E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

of fewer operators (though at least 3 per every

major market). Pyramid projects that by 2006, 94 percent of

Russia’s cellular phone market will be in the hands of the

five leading providers (compared to 85 percent at the end of

2001). Mobile penetration will increase (to c. 10 percent) and

prepaid customers will account for the vast majority of users.

Revenues from cellular networks exceed revenues from fixed

line networks in certain markets. SMS is booming. Second and

third mobile operator licenses are tendered by all cash

strapped governments in the region (though a Polish attempt to

sell an UMTS license ended in a fiasco). Poland introduced a

wireless local loop service. Macedonia just handed a second

mobile operator license to the Greek OTE.

“By the end of 2005, the total number of mobile subscribers in

CEE will exceed 50 million (compared to 30 million by end-2001) and mobile Internet accounts will constitute

approximately 21 percent of total mobile accounts”, projects

Pyramid. The Czech Republic will have 78 mobile users per 100

population - and Hungary 66. In a second tier of countries -

the likes of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia - a mobile

phone will remain a luxury and a status symbol.

Hitherto domestic operators - from the Greek OTE to the

Russian MTS - are becoming regional. Multinationals, such as

the British Vodafone and the French Orange - have entered the

regional fray. Some CEE markets are as saturated (and

customers as savvy and demanding) as many advanced Western

European ones. A host of value added services (VAS) is thrust

upon the - sometimes reluctant - users, leading naturally to

WAP (recently introduced throughout much of CEE), 2.5G, and 3G

(wi-fi or wireless Internet) services.

Moreover, Pyramid sees an intriguing opportunity in VoIP

(Voice over IP) telephony. It says:

“As the incumbents in the CEE markets continue to dominate

long-distance circuit-switched telephony, VoIP offers a unique

opportunity for new operators to gain a foothold in this

traditional monopolistic stronghold.”

Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP’s) have sprung up

all over the region (an Israeli firm is now planning to offer

VoIP services in Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania). Even

incumbents have been offering VoIP - as early as 1998 in the

Czech Republic. In his keynote address to The Economist CEE

Telecommunications Conference, in December 2001, Ofer Gneezy,

President and CEO of iBasis (a global ITSP), cited industry

analysts projecting VoIP average annual growth rates in CEE of

80 percent through 2006.

 

This, coupled with a growing number of Internet users and

access providers (spurred on by telecoms liberalization and

growing incomes), may revolutionize the landscape in the next

5-10 years. Pyramid expects annual Internet adoption growth

rates of 40 percent through 2005 (that’s 30,000 new users a

day!). Internet related revenues will reach $10 billion by

2005 (five times today’s $1.8 billion - but only one seventh

the Internet market in Western Europe).

Internet penetration in Central Europe will reach 15 percent

in 2005 (from 4 percent today and 3 percent in Russia) - and

40 percent in Western Europe (compared to 18 percent today).

Mobile Internet accounts will constitute one third of the

total in CEE - c. 20 million users. Harald Gruber of the

European Investment Bank is even more optimistic, saying

(“Competition and Innovation: The Diffusion of

Telecommunications in CEE”, March 2000): “About 20 percent of

the population will adopt mobile telecommunications”.

II. The Future

Leapfrogging is not a linear function of the ubiquity of

hardware and software. Though not a homogeneous lot, some

lessons common to all countries in transition are already

evident.

Technology is a social phenomenon with social implications. It

fosters entrepreneurship and social mobility. By allowing the

countries in transition to skip massive investments in

outdated technologies - the cellular phone, the Internet,

cable TV, and the satellite came to be perceived as shortcuts

to prosperity, the generators of the dual ethoses of “rags to

riches”, and “creative destruction” (dizzying, constant, and

disruptive innovation). They are the future, a youthful

promise, and a landscape of opportunities.

Software developers in CEE countries tried to establish local

versions of “Silicon Valley”, or the flourishing software

industry in India. Russian entrepreneurs developed anti virus

software, Yugoslavs offered web design services, electronic

media flourished in the Czech Republic and so on. But, as hard

reality set in, most of these talents left for Western Europe,

the USA, Canada, and Australia - where technology firms

snatched them eagerly. Central and Eastern Europe is a major

net exporter of engineers, programmers, systems analysts, Web

designers, and concepts analysts.

Internet penetration in these countries - even in the most

wired - is still very low by European standards, let alone

American ones. The trauma of communism left them with decrepit

and rarefied infrastructure, a prohibitive, extortionist, and

skewed cost structure, computer illiteracy, inefficient

competition, insufficient investment capital, and entrenched

luddism (e.g., computer phobia). Foreign operators often

exacerbate the situation. ArmenTel, the Greek owned monopoly

in Armenia, keeps Internet access costs prohibitively high,

ignoring court actions by the government and loud complaints

by disgruntled customers.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (in its report

“Bridging the Digital Divide: Internet Access in Central and

Eastern Europe”) says that, as contrasted with India (or

Malaysia), the countries of the CEE did not invest in

computerizing their schools, public libraries, and higher

education institutions, or in subsidizing private computer-training colleges.

More crucially and less reversibly, decades of central (mis-

)planning rendered the societies of Central and Eastern Europe

inert and dependent, apart from their traditional

conservatism. Many - especially older mid-and high-level

managers and engineers - feel threatened by technology.

Technology makes people redundant.

