Archives for February 2010

Julian Bedford of World Service News looks at the Radio Documentaries that will form part of the SuperPower season.

One of the documentaries I've been working on in preparation for the Superpower season is an investigation into our vulnerability to snoopers and hackers now so much of our lives is played out online.

As someone who has failed to engage properly with the web, I expected it to be terrifying and to some extent it is, but what is more scary to me is the discovery of how much of ourselves is daily given away as we type.

We trade information for free searches and the use of social networks.

The growing presence of cookies in the back of our computers tell any interested parties in great detail who we are, how we live and what interests us.

For much of that information I am grateful to Aleks Krototski, who has been dropping in to Bush House to record the big documentary strand of the season -- The Virtual Revolution. She lives and breathes the web and her insights in the series are a lesson to us all.

For more on the malicious hackers, go to Russia. There we meet Andrei who's the central figure in our "Hackers For Hire" documentary.

Just twenty-years-old and yet he claims to have been inside more government computers around the world than is good for him.

Sarah Rainsford and Rose Kudabaeva travelled into the intense cold of Moscow and Siberia to find out why Russian hackers are so good.

Another country whose hackers enjoy a certain renown at present is China, but our investigation there was centred more on the country's Great Firewall and how Chinese internauts use the web.

Weiliang Nie of BBC Chinese found it difficult to get the story, but has taped some intriguing voices and brought home an audio diary of his journey.

That's what's been really enjoyable -- working and thinking in another dimension. The use of audio diaries and video to make the stories come alive not just on radio, but on the web.

For me it's been the biggest challenge of the whole season, a certain reconfiguring of my brain to try and get things to work in ways I am just not used to. Because I am such a recent convert I cannot say whether it has worked, but for your sakes, I hope it has.

Then there's Gordon. A serendipitous encounter at a London railway station with a passing acquaintance from college, not seen in twenty years, gave me my internet entrepreneur who is enduring the hazards of a start-up.

He is living and breathing what we are investigating, and trying to turn two years of his life into a going concern rather than a failed dream.

The clock is ticking on his venture and I am genuinely intrigued to discover whether his business project will work. We should know more by the end of the season.

There are other ideas that I would have loved to pursue; such as taking a stroll through a graveyard of dead internet sites and what that journey might tell us about the way our lives have been changed over the past twenty years.

Perhaps we can have a look at those when we next get round to examine the world's new SuperPower.

Julian Bedford is the editor of radio documentaries for BBC World Service

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SuperPower in Brazil by Mark Gregory, BBC Technology Correspondent

Day 1: I am in Sao Paulo finding out how Brazilians make money from using the internet. It's my first trip to Brazil. First impression of Sao Paulo: it's huge and sprawling but surprisingly lush.

Most Brazilians don't have internet access at home so they go to internet cafes - known locally as Lan Houses. Lan Houses are everywhere, mostly filled with kids using the social networking site Orkut (which is more popular than Facebook here) and playing games.

The City Council has set up a network of centres known as Telecentros where anyone can drop in and have one hour of internet access free of charge.
I went to one in the corner of a public library in the centre of town.

The atmosphere is studious. I meet an unemployed man living in a shelter who speaks remarkably good English.

He tells me he uses the internet to hunt for jobs. It saves him a lot of time and hassle as he used to have to travel all over the city to go to different employment agencies. He tells me he often doesn't have enough money to buy food let alone pay for a bus fare to get to an employment agency.

Mind you, his online job hunting doesn't seem that successful - he's only ever found one part time job and that was a couple of years ago.

A woman tells me she's applying for a passport online. She says it's much easier than the old system where you had to queue for hours at a government office.

Is there a message from these two random conversations? Yes there is: internet access opens up opportunities for making money and saving time by making it easier to do simple things like hunting for work or dealing with red tape.

Later in the day I meet a lady from Dell, the computer firm, who tells me the average Brazilian internet user is online for 70 hours a week - more than any other country in the world. The figures sounds too high - I am not sure I believe her.

