5-inch display, it’s decidedly behind the times. For $8,299 you should expect more, and you get more with practically any iPhone or Android phone on the market — most of which are under $600, even without a contract.

5. Bang & Olufsen BeoVision 4 —85-inch 3-D TV ($85,000)

Bang & Olufsen has always been a premium-priced brand, but they’ve outdone themselves with the BeoVision 4 85-inch plasma TV. With its whopping $85,000 price tag, the BeoVision 4 clocks in at mind-blowing $1,000 per inch. Sure it has some cool features, like a screen that automatically lowers when you’re not watching it, but who really needs that? Instead, pick up Sharp’s new Aquos 80” LED LCD for a mere $4,500.

4. Leica M9 Titanium Digital Camera ($28,000)
What happens when you take an already pricey $7,000 Leica M9 camera and put it the hands of automobile designer Walter de’Silva from Audi? You get the even more pricey $28,000 M9 Titanium version made from titanium, sapphire crystal and leather typically used on Audi cars. While I appreciate that the “Leica logo has been restyled and is elaborately hand-engraved in pure resin, inlaid with white enamel, sealed with clear varnish and then polished and positioned centrally — directly above the lens“, I think I’ll save 21 grand and go with the base model.

3. AudioQuest Diamond HDMI Cable ($1,495)
There is no shortage of overpriced HDMI cables on the market, but AudioQuest takes the cake with its Diamond line, charging a jaw-dropping $1,495 for a 6-foot cable. What do you get for that price? A lot of marketing hooey, mostly, about solid silver connectors and proprietary insulation. Digital signals aren’t prone to interference over short lengths, and there is scant evidence that higher-quality cables make any difference. Instead, get a 6-foot cable from highly regarded Monoprice.com for $3.50.

2. Goldmund Eidos Reference Blue Blu-ray Player ($170,000)
How can the Eidos Reference Blue Blu-ray player possibly cost as much as a house? According to Goldmund, ”It is because our specialists made absolutely no compromise between the quality and refinement of the finish, the exceptional mechanical construction and the cost.” For those of us that have to make compromises, we will likely be better off with the Samsung BD-D6500 (well under $200 retail), which offers many useful features not available in the Eidos Reference Blue, such as 3-D output, built-in Wi-Fi and hundreds of apps. And don’t worry about compromising the picture; “Avatar” is going to look just as good on the Samsung player, and you’ll have enough money left over to buy a house to watch it in.

1. Text messaging from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon (20 cents a message)

With all the high-priced gizmos out there, how does a 20-cent text message make my #1 spot? Let’s do a little math. AT&T charges 20 cents per text message. A single text message is limited to 160 characters, which is at most 160 bytes in size. So, 1 GB of bandwidth can handle about 6.25 million text messages. Multiply 6.25 million by 20 cents and you find that the cell phone companies are charging $1.25 million per GB of data for text messaging. If you’re a heavy texter, texting plans from the carriers can drive cost per gigabyte down into the tens-of-thousands of dollars. Or use that old standby, email, instead.

Source: Myjoyonline.com

“It is very important that deserving applicants, such as those from emerging economies, be included in the new gTLD program,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer. “It is necessary to encourage diverse participation in this new program and to broaden the scope of our multi-stakeholder model.”

The ICANN Board of Directors also made clear today that it wants to enhance the organization’s policies relating to conflicts of interest, ethics, confidentiality and an overall code of conduct.

“We want to achieve a Gold Standard in terms of conflicts and ethics practices,” said Steve Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board. “Specifically we are working on a system which will lay out how Directors interested in specific new generic Top Level Domain applications will be restricted from participation in the deliberations and decisions regarding the new gTLD Program.”

In closing ICANN’s 42nd public meeting in Dakar, Senegal, the Board passed a resolution stating that, “ICANN will treat decisions relating to approving any single new gTLD application in an ethical manner and with care to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

ICANN’s next public meeting will occur March 11-16 in San Jose, Costa Rica.

To read the resolutions passed by the ICANN Board, go here

To download high resolution pictures from the Dakar meeting, go here

source: ICANN

Forest governance can be described as the modus operandi by which officials and institutions acquire and exercise authority in the management of forest resources.

Good forest governance is characterized by predictable, open and informed policy making based on transparent processes; a bureaucracy imbued with a professional ethos; an executive arm of government accountable for its actions and a strong civil society participating in decisions related to the sector.

Widespread failure of forest governance directly undermines any nation’s attempt to achieve sustainable economic growth, societal equity, and environmental conservation, Gerhard Dieterle, Forestry Advisor for the World Bank, says.

Forestry is vital for economic growth and for the continuation of life. Forestry governance therefore deserves a more critical attention. Poor and forest dependent populations who rely on timber and non-timber forest products  results in a loss of revenue that could be invested in sustainable forest management or economic development.

The World Bank’s Forest Strategy acknowledges illegal logging and lack of appropriate forest governance as a major obstacle to the efforts of client countries to alleviate poverty, to develop their natural resources and to protect global and local environmental services and values.

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has today become very useful and all aspects of human life including education, health and national security. The introduction of innovative ICTs could be a turning point in many countries for a better forestry management and economic growth.

The World Bank FLEG trust fund, PROFOR and the Government of Finland funded research has analyzed and documented innovative, successful and/or unsuccessful cases of deployment of ICT in the forest sector in some countries. Below are the Forestry Management country reports:

• Uganda country reports
• Ghana country reports
• Finland country reports

Read More

• Forest Governance 2.0 (July 2011)

References:

www.profor.info

web.worldbank.org

NCA’s analysis of the data for these first ten days shows that of the porting requests completed:

1. 12% were completed in 15 minutes or less
2. 22% were completed in 30 minutes or less
3. 36% were completed in 1 hour or less
4. 72% were completed in 4 hours or less
5. 14% completed between 4 and 12 hours
6. 13% completed between 12 and 24 hours
7. Less than 1% were completed in more than 24 hours

The fastest port recorded so far in Ghana took place in a mere 1 minute, 31 seconds. The average porting time for the first ten days was 4 hours, 17 minutes.

This performance compares very favorably with recent MNP implementations in other countries, such as India, where porting a mobile number can take up to seven days, and Kenya, where it can take up to 48 hours. Even in Europe, porting can take considerably longer than it does in Ghana. Spain has just announced its intention to reduce porting times next year from the current four days to one.

Ghana also stands out by another measure: thanks to the collaborative and concerted effort by all involved, Mobile Number Portability moved from decision to launch in just 17 months. Ghana is also among the very few countries which have launched the service in the month first promised.

During this full scale nation-wide launch, a number of challenges have arisen. Some porting applications which could not be submitted because no validation text message was received; the causes are under investigation. In other cases the customer’s original service provider declined to authorize the porting request, usually because the customer had not been with that network for the minimum 30 days required. Many of the several cases in which a request was incorrectly declined have already been resolved.

Ghana mobile phone subscribers are reminded that when they sign the porting request form and send the validation text message, they are moving their number from their current mobile service provider to a new one. They are closing their account at the old network, and when the porting is completed, they will no longer be using the old SIM. It appears that in some cases, the customer did not clearly understand this, and believed they were receiving an additional number. We therefore wish to summarize again the steps taken in the porting process:

1. If you wish to leave or quit your current mobile service provider but keep the same phone number, you should go to a shop or agent for the service provider you wish to join, bringing your photo ID and your phone.

2. You will be asked to sign the porting request form, your ID information will be recorded, and you will be asked to send a free text message to validate the request.

3. As soon as the agent or shop has submitted your request via computer and you have sent the validation text message, you will receive a text message. “Your porting request is being processed. Thank you.”

4. If the request was not submitted by computer or the validation text message you sent was not received, then two days later you will receive a text message, “Your porting request could not be submitted.” In this case, you should contact the service provider you intended to join to learn what has gone wrong with the process.

5. If for any of the few permitted reasons your current service provider declines to approve your request, you will receive a text message, “Your porting request was not approved. Please contact your new operator for details.” You should contact the network you intended to join.

6. If all goes well, in less than 24 hours you should receive a text message, “Your number is being ported now. Please switch to the chip or service from your new operator.” However, if you do not receive that message and your current SIM stops working, it is possible that the porting request has been completed, but you did not receive the text message. In that case, you should try your new SIM to see if it can now make and receive calls.

7. Any problems or inquiries during or after the porting process should be directed at the service provider you joined or attempted to join.

NCA is pleased with the public response to MNP so far, and we are diligently monitoring the process to ensure that rules are followed and that the process is serving the public interest as intended. In the future, we intend to release general statistics on a monthly basis.

Members of Facebook are invited to join our group page, “MNP Ghana”, to learn more and join the discussion.

Source: myjoyonline

Customer spending on a website can be cut in half by a spelling mistake, says an online businessman

Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.

Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been “shocked at the poor quality of written English”.

Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website’s credibility, he says.

The concerns were echoed by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), whose head of education and skills warned that too many employers were having to invest in remedial literacy lessons for their staff.

Written word

Mr Duncombe, who runs travel, mobile phones and clothing websites, says that poor spelling is a serious problem for the online economy.

“Often these cutting-edge companies depend upon old-fashioned skills,” says Mr Duncombe.

Charles Duncombe says poor spelling is costing the economy millions

And he says that the struggle to recruit enough staff who can spell means that this sector of the economy is not as efficient as it might be.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics published last month showed internet sales in the UK running at £527m per week.

“I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going online.

“This is because when you sell or communicate on the internet, 99% of the time it is done by the written word.”

Mr Duncombe says that it is possible to identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on sales.

He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.

“If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes,” says Mr Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

“You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website.”

When recruiting school and university leavers, Mr Duncombe says too many applications have contained spelling mistakes or poor grammar.

“Some people even used text speak in their cover letter,” he says.

Even among those who appeared to be able to spell, he says that a written test, without access to a computer spellchecker, revealed further problems with spelling.

William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, says that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.

“However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility,” said Professor Dutton.

“In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue.”

James Fothergill, the CBI’s head of education and skills, said: “Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.

“This situation is a real concern and the government must make the improvement of basic literacy and numeracy skills of all school and college leavers a top priority.”

Source: BBC