Posts tagged ‘Wi-Fi’

  |  
02/04/2015

India’s IT plans suffer from power cuts, congestion – and monkeys | Reuters

As India launches an $18 billion plan to spread the information revolution to its provinces, the problems it faces are a holdover from the past – electricity shortages, badly planned, jam-packed cities, and monkeys.

The clash between the old world and the new is sharply in focus in the crowded 3,000-year-old holy city of Varanasi, where many devout Hindus come to die in the belief that doing so will give them salvation. Varanasi is also home to hundreds of macaque monkeys that live in its temples and are fed and venerated by devotees.

But the monkeys also feast on the fibre-optic cables that are strung along the banks of the Ganges river.

“We cannot move the temples from here. We cannot modify anything here, everything is built up. The monkeys, they destroy all the wires and eat all the wires,” said communications engineer A.P. Srivastava.

Srivastava, who oversees the expansion of new connections in the local district, said his team had to replace the riverside cables when the monkeys chewed them up less than two months after they were installed.

He said his team is now looking for alternatives, but there are few to be found. The city of over 2 million people is impossibly crowded and laying underground cable is out of the question. Chasing away or trapping the monkeys will outrage residents and temple-goers.

Varanasi is part of the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader who came to power last May.

A shortage of electricity is further complicating efforts to set up stable Wi-Fi in public places – daily power cuts can last for hours during the sweltering summer in Varanasi and across much of India.

Modi’s government has pledged to lay 700,000 kms (434,960 miles) of broadband cable to connect India’s 250,000 village clusters within three years, build 100 new “Smart Cities” by 2020 and shift more public services like education and health to electronic platforms to improve access and accountability.

via India’s IT plans suffer from power cuts, congestion – and monkeys | Reuters.

Posted in Economics, India alert, IT | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
26/02/2015

To Combat Crowds, India’s McDonald’s Now Lets Diners Order at the Table – India Real Time – WSJ

Tired of having to elbow your way through pushy crowds to get your fast-food fix? McDonald’s MCD +3.87% in India has a solution for you: Skip the long lines and order a Maharaja Mac from your table.

The more than 350 McDonald’s outlets in India each get about 4,000 customers a day on average. That’s twice the number of customers that come to the average Mickey D branches in the rest of the world. As part of an experiment in crowd control, one franchisee has started allowing burger fans to order and pay through roaming cashiers who take orders and payments on Wi-Fi enabled tablets and credit-card machines.

The queue-quelling technology is already being tested at the McDonald’s at Mumbai’s Phoenix Mills mall. It will be rolled out in 200 more branches this year, said Amit Jatia, who runs most of the McDonald’s in India.

“India is changing,” he said. “You have to keep evolving with the changing needs of the consumer.”

Mr. Jatia’s Hardcastle Restaurants runs 202 McDonald’s outlets in western and southern India, while another group controls 166 restaurants in northern and eastern India.

via To Combat Crowds, India’s McDonald’s Now Lets Diners Order at the Table – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in Economics, India alert | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
06/05/2014

China’s Campaign Against Foreign Words | World Affairs Journal

My guess is that this anti-English jargon campaign will be just as successful as the French one a few years ago.

“Twice in late April, People’s Daily railed against the incorporation of acronyms and English words in written Chinese. “How much have foreign languages damaged the purity and vitality of the Chinese language?” the Communist Party’s flagship publication asked as it complained of the “zero-translation phenomenon.”

So if you write in the world’s most exquisite language—in my opinion, anyway—don’t even think of jotting down “WiFi,” “MBA,” or “VIP.” If you’re a fan of Apple products, please do not use “iPhone” or “iPad.” And never ever scribble “PM2.5,” a scientific term that has become popular in China due to the air pollution crisis, or “e-mail.”

China’s communist culture caretakers are cheesed, perhaps by the unfairness of the situation. They note that when English absorbs Chinese words, such as “kung fu,” the terms are romanized. When China copies English terms, however, they are often adopted without change, dropped into Chinese text as is.

This is not the first time Beijing has moaned about foreign terms. In 2010 for instance, China Central Television banned “NBA” and required the on-air use of “US professional basketball association.” The irony is that the state broadcaster consistently uses “CCTV” to identify itself, something that has not escaped the attention of China’s noisy online community.

