Software-export strategies for developing countries: A Caribbean perspective

The globalization of the software industry is seen to be driven in part by skill shortages in industrialised economies, the movement of software development practices away from centralised to more distributed modes and the spread of information and communication technologies to less developed economies, where skilled labour is available at lower costs. As such, a software export industry is sometimes seen as a means by which some non-industrialised countries can create competitive advantage. While many studies have explored the software-exporting strategies used by the more successful of these countries, little research has been done in other locations that lack some of the basic resources deemed necessary for success in this area. This paper describes two Caribbean software-outsourcing ventures in order to explore possible software-export strategies available within such atypical contexts. The role of government and degree of integration of the software outsourcer into the local context are found to feature significantly

A remark about weak fillings

Let $L$ be a closed totally real submanifold of $\mathbb{C}^{n}$, $n\ge 2$, which is not Lagrangian. We observe that small enough tubular neighborhoods of $L$ give exotic examples of weak fillings of $ST^{\ast}L$ endowed with its standard contact structure.Comment: 10 pages. The referee's comments have been include

An exotic deformation of the hyperbolic space

On the one hand, we construct a continuous family of non-isometric proper CAT(-1) spaces on which the isometry group ${\rm Isom}(\mathbf{H}^{n})$ of the real hyperbolic $n$-space acts minimally and cocompactly. This provides the first examples of non-standard CAT(0) model spaces for simple Lie groups. On the other hand, we classify all continuous non-elementary actions of ${\rm Isom}(\mathbf{H}^{n})$ on the infinite-dimensional real hyperbolic space. It turns out that they are in correspondence with the exotic model spaces that we construct.Comment: 42 pages, minor modifications, this is the final versio

Everywhere and nowhere: Nearshore software development in the context of globalisation

Offshore software outsourcing, a major contributor to globally distributed work (GDW), has been identified as one of the most striking manifestations of contemporary globalisation. In particular, offshoring resonates with influential views that suggest that ICTs have rendered location irrelevant. Some research, however, has questioned this “placeless logic” and suggested that location may be significant to the success of offshoring ventures. In this paper, we draw on evidence from two nearshore software development ventures in the Caribbean to identify a number of locational characteristics relating to the physical, economic and cultural setting, local resources and government policy that may be important in influencing the suitability of offshore outsourcing venues. Some of these are recognised, even by companies pursuing placeless location strategies, while others were unanticipated. The cases also suggest that companies may be able to actively shape certain characteristics to their advantage. Implications for vendors and clients of nearshore information services, and potentially also for companies considering offshore ventures in non-traditional locations, are identified

Service Outsourcing and Specialization: A Theory on Endogeneous Task Scope

We develop a model of outsourcing and trade in service inputs where the scope of tasks produced by both manufacturing firms and service providers is endogeneous. Manufacturing firms have to perform a fixed set of tasks in order to produce their final good but can decide to outsource some of these tasks to service providers, which, contrary to manufacturers, have the possibility to sell tasks to different manufacturers and thereby benefit from economies of scale in their task production. The key assumption is that the marginal cost of a firm (manufacturer or service provider) increases in the scope of tasks performed inside the firm: a firm which specializes in a narrow scope of tasks is more productive. Working against this incentive to produce as few tasks as possible "inhouse" is a fixed cost paid by each firm. The model yields several new predictions about trade liberalization and welfare as measured by aggregate productivity. An increase in the size of an economy raises the scale of all firms, facilitates greater specialization and therefore raises each firm's productivity. The model therefore generates gains from trade or larger market size through a "specialization effect" as opposed to the classical "variety effect" usually generated by models building on Dixit Stiglitz utility structures. Welfare increases due to adjustments in task scope allowed by the emergence of specialized service firms. Detailed Swedish data on what tasks (or occupations) are performed by workers is used to test this prediction. Indeed,we find that manufacturing firms in larger cities (controlling for firm size) perform fewer tasks inhouse than firms in smaller cities.service outsourcing; division of labour; productivity; specialization

Distributed video coding in wireless multimedia sensor network for multimedia broadcasting

Recently the development of Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has provided the promising theory support to realize the infrastructure of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN), which composed of autonomous hardware for capturing and transmission of quality audio-visual content. The implementation of DVC in WMSN can better solve the problem of energy constraint of the sensor nodes due to the benefit of lower computational encoder in DVC. In this paper, a practical DVC scheme, pixel-domain Wyner-Ziv(PDWZ) video coding, with slice structure and adaptive rate selection(ARS) is proposed to solve the certain problems when applying DVC into WMSN. Firstly, the proposed slice structure in PDWZ has extended the feasibility of PDWZ to work with any interleaver size used in Slepian-wolf turbo codec for heterogeneous applications. Meanwhile, based on the slice structure, an adaptive code rate selection has been proposed aiming at reduce the system delay occurred in feedback request. The simulation results clearly showed the enhancement in R-D performance and perceptual quality. It also can be observed that system delay caused by frequent feedback is greatly reduced, which gives a promising support for WMSN with low latency and facilitates the QoS management

An efficient error resilience scheme based on wyner-ziv coding for region-of-Interest protection of wavelet based video transmission

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth efficient error resilience scheme for wavelet based video transmission over wireless channel by introducing an additional Wyner-Ziv (WZ) stream to protect region of interest (ROI) in a frame. In the proposed architecture, the main video stream is compressed by a generic wavelet domain coding structure and passed through the error prone channel without any protection. Meanwhile, the predefined ROI area related wavelet coefficients obtained after an integer wavelet transform will be specially protected by WZ codec in an additional channel during transmission. At the decoder side, the error-prone ROI related wavelet coefficients will be used as side information to help decoding the WZ stream. Different size of WZ bit streams can be applied in order to meet different bandwidth condition and different requirement of end users. The simulation results clearly revealed that the proposed scheme has distinct advantages in saving bandwidth comparing with fully applied FEC algorithm to whole video stream and in the meantime offer the robust transmission over error prone channel for certain video applications