Telenor and Ooredoo to support Wiki Zero

Myanmar Wiki developers and the staff from Telenor are discussing to provide free mobile access to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia.

The project is called Wiki Zero and competitors Ooredoo have also pledged their support.Organisers plan to train freelance developers to provide articles in Myanmar for free.

“Telenor asked for 50 articles to in initiate. Their recommendations are systematic. Ooredoo requested for 100,000 articles before their sim-card on sale. We can give 100,000 articles they want though I’m afraid this would end up a perfunctory effort,” said Mayar, a developer for Myanmar Wiki.

There are only 30,000 articles in the Myanmar version of Wikipedia due to complications using Unicode which supports the Myanmar alphabet system.

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopaedia which provides publicly generated multi-language content for free. 

Source : Eleven

Myanmar to sign energy contracts in May

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar, April 24 (UPI) -- Production sharing contracts for energy companies tasked with exploring Myanmar's onshore reserves should be signed in May, a planning official said Thursday.

Energy companies rambling into Myanmar following onshore auctions. UPI/Gary C. Caskey

More than a dozen blocks for onshore development were awarded to international energy companies during an October auction. Khin Khin Aye, director of energy planning at the Myanmar Ministry of Energy, said the government was working according to normal procedures.

"We will sign the production sharing contracts in the middle of May," he told the energy news website Rigzone.

International investors have moved into the wake created when Myanmar earned relief from economic sanctions when in 2010 it ended a long period of military rule through general elections. Human rights groups have said it was those sanctions that brought about reforms in the first place.

Last month, the government awarded some of the biggest energy companies in the world with exploration contracts for frontier territory off the Myanmar coast.

The first barrel of oil was exported from Myanmar in 1853, though the country's energy sector was largely idled during the long period of military rule. French energy company Total, a pioneer developer in Myanmar, estimates the country produces about 180,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and nearly all of that is in the form of natural gas.

Source : UPI

No plan to cancel CDMA network: Union Minister of Ministry of Communications

Emergency System for CDMA network shown at ICT show, Convention Hall (Photo – EMG)

Myanmar has no plans to cancel the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network for mobile phones, said Myat Hein, Union Minister, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

The country presently has the CDMA as well as other mobile networks, such as GSM, WCDMA, CDMA 800 and CDMA 450.

“There isn’t any plan to cancel the use of CDMA mobile network - only has plans for enlarging it,” said Myat Hein.

“Several mobile networks are currently in operations such as GSM, WCDMA, CDMA 800 and CDMA 450. Therefore, there is difficulty like – this tower is able to connect just GSM network and not CDMA,” he added.

Previously, only CDMA phones had better connection in rural areas. Later, network towers for GSM mobiles have been built across the country, hence the GSM network becomes larger and has more users.

As the CDMA 450 has no internet service and the CDMA 800 has cancelled the internet service, their users flock to rely on the GSM network which boasts about its compatibility with more choices of handsets.

Private banks open more branches

A total of 366 private bank branches have opened in Myanmar since 2011 when the government initiated a series of political and economic reforms.
The Central Bank of Myanmar is cooperating with World Bank and international organisations like International Monetary Fund Organisations to modernise financial services in Myanmar.
During March 2011, the total number of private bank branches numbered only 292. The number has grown to 658 by January 2014.
The Central Bank of Myanmar is working together with Daiwa Institute Research and JICA to modernise payment and settlement systems. The IMF, German International Cooperation, Central Bank of Malaysia and Central Bank of Thailand are also helping.

Mandalay leads tourism sector with 302 new hotels

Mandalay Region leads other cities and tourist destinations in Myanmar with 302 new hotels approved, according to data from Ministry of Hotels and Tourism. Out of 960 hotels granted operating licences across Myanmar over the last year, 302 have been opened in Mandalay while 238 have opened in Yangon Region.
The data released by the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism between July 2013 and February 2014 shows that 1,102 travel firm licenses, 190 transportation licenses and 3,341 tour guide firm licenses have been issued across the country.
Over two million tourists visited Myanmar in 2013; a figure that has been consistently doubling every year since the government initiated a series of political and economic reforms in 2011. This year is expected to attract 3 million visitors.
Many hotels are situated in popular cultural zones and tourist attractions with 90 percent of all hotels in Mandalay, Yangon, Ayeyawady, Bago regions, Shan State and Rakhine State.
Local investment in hotels and tourism is up by US$ 526.79 million by March 2014.