In response to the new language campaign, China’s netizens naturally took to mockery and sarcasm last month. They posted fictitious conversations using ungainly translations for the now shunned foreign terms. On Weibo, China’s microblogging service, they held a “grand competition to keep the purity of the Chinese language.” The consensus was that People’s Daily was once again promoting the ridiculous and impractical, as the substituted Chinese translations were almost always longer and convoluted.

The derision has not stopped China’s policymakers from taking extraordinary steps to defend their language. In 2012, the Chinese government established a linguistics committee to standardize foreign words. In 2013, it published the first ten approved Chinese translations for terms such as WTO, AIDS, and GDP, ordering all media to use them. A second and third series of approved terms are expected this year. How French.

There is a bit of obtuseness in all these elaborate efforts. As People’s Daily, China’s most authoritative publication, talks about foreign terms damaging “purity and vitality,” it forgets that innovation, in the form of borrowing, is the essence of vitality. And as for “purity,” the Chinese people are not buying the Communist Party’s hypocritical argument. “Do you think simplified Chinese characters pure?” asked one blogger.

The party, starting in the early Maoist era, replaced what are now called “traditional” Chinese characters for a set of “simplified” ones, thereby making a wholesale change of the script. The new set of characters may be easier to write, but the forced adoption meant that young Chinese in the Mainland can no longer read classic works in their own language unless they have been transcribed into the new characters.

The party, it seems, is just anti-foreign. “Since the reform and opening up, many people have blindly worshipped the West, casually using foreign words as a way of showing off their knowledge and intellect,” said Xia Jixuan from the Ministry of Education, quoted in People’s Daily. “This also exacerbated the proliferation of foreign words.”

Are foreign words inherently bad? In China, unfortunately, we are seeing further evidence of the closing of Communist Party minds.

via China’s Campaign Against Foreign Words | World Affairs Journal.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Posted in China alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
08/01/2013

* India Proposes Curbs on Tech Imports

WSJ: “India has proposed sweeping curbs on the import of technology products ranging from laptops to Wi-Fi devices to computer-network equipment.

image

The proposed regulations, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, would create an expansive “Buy India” mandate requiring a large percentage of the high-tech goods sold in the country to be manufactured locally.

If implemented, the rules could wreak havoc on the business plans of a wide range of U.S. and other foreign firms, including hardware-makers Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO -0.40% and Dell DELL -2.22% Inc.; services companies such as International Business Machines IBM -0.64% Corp.; and telecom-gear suppliers such as Nokia Siemens Networks B.V. and Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson ERIC-B.SK -3.89% .

To comply with the rules, foreign companies would have to set up factories in India quickly—possibly as soon as April—or significantly expand their existing manufacturing capacity in a country where the infrastructure is poor and building plants can take years because of red tape and other hassles.

Or they could face the loss of current business—collectively the industries affected generate billions of dollars in sales here annually—and the chance to tap into what is expected to be a booming technology market in years to come. Spending in India’s technology and electronics market is expected to reach about $400 billion by 2020, up from $45 billion in 2009.

Proposed regulations would require most high-tech goods sold in India to be made there. A Dell factory in India.

The rules are in draft form, and their sweep may reflect some brinkmanship on the part of the Indian government, which wants foreign firms to increase manufacturing in India. The government could still choose to delay or scale back its plan.

Still, U.S. lobbyists and industry are strenuously opposing the proposals, which have quickly become the most serious point of tension in commercial relations between the two countries. The proposals also aren’t the U.S. government’s only concern. It is also trying to head off Indian anti-tax-avoidance rules that would expose foreign investors to huge potential liability if they take effect in April as planned.

“India is the largest free-market democracy in the world. To mandate local manufacturing is antithetical to the very concept of a free marketplace,” said Ron Somers, president of the U.S.-India Business Council, a lobby group for U.S. firms in India.”

via India Proposes Curbs on Tech Imports – WSJ.com.

Posted in Digital communications, Economics, Import, India alert, Manufacturing, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , ,
  |  
CCChang

Law of Unintended Consequences

continuously updated blog about China & India

ChiaHou's Book Reviews

continuously updated blog about China & India

What's wrong with the world; and its economy

continuously updated blog about China & India