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Showing posts from August, 2012

Microfinance: The Emperor's Old Clothes?

Trouble is brewing within and around the microfinance industry. Some industry watchers have been particularly scathing of the impact (or lack thereof) of microfinance on alleviating poverty. For forty odd years microfinance was touted as the  vehicle for delivery of low cost capital to the poor leading and thereby creating opportunities for local enterprise. Today the microfinance industry is accused of not only delivering neat profits for some but of also gifting influential organisations such as the World Bank a formidable political tool. Microfinance is premised on the belief that providing the poor with access to affordable capital stimulates entrepreneurship, creates jobs and helps to drive poverty out of their communities. That is all very well as long as there is a market for the said entrepreneurial goods and services within the community. In other words, while microfinance may tackle the supply side there is scant empirical evidence that it simultaneously boosts demand

A Radio Transmitter for the Masses

Any amateur dabbling in radio technology knows the high cost of hardware. Peripherals designed to work with software defined radios (SDR) can cost anywhere between $150 (Funcube) to $4,500 ( Matchstiq ). While the Funcube operates between 64 MHz and 1,700 MHz, the Matchstiq transceiver covers signals from 300 MHz to 3,800 MHZ with channel bandwidth up to 28 MHz. The two devices have established niche markets, not every radio hobbyist is willing or able to fork out the sums involved, less so newbies. Enter the Realtek   DVB-T  dongle. Antti Palosaari , a DVB kernel developer, discovered that the  RTL2832U chip found in Realtek DVB-T dongles can be reprogrammed to transfer raw radio signals (I/Q samples) to a host computer. This presents hobbyists with a low cost ($20) software defined radio which can be used to receive raw signals between 52 and 1700 MHz. An obvious digital signal processing candidate is FM radio. Unfortunately, because of the inordinately high demand for the

An Apple A Day Keeps Samsung Away

Last week Samsung was hit with a billion dollar fine for willfully lifting smartphone technology off arch rival Apple Inc . At the heart of the legal spat is a software technique that appears to make icons bounce at the edge of a phone and another that allows a user to 'pinch' and zoom in or out of a section on the phone screen. Apple's i-devices are powered by iOS , an operating system based on a system developed by the  Darwin Foundation . Android , an OS released by Google, drives Samsung smartphones. The ancestry of both operating systems can be traced back to open source software based on UNIX; FreeBSD in the case of iOS and Linux for Android. The software features in contention all rely on UNIX internals. No UNIX means no pinching and no bouncing. Both Apple and Samsung should be eternally grateful to the University of California at Berkeley for releasing patent-free BSD Unix into the wild.