On 14 May 2018 the Energy and Environment Partnership Trust Fund opened two funding windows i.e EEP Innovation and EEP Catalyst. An application guide in available here.
At the end of July 2011 MTN Mobile Money announced the launch of payD, an on-line payment service. Using encrypted channels, payD allows bank customers to effect electronic payments with PIN-protected cards. A rogue IMSI catcher , masquerading as a GSM base station, can entice mobile phones in the vicinity to camp to its stronger signal and exposing the phone to packet sniffing. Sensitive information could be harvested from the communication session. It is worth noting that plain old SMS messages are not encrypted.
A mobile phone is a miniature telephone exchange. It accepts incoming calls, initiates outgoing calls and can act as a repeater by forwarding calls or as a switch through teleconferencing. These are the basic features of a telephone exchange. TerraNet , a Swedish firm, has exploited these features to facilitate free mobile-to-mobile calls. Using peer-to-peer technology, a cluster of mobile phones can communicate without the need to go through a base station (switch) provided they are within 1,000m of each other. This technology, being trialled in Ecuador and Tanzania, is perfect for developing countries where infrastructure is as limited as disposable income. Because mobile phones can forward calls, the effective communication distance can be extended from a 1 kilometer radius to about 20 kilometers. That is sufficient to cover most rural communities and, for example, university campuses. Like Skype , this is a subvertive, effective and disruptive technology. While manufacturers...
One in very five humans has a phone in their pocket. Yet only five companies in the world account for the GSM chipsets found in all GSM phones around the globe. Of these, more than half are powered by technologies developed by one company: ST/Ericsson. Such is the death grip on the mobile handset market by a handful of companies that there is little incentive to innovate around the GSM chip, the baseband processor. Any innovation would meet with some steep challenges. For starters, programming information (API) for the chip is a very closely guarded secret . This secrecy guarantees licensing fees to the G5 for the GSM protocol stack software. Hardly surprising that smart phones, which boast a second (more 'open') application processor, enjoy more creativity than their drab cousins the feature phones. Closed proprietary GSM hardware implementations could also be responsible for the rapid loss in market share to the new kids on the block - Android and the iPhone.
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