To a few open minded (i.e., foreign owned) firms, computer

networking stands for decentralized channels of distribution

and marketing as well as potential global penetration. But

even there, only a minuscule number of businesses took

advantage of e-commerce (though the countries of Central

Europe and the Baltic may be the global pioneers of m-commerce

due to their wireless networks).

E-commerce is leapfrogging’s litmus test because it represents

the culmination and confluence of hardware, software, and

process engineering. To have e-commerce, a country needs rich

computer infrastructure, a functioning telecommunications

network, and cheap access to the Internet. Its citizens need

to be reasonably computer literate, possess both a consumerist

mentality (e.g., inability to postpone gratification), and a

modicum of trust between the players in the economy - and hold

credit cards.

Alas, the countries in transition lack all of the above to

varying degrees. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Russia

42nd (out of 60 countries) in its year 2000 “e-readiness

survey”. Other CEE countries fared little better.

Penetration and coverage rates (the number of computers and

phone lines per household), network reliability, and the

absolute number of Internet users - are all dismally low.

Access fees are prohibitively high. Budding Internet

enterprises in the countries in transition are happy

exceptions that prove the depressing rule. They usually

respond to erratic local demand. Few have expanded

internationally. Even fewer engage in research and

development.

Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer (with the

rich, developed countries). It did not deliver on this

promise. Unable to catch up with Western affluence and

prosperity, the denizens of CEE are frustrated. They feel

inferior, neglected, looked down upon, dictated to, and, in

general, put down. New, ever-cheaper, technologies, thought

the locals, would surely restore the rightful balance between

impoverished East and filthy rich West. But the Internet - and

even technologies such as cellular telephony - belong to those

who can effectively deploy them (i.e., consumers in developed,

infrastructure-rich, countries).

The news get worse.

The Internet is gradually permeated by commercial interests

and going wireless. This convergence of content and business

interests - means less access to the underprivileged. The

digital divide is growing by the day. New technologies have

done little to bridge this gap - on the contrary: they

enhanced the productivity and economic growth (this is known

as “The New Economy”) of rich countries (mainly the United

States) and left the have-nots in the dust.

 

The countries in transition also lack the proper legislative

and law enforcement infrastructure (backed by the right

cultural background). Property rights, contracts, intellectual

property - are all new, often indigestible, concepts, emblems

of Western hegemony and monopolistic practices. Widespread

copyright violation, software piracy, and hacking are both

status symbols and political declarations of sorts.

Admittedly, the dissemination of illicit intellectual products

may have served to level the playing field. But now it is

hindering entrepreneurship and holding back development.

After Asia, the countries in transition are the second largest

centre of piracy. Software, films, even books - are copied and

distributed quite freely and openly. There are street vendors

who deal in the counterfeit products - but most of it is sold

through stores and OEMs. This despite massive efforts (e.g.,

in Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and, lately, in Macedonia) by

software developers, licensed film libraries, and distributors

- to fight these phenomena.

Intellectual property may go the way the pharmaceutical

industry has. Content owners and distributors may team up with

sponsors (multilateral institutions, private charities and

donors). The latter will subsidize intellectual property and,

thus, make it affordable to the denizens of poor countries.

This is already happening in scholarly publishing.

This is very promising. But it far from leapfrogging

development. In hindsight, leapfrogging may have been nothing

but another of those intellectual fads whose time has gone

before it ever came.

 

The Selfish Net - The Semantic Web

By: Sam Vaknin

A decade after the invention of the World Wide Web, Tim

Berners-Lee is promoting the “Semantic Web”. The Internet

hitherto is a repository of digital content. It has a

rudimentary inventory system and very crude data location

services. As a sad result, most of the content is invisible

and inaccessible. Moreover, the Internet manipulates strings

of symbols, not logical or semantic propositions. In other

words, the Net compares values but does not know the meaning

of the values it thus manipulates. It is unable to interpret

strings, to infer new facts, to deduce, induce, derive, or

otherwise comprehend what it is doing. In short, it does not

understand language. Run an ambiguous term by any search

engine and these shortcomings become painfully evident. This

lack of understanding of the semantic foundations of its raw

material (data, information) prevent applications and

databases from sharing resources and feeding each other. The

Internet is discrete, not continuous. It resembles an

archipelago, with users hopping from island to island in a

frantic search for relevancy.

Even visionaries like Berners-Lee do not contemplate an

“intelligent Web”. They are simply proposing to let users,

content creators, and web developers assign descriptive metatags (“name of hotel”) to fields, or to strings of symbols

(“Hilton”). These metatags (arranged in semantic and

relational “ontologies” - lists of metatags, their meanings

and how they relate to each other) will be read by various

applications and allow them to process the associated strings

of symbols correctly (place the word “Hilton” in your address

book under “hotels”). This will make information retrieval

more efficient and reliable and the information retrieved is

bound to be more relevant and amenable to higher level

processing (statistics, the development of heuristic rules,

etc.). The shift is from HTML (whose tags are concerned with

visual appearances and content indexing) to languages such as

the DARPA Agent Markup Language, OIL (Ontology Inference Layer

or Ontology Interchange Language), or even XML (whose tags are

concerned with content taxonomy, document structure, and

semantics). This would bring the Internet closer to the

classic library card catalogue.

Even in its current, pre-semantic, hyperlink-dependent, phase,

the Internet brings to mind Richard Dawkins’ seminal work “The

Selfish Gene” (OUP, 1976). This would be doubly true for the

Semantic Web.

Dawkins suggested to generalize the principle of natural

selection to a law of the survival of the stable. “A stable

thing is a collection of atoms which is permanent enough or

common enough