04.25.09
Business on the Electronic Frontier
Staying connected seems to be promoted as a key element in business today. What does this mean when you are ‘ staying connected’ ? What is the cost to staying connected ? Having to travel for my small and thriving businesses staying connected is one of my key concerns at all times. Roaming is not for everyone unless you are corporate and a 100 000 or 200 000 rupee phone bill does not shake you its highly unlikely that this is the best option for small businesses. Then there is the issue of internet and buying per hour usage to check mail when traveling. Though you tend to resort to this practise because of lack of choice the cost is very high. An hour of internet on average costs about 6 Euro when traveling in europe. Yet to really work with your office and communicate effectively an hour a day is not going to be enough. Are we stumped with options in this digital age ? Has the cost off connectivity really leveled the playing field? As a business I m not to keen to use a public computer system such as an internet cafe. In my daily work alot of the communication has to be safe and secure. I believe that this market where every business can communicate effectively and securely irrespective of region or location is widely untapped. A few ideas have formulated as to how this issue can be tackled and I am sure that I am not the first. With internet basically having the capacity to bring all types of communication together this definetly seems to be the medium to use. The next asset is the mobile phone every business is integrated with 100 s of units in every institution. How do you merge these two? Providers of world roaming services could integrate a powerful internet portal that would allow for communication to work with their roaming services. For example if a user were to send
a sms to check their mail and respond to all emails on a local sms wouldn’t that be great ?
Posted by Wordmobi
05.29.07
SIP: for calling beyond boundaries
Okay so I have been out of circulation for a while, but it has been busy trying to make a living. I really had no idea how hectic this would get. But c’est la vie and things move on. My topic for today is the SIP topic. Have I used it … YES!! If you thought skype was great then SIP will definitely make you stand up and take notice.
SIP — session initiation protocol. For the theory I m going to give you the wiki link to SIP.
That should sort out most of your initial questions. I’m going to go straight into how to configure your phone preferably a Nokia E or N series device with wifi. The easiest ways are
1. Go to www.fring.com – download the application – install – setup skype /SIP (there is another site) I like fring. Its pretty straight forward. Download the application setup your SIP account and you are good to go.
(Please refer at the bottom for links to various SIP accounts)
2. Nokia N series and E series that have wifi both have the SIP functionality in built. Once you configure your account details and settings your phone should log onto your registered SIP address and be able to call. This link should give you the configuration for your Nokia. Another configuration link from the voxalot forums.
3. You can configure your PC by downloading xten lite or sjphone . This will also allow you to take advantage of SIP calling.
4. There are some SIP only phones in the market but I have no experience with them. D-Link and Linksys are 2 providers of such phones.
Some of the more popular SIP providers:
Once you’ve registered there and you need to connect to other SIP providers by just dialing the SIP number of your colleague (if they are on another SIP service)
You can check the network directory to find out your buddy’s SIP- Code
… AND once you wade through all this and have your service configured and you have a whole host of people configured along with you then its time to configure ENUM
This will redirect anyone calling your regular phone to your mapped SIP number.
I hope to have the time to write a follow up article on this in the near future.
05.15.06
E-commerce sites in Sri Lanka (a quick look)
Here are some e- commerce sites in Sri Lanka. Some have been there for a while the others are relatively new. Either way most have been established more recently. Though I have not used any special criteria to evaluate them I have mentioned a few points about each.
kaputa — nice vesak cards/ integrated classifieds
srilankabusiness.com — fixed subscription cost
wow – wow theres alot of stuff.
Lanka.info – site cannot be accessed from sri lanka
boutiquesrilanka — tourist site for sri lanka quite well laid out
autolandvehicles — car site
autolanka– very very nice car site covers a lot of areas of interest and reservation possible
carsaleslk – nice menus and nice interface – no payment
aitken spence hotels — a nice site but online reservations not integrated
sri lanka.com – super hotel reservation and tourist site. Nice layout and the mini sites are very well integrated. Booking request is an excellent idea.
sri lankan airlines – sri lankan airlines online booking and confirmation (only in English) — imagine if we could do this for train and bus tickets
Jobsnet – jobsite/ multilingual / very nice
E-channelling — fantastic site / multilingual/ easy to use/ well maintained and integrated payment gateway. I was told by a friend (who rarely uses computers) about the site.
Kaddai.com — sales and auctions platform — very functional site, sms integration, a lot of features such as intrasite messaging, transaction status, feedback and reliability status to mention a few.
Please let me know if there are more e-commerce sites out there ……….
Possibilities for E-commerce … with mobile networks
So here I am in the hill country. No computer just me and nature. Suddenly I realise that I need to check my mail. I dash to my hotel and ask them about their rates. I’m sure they figured that I was not going to use their internet when they saw my jaw drop. So what next ? Pulled out my cell phone configured my pop settings and connected up to my provider’s gprs. I expected to be drumming my fingers for a good ten minutes. A few seconds later my phone does a small chirp and voila there is the email that I’ve been waiting for! Later on in the day as I traveled around I noticed that there was a strong penetration of mobile phones in the region. Every 4th person seemed to have a unit. While everyone talks about penetration and last mile connectivity why not use whats available? Why not use gprs, edge or EV DO modems for connectivity in there areas ? One could use their present mobile phone sim with these modems. Of course you wouldn’t do huge downloads but one could facilitate E commerce transactions such as ordering spare parts, up loading pictures of products or even checking their bank balance. Maybe I’m being naive but if its there why not use it, right ?