Gov’t to take action against bean price manipulators

Since bean varieties are among Myanmar’s largest exports, the government will take action against the manipulation of bean prices that affect market stability, according to U Win Myint , Union Minister for Economics and Trade.

The minister made the comment at a 20th anniversary  gathering on Sunday (March 16) for the Myanmar Variegated Bean and Sesame Merchants Association, organised by the head of the Myanmar Traders and Industrialists Association.

Since 2008, U Win Myint said, some large-scale dealers have manipulated the bean market by trading prematurely or engaging in Do relays, resulting in chaos that has produced more than Ks 206 billion in debt.

“As very often happens in the trading world, such cases as buying and selling in advance, selling in Do relays, and financial abuse and fraud, have meant that officials from the sesame association and UMFCCI need to systematically monitor the dealings,” U Win Myint said.

“There are large, middle and small-scale traders in the bean enterprise. Big traders are obliged to raise and accompany the small. If the small traders cannot export, they buy from the big. The big traders should not monopolize.”

A graph of Myanmar’s variegated bean exports reveals 449,900 tons of variegated beans worth US$ 938.4 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year; 1.45 million tons worth US$ 1.12 billion for the 2011-12 fiscal year; 1.5 million tons worth US$ 1 billion for the 2012-13 fiscal year; and 1.17 million tons of variegated beans worth US$ 805.54 million for the 2013-14 fiscal year.

“According to the second estimation of India’s Ministry of Agriculture, which has been the main importer of Myanmar variegated beans, 19.7 million tons of variegated beans in total—including 3.34 million tons of pigeon-pea,  9.79 million tons of gram, and 1.28 million tons of green gram—is estimated to be produced for the 2013-14 fiscal year,” added U Win Myint.

Source - Eleven Myanmar

“ ျမန္မာ SME မ်ားအား ပံ့ပိုးကူညီေပးရန္အတြက္ စစ္တမ္းေကာက္ယူျခင္းျပဳလုပ္မည္”

2013 ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ကိုရီယားကုန္သြယ္စက္မႈစြမ္းအင္ ၀န္ၾကီးဌာန၏ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈျဖင့္ စက္မႈနည္းပညာ တကၠသိုလ္ KITECH မွ ျမန္မာ SME မ်ားကို နည္းပညာ ပံ့ပိုးကူညီမူလုပ္ငန္းအတြက္ Gunhong Int’l Co.,Ltd မွ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ျပီးျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ထိုအစီအစဥ္တြင္ ျမန္မာကုမၸဏီ(၇)ခု မွ ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္း၊ ေရသန္႕စင္မႈ လုပ္ငန္း၊ စက္ပစၥည္းမ်ား ႏွင့္ ေမာ္ေတာ္ကားလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအားနည္းပညာမ်ား ပို႕ခ်ေပးခဲ့ရာ ေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ ရလဒ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေအာင္ျမင္စြာေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။

ယခု ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ကုိရီးယားအစိုးရေထာက္ပ့ံမႈျဖင့္ ကိုရီးယား အမ်ိဳးသားနည္းဗ်ဴဟာတကၠသိုလ္ (NSI) မွ Chairman ျဖစ္သူ (ကိုရီးယားစီးပြားေရး၀န္ၾကီးဌာနတြင္ ဒု၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ အျဖစ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သူ Mr.Kyong Shik Kang)မွ ဦးေဆာင္၍ Gunhong Int’l Co.,Ltd ႏွင့္အတူ ျမန္္မာSMEမ်ားအား ေရွးဦးစြာ စစ္တမ္းေကာက္ယူျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။
ျမန္မာSME မ်ား၏နည္းပညာ လိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားကိုသိရွိလို၍ စစ္တမ္းေကာက္ယူမႈတြင္ ပါ၀င္ေသာ အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကို ကူညီ၍ ျဖည့္စြက္ေပးပါရန္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံအပ္ပါသည္။

အေသးစိတ္သိရိွလိုပါက Gunhong Int'l Co., Ltd

Ph: 01-241208 ,0943103931,09450022988
Email: egunhong@gmail.comသို႕ ဆက္သြယ္စံုစမ္းေမးျမန္းႏိုင္ပါသည္။