Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Can ICT Create New Business Partnerships?
Dear Colleagues, I run a small (15 employee) IT company in South Africa that provides electronic payment solutions to African banks and payment processors. Over many years now we have developed products that are scaled to meet the requirements of the market. This has allowed us to survive despite a continual onslaught from multi-national companies (MNCs). Our philosophy is that we HAVE to make the poor (the majority of our population) profitable. They will be our only market once the MNCs have 'cherry-picked' the top-end of their market. My experience is that there are very few partnerships with MNCs. They buy-out the locals if they see any profits. However, as their focus is actually their home states, they do not want to build on the local industry, but to further distribute the products and services that they developed at the head-office. Thus, my experience is that, in general, MNCs look after their own interests. In Africa that tends to be the top end of the market. The result of this is that the difference between the haves and the have nots tends to increase with the advent of MNCs. The result of this is that we in Africa generally have vastly inappropriate technology available. It is easier to support Oracle databases in Africa than to support Microsoft SQL, PostgerSQL or any other smaller database. This is peculiar, as, in general, there are very few businesses that will ever require the scalability of a high end database. In the field of financial services I have personally heard and read the same line over and over from the MNCs. The market is un-profitable. The reason for this unprofitability in most cases is that the COST of the MNCs infrastructure is scaled for rich people and therefore inappropriate to the markets in Africa. There are very few NGOs which operate in the areas that we do so our experience with them is limited. I can say that, of late, the emphasis has really moved to sustainability. My business focuses on creating products that are scaled correctly, light on infrastructure, low on support, multi-lingual, low on training and as cheap as possible to roll-out. In this way we operate in a market that is ignored by the MNCs. We can be sustainably profitable (not wildly so) by providing unique products that people in our community really depend on. Our vision is that this is the bottom of the toughest market around. If we can make some profits here, then we will be in the right place to make more profits when, through trade assisted by our products, this market moves up. Our mantra is - appropriate and sustainable - if you achieve that, everything else falls into place. Kind regards BARRY COETZEE CEO iVeri PAYMENT TECHNOLOGY EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * WEB: WWW.IVERI.COM TEL: +27 11 269-4000 * FAX: +27 11 269-4098 On 11/8/04, Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator wrote: Most corporations trying to enter markets in developing countries view the poor simply as consumers and consider NGOs as just an extension of welfare services. Yet international corporations often lack sufficient market data, an understanding of local needs and preferences, or distribution channels. ICT could help the poor and NGOs become business partners, suppliers, distributors and sources of market information to large companies. ..snip... Yet some argue that powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) drive out small, local companies in poor communities, and local businesses should be protected. Brazil nurtured its computer industry that way. This view contends that the power balance between MNCs and local entrepreneurs or NGOs is so uneven that the latter can't possibly protect their interests. ..snip... This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What is the Future for Cyber-Security?
On a philosophical note I feel that the solution would be to stop doing things that create enemies. If a country does not have any enemies then their security concerns reduce radically. Crime is more a social issue. Terrorism is a political issue. I do not think that any amount of technology will address the problems caused by politicians. The right to privacy and security of the individual should be the driving motivation of cyber-security. The individual should decide whether technology provided by their government, their industry, or by like minded persons provide them with the security levels they desire. The same applies to industry. Governments are very different. They use the resources, usually military, available to them to protect their own, usually military and commercial, interests. It is usually also to protect their own interests that they prescribe to their citizens. I personally would rather use private encryption that civil rights groups use rather than encryption provided by my government, or worse, provided by some other government. I strongly feel that NGOs, etc. should provide the people that they are assisting with apropriate cyber protection. Not necessarily the protection preferred or prescribed by some other government. It is naive to expect bad persons to not use the technology available to them. This has never happened in the history of mankind and will definitely not happen in the cyber age. The same problem of the good guys versus the bad continues, albeit with different tools. This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Cyber-Security and E-commerce
Dear GKD Members, Everything (in developing economies) MUST comply with sustainable and appropriate. In economies where the total number of e-commerce transactions are in the 1000's there is no point in installing or using any technology that costs more than a couple of thousand US$. It would not be sustainable. However, even developing economies are part of the planet. An important part of their development is to institute systems that will put them in synch with the rest of planet so that they can trade (and pay off their debts). The technology would be appropriate. ALL universisal cyber-security protocols are designed to meet the specific requirements of developed economies. I can make that statement because the cost of implementing them usually is un-sustainable. Furthermore, paranoid legal requirements that have been forced on the world since 9/11 have made the administrative and other overheads on a transaction so huge that any system would need massive volumes to pay them off. Developing economies do not have these volumes. So what do we do? We cannot do nothing. The reason for this is that crooks always move to the weak point in the system. If the developed world is successful with their expensive security systems and the weak point becomes the developing world then they would have succeeded in exporting fraud, etc. into the developing economies and we would have to accept that we are, indeed, basket cases. So this is not an option. We have to find sustainable and appropriate ways of implementing cyber-security while still using the same systems that everyone else uses, ie Visa, MasterCard, Sprint, etc. I like the eBay / reputational suggestion below. The problem is that eBay does not settle to any developing world. They welcome you as a buyer, but they will not settle you as a merchant. This is the problem with private systems. Individuals and profit margins make the rules. What we have been experimenting with is the Management of Risk as opposed to the Prevention of Risk. Prevention is proving too expensive and too high an overhead for our infrastructure. However, with so few transactions, maybe we can just insure against the risk. Or, maybe, change our pricing so that we can build up a pool to fund risk when it happens. Believe it or not, this works out much cheaper than implementing some of the security protocols like EMV, 3D Secure, VbyV, etc. There is something we are doing on the reputational side. We are moving away from universal VeriSign type certificates and starting to issue our own, cheaper certificates. This works very well and we have found that there are very few rejections of these certificates. It is incumbent on the Issuer to ensure that their reputation does not cause users to reject the certificate. I would love to hear if anyone has ony other ideas on how to approach these issues. On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Femi Oyesanya wrote: Organizations in developing Countries ought to adopt International Certification and accreditation standards. For example, ISO 11799. The challege is finding qualified expertise to implement adoption of these standards. I suppose Femi's suggestion could work for fairly established firms, but it would simply raise the barriers to small e-business development. Why don't we take the cue from empirical cases? Take eBay for example. While there have been cases of grand abuses (e.g., the laptop sale scandal a year or two back), it has remained a very popular site for incidental or systematic e-businesspersons. Trust is built by repeated transactions - and eBay aptly recognizes this by appending the net positive feedback you have from previous transaction partners (buyers and sellers) to the name you use on the site. A first-timer at eBay would readily be viewed with suspicion. Many sellers avoid this risk by declaring outright they will not transact with anyone not having positive feedback. It becomes increasingly important then to maintain a good reputation (i.e., net positive feedback) to gain the trust of new buyers/sellers and maintain that of previous ones. Your reputation becomes the de facto certification of good business practice, and presumably, security. From this rudimentary - if naive - case, what is seemingly important for developing countries are two things: 1) In lieu of harping on security for each individual firm, it might be better to ensure security at the marketplace - i.e., where transactions are conducted; and 2) the guarantee of security is not in keeping information closed, but rather, transparent - open and accessible. This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd
