State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

On the way to work today I heard a report from NPR about email overload. I wanted to share the story with all and ask you:

• do you consider your email volume to be excessive?
• do you use any special tools (other than filters) to manage email?

In my case I have multiple email accounts (work, web-based, ISP, blog, others). With hundreds of emails coming each day it is a challenge to sift out the useful and relevant messages from trivia, promotions and spam. At work, I find the back and forth short messages to be most annoying, esp when there is a large distribution list in CC. For personal emails, the forwarded chain letters, powerpoint slide shows and hoaxes are a nuisance - and many times they come from your family and friends. On the other hand its a pain when a useful mail ends up in spam.

IM and presence indicators (such as those in outlook or yahoo) are useful to cut down on some email load. SMS is another option but its cost could be a factor in some places. Blackberry comes to the rescue but it is not a common tool. A co-worker uses outlook client with yahoo filters as a catch-all. Main reason — yahoo spam filters works so well. Here’s a new development from Yahoo:

Yahoo, one of the biggest providers of Web-based mail, is trying to rethink its e-mail as a social network, according to John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. The idea is that since most of us e-mail only a handful of people regularly, e-mail systems should display those messages at the top of the inbox.

Most recently the so-called social networks are adding to the junk mail because people who you have never even heard want to be your friend. One person I know refuses to sign up for LinkedIn because he is afraid that people will get offended if he refuses their connection request!

The NPR story has an interesting anecdote about how “auto-fill” created a multi-million dollar problem for a fortune 100 company. I have myself been in the situation where outlook auto-filled the wrong email (yahoo instead of work) and I got in trouble later.

I believe that the good old phone call is still a great way to get things done. May be as a follow-up to that email you just sent or as a heads up that an important message is on its way soon!

Reality Mining is a process which mines various machine-sensed data which could be used predict human behavior. In case of cell phones, it has been used to provide a uniquely rich record of people’s locations, actions, social behavior, and even social roles. The research at MIT is sponsored by Nokia.

This is one of those stories which may seem to be ’so far out there’ but it has caused many to raise concerns. See the views from Nicholas Carr’s RoughType blog on reality mining.  Do you know for sure that your call data is secure? My concern is that for a variety of reasons, data from emerging telecom markets is susceptible to abuse and reality mining presents one of ways to make use of this data. The privacy laws in Pakistan and other developing countries are so weak (if there are any) that its only a matter of time before a problem is reported.

Here’s more via Business Week:

Nathan Eagle, a research scientist at the MIT Design Laboratory, is currently working with a database that holds an entire month’s worth calling data for a whole European country, though he won’t say which one. Scrubbed of all information that might be used to identify people, the data set contains information on 250 million phones and some 12 billion phone calls.

Wireless companies could use the information to help keep customers from switching to a rival—a strategic must in a region where most of the population already has a cell phone and “new” customers are scarce. Eagle mines the data for a range of information, such as identifying so-called influencers, who use their phone the most. Not only are these subscribers valuable because they use their phone a lot, but they’re also more likely to influence other people’s service and product purchases—and to take customers with them when they switch. “If someone who makes a lot of calls walks away, there’s a higher potential that they’ll take more people along with them,” Eagle says.

Read more »