Day 2: I'm still chasing how to make money on the web. I met one person who certainly seems to have worked out how to do it: Gilberto Mautner, founder of Brazil's first and largest webhosting company Locaweb.

The company was founded at a corner desk in a textile factory 12 years ago.

Now it hosts the websites of 200,000 Brazilian companies.

Gilberto waxed lyrical about how the web is helping small firms reach new markets.

Highlight of the visit was venturing into the company's data centre - a high security room full of servers, incongruously with a toilet in one corner.

Later I visited an area of the city, which is billed as Latin America's largest open air electronics market - a grand name for a few streets stuffed with gadget sellers and street hawkers peddling pirate software.

At one point a police car appeared and many of the sellers immediately ran for cover.

Some of the kit on sale was clearly fake - my favourite was a mobile phone looking exactly like a Blackberry. Closer in section revealed the brand name was actually Blackbory.

Day 3: visited what is described as a business incubator, an organisation dedicated to nurturing small technology firms in the grounds of the University of Sao Paulo.

I met a remarkable entrepreneur Patrick Choate who seems to have perfected the art of making money out of very little, using the power of the internet.

He buys carbon fibre tubes normally used in the exhaust pipes of high performance motorcycles, slices them up into wristband sized rings, and sells them over the internet as jewellery.

Each tube makes 30 wristbands, each wristband is sold for the same price as the whole tube cost him to acquire. Cost of production: almost zero; cost of distribution: not much; profit: huge.

Petrol heads snap them as the result of a clever marketing wheeze.
Patrick has contacts in Formula One motor racing and he has persuaded several top drivers to be photographed wearing his carbon fibre wristbands. The photos are prominently displayed on his website making his products into objects of desire.

It shows what you can do with a clever idea and the reach of the web.

Later in the day, I drove past a road sign marking the Tropic of Capricorn - the southern boundary of the tropics - and it definitely wins the coolest sign of the week award.

In a similar vein, a friend told me there's a football stadium in Brazil that is exactly on the equator. At half time the teams change hemispheres.

The day ended with a visit to a project in a favela that encourages slum dwellers to learn computing skills. The district is known locally as the "crack favela" as a result of its drug problems. I heard uplifting tales of how training in making effective use of the internet has helped some people find jobs and improve their lives.

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Welcome to our BBC SuperPower blog.

From March 8-19th, the BBC is running a season on how the web is transforming people's lives.

There will be documentaries, features and specials on television and radio and even more material available online.

We hope to answer some of the big questions: what kind of business do we want now that all businesses can be global? How is politics changing when we the public can make our views known in seconds? And who is really shaping this new world? Is it us - or the individuals and companies who have mastered the web?

Some of the highlights of the season include:

Blogworld which is gathering the best of the blogosphere in multiple languages. Visit their blog, especially if there's a blog you'd like to share with the team. Starting on March 8th the BBC will be airing short TV and radio slots in English, Arabic and Farsi, talking with some of the bloggers that are going to be featured.

Digital Giants which will be talking to some of the main figures in the development of the web in our series including Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Eric Schmidt of Google, Joe Rospars from the Obama campaign and Sam Pitroda the main advisor to the Indian Government on the web.

On/Off which explores the differences between the connected and unconnected worlds. Two families in the world's most connected city, Seoul in South Korea agreed to be disconnected from the web for one week. In contrast two young men in a Nigerian village, Gitata have been given two internet connected mobile phones to explore the web for the first time.

Superpower Nation which is the biggest ever experience of its kind, will harness the power of the web and the BBC's 32 language services to launch the world's biggest multi-lingual conversation. Superpower Nation goes on air March 18th.

We want this to be a lively place where you can provide us with feedback about your own experiences of using the web, and to let us know what you think about the season.

We look forward particularly to hearing about whether you think the web has transformed your life, from wherever you are.

Michael Duncan is the co-ordinator of the BBC SuperPower Season.

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