We visited Bimilipatan , now Bheemunipatnam, on 2 March through the beautiful beach road 28 kilometres from Vizag (now Visakhapatnam). Very near the light house we saw the pyramid tombs rise at the Flagstaff cemetery.
Do you want want to monitor what are hot issues on social media? RTreporter is a handy data tool doing that. It was developed by a Dutch fund for promoting journalism in The Netherlands. The Dutch Nu.nl site already makes use of this tool.
The tool signals trends on Twitter. Different packages can be ordered that send notifications on high volume use of one ore more keywords.
The sanitation project that I sponsor in Bangladesh is now fully funded.
It is from The Max Foundation that seeks to prevent child mortality with small-scale water projects in Bangladesh. Micro-sanitation, the combination of providing wells, latrines, and hygiene education is the most effective and efficient way to fight simple but lethal diseases like diarrhea and give children a future. The Max Foundation provides micro-sanitation in Bangladesh together with the local community.
Through a really simple reporting system I’ll be getting occasional news on progress in pictures and short films.
If you are interested to follow my example check out http://www.akvo.org and pick a project. Akvo is Esperanto for water.
At my office we have lots of discussions about how we can share our free WASH content on water sanitation and hygiene water with Africa, with mobile phones spreading rapidly out there. I am always saying that most of the subscribers to our paper Source Bulletin newsletters do not have access to internet. Oh sure, I have come across the occasional NGO activist in Ghana and engineer in Nigeria that tell me to go to an Internet cafe each weekend to get our newsletter and download other relevant stuff from our site www.irc.nl. We all believe that mobile phones provide the chance for most Africans to get access to relevant content on the internet.
At the HIVOS/IICD Fill the Gap conference http://www.fill-the-gap.nl/ in Amsterdam last Friday we had some sobering news on this from Estelle Akofio-Sowah from Google in Ghana. The costs for internet access in Africa are coming down, but still costs 135 Euro per month. Google Ghana provides universities with free broadband internet access. They are introducing their android mobile phones at a price of around 38 euro.
Other challenges identified by Estelle included:
The free Friday afternoon was my first free time in my effort to reduce my workweeks in my retiring from work year.
As early adaptor I have already quite a few CDs from new artists that received $50,000 from ‘believers’ in them on the Sell a band site . Good stuff. It brought me also two nice concerts in Amsterdam. One in Toomlers and one in Paradiso. I am still a member there.
A break away group is Africa Unsigned that focuses on selected African musicians to record music funded by fans. Through “crowd funding” artists raise $10.000 for the recording, distribution and promotion of an EP.
I have decided to put another $500 in artists on this site. Just now $30 in Victor Kunonga from Zimababwe
Kunonga’s lyrics reflect the voices of the voiceless in contemporary Zimbabwe, emerging from crisis and social inequity. His songs and their popularity derive from a profound sense of dignity and social awareness; songs that address and confront issues of poverty, dispossession, and the rights and needs of ordinary people.
I also put $30 in Neema.
I just listened to the Dutch radio programme Tros Radio online on Saturday afternoon 27 February with Internet guru Fransico van Jole. They always have interesting news about internet. To my great surprise they had an item on the bankruptcy of the Sellaband investment site for music fans without knowing that German investors had taken over the site. I read this news in my newspaper de Volkskrant on p 22 of 25 February. Last night I checked the site and it was operating again, so I invested another 350 dollars in various bands.
I find it really shocking that an official radio programme about internet could have missed this news. Or is checking facts not part of internet journalism anymore?
Telecommunications operator Safaricom’s M-PESA enables already 8.8 million subscribers in Kenya to send and receive money through their mobile phones. It also contributes to entirely new applications that can leverage this mobile payment system. ‘Computerised water’ is one of them. See the M-PESA YouTube video. Continue reading
December is the month of introspection, a least in the Netherlands. My Dutch Communicatie magazine of this month is no different. “This is a crisis issue”, writes editor Rocco Mooy. The illustration of the economic crisis they use shows boxes “recession: people spend money they don’t have … on things they don’t need”. Continue reading
Using Twitter can be a useful addition in the public communication mix of companies, only if the info of 140 characters is relevant for early adaptors. This is one of the key conclusions I draw from research Laurens Roos reported in the October 2009 issue of the Dutch Communicatie magazine.
I am a member of the Association of the Kern Institute in Leiden because of my interest in the Indian – Dutch history. In 1989 I have documented in slides what is left of Indian-Dutch monuments from the Dutch East Indian Company VOC on the coasts of India, see my site
The Association possesses a collection of objects, and takes care of its management and restoration. Among these objects, most noteworthy are the “Gandhara album”, which contains a number of albumin prints dating from before 1885, some 80.000 pictures as well as a number of palmleaf manuscripts. It is freely accessible online.
The Kern Institute is the national centre of expertise for South Asia and the Himalayan region, more specifically India and Pakistan, Tibet and Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The institute houses the Department of Indian & Tibetan Studies of Leiden University, as well as an excellent library that offers excellent resources for a broad range of approaches to the study of India and surrounding countries.