Monthly Archives: April 2011
A day shooting in Siem Reap
28/04/2011 By: Dara SaoyuthHere’s some photos taking when I was in Siem Reap yesterday with my friend to shoot a video documentary. Cheers,
Related Articles
Nokia starts measures to align workforce and site operations with new strategy
The Start screen of Windows Phone 7 / Image via Wikipedia
Espoo, Finland – To deliver on its new strategy, Nokia today announced plans to align its global workforce and consolidate site operations. These measures are part of Nokia’s target to reduce its Devices & Services non-IFRS operating expenses by 1 billion euros for the full year 2013 in comparison to the full year 2010, as announced last week.
Earlier today, Nokia announced plans to form a strategic collaboration with Accenture that would result in the transfer of Nokia’s Symbian software activites, including about 3,000 employees to Accenture. In addition, Nokia also plans to reduce its global workforce by about 4,000 employees by the end of 2012, with the majority of reductions in Denmark, Finland and the UK. In accordance with country-by-country legal requirements, discussions with employee representatives started today.
Nokia also plans to consolidate the company’s research and product development sites so that each site has a clear role and mission. Nokia expects the expansion of some sites and the contraction or closure of others.
All employees affected by the reduction plans can stay on the Nokia payroll through the end of 2011. Nokia expects personnel reductions to occur in phases until the end of 2012, linked to the roll-out of Nokia’s planned product and services portfolio. During this period, Nokia intends to ramp up its capacity for the development of Nokia smartphones based on the Windows Phone platform, the company’s broad range of mobile phones and its services portfolio.
“At Nokia, we have new clarity around our path forward, which is focused on our leadership across smart devices, mobile phones and future disruptions,” said Stephen Elop, Nokia president and CEO. “However, with this new focus, we also will face reductions in our workforce. This is a difficult reality, and we are working closely with our employees and partners to identify long-term re-employment programs for the talented people of Nokia.”
Nokia is launching a comprehensive social responsibility program for employees and the communities likely to be affected by the personnel reductions. The program will be led locally, with local partners and stakeholders, and senior management support.
“We are offering those who are losing their jobs a range of options, from individual re-employment support and re-training to making investments to promote innovation and working with a variety of partners to create new opportunities,” Elop continued.
Original Text by NOKIA Company
Released on 27 April 2011 Related Post- Nokia press launch N8 & C7 in Cambodia (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- Reputation with NOKIA Symbian^3 N8 & C7 (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- NOKIA Concert (http://sayuth.wordpress.com)
- Press Release from NOKIA issued on September 14, 2010 (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- Nokia X2-01 Review (brighthub.com)
- Nokia and Microsoft Sign Definitive Agreement Ahead of Schedule (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
My day with Khmer manuscript restoration team
by: Dara Saoyuth
I would say that I was very lucky to have chance going with a Khmer manuscript restoration team to Takeo province searching for the remaining manuscripts because firstly, I can shoot some wonderful scenes for my documentary video and secondly, I have chance to experience new things.
It’s 7:30 in the morning that I went to Sarawan pagoda, where the team work, waiting for them to take me, and we left Phnom Penh at around 8 o’clock in the morning. Since there was only 1 free space in the car, my partner has to stay in Phnom Penh contacting people and arrange for the next day traveling and shooting in Siem Reap.
I felt less comfortable at first since I alone had to carry a bag of video camera, a tripod, a bag of still camera, mic and headset and some technical equipments. I thought that I could not do the work to level my partner has expected from me because shooting process needs at least two people to assists each other.
However, once I met the manuscript restoration team, I became more comfortable since they all were very friendly and helpful. They helped me a lot, especially with doing white balance for the video camera that I need to do it very often once we change from one location to the others.
Technicality was not a problem anymore; however, I started to feel disappointed after going to some pagodas but cannot find any manuscript left. Fortunately, we at last found some pagodas that remain having manuscripts, and also found people who know how manuscripts were treated during the Khmer rouge regime. Without hesitating, I started shooting and interviewing people there.
I really appreciate what the restoration team is working because I can see that they are working very hard from one pagoda to another without spending much time to relax themselves. At first, I don’t believe when they told me that they never experience sleeping in hotel or guesthouse when they have mission to go to provinces. But, now, I have to believe that pagodas have become their guesthouse and at the same time pagodas are their restaurant.
I have a lot more things to tell “Student Blog” visitors, but I’d like to say sorry that I have to prepare for tomorrow shooting in Siem Reap province. I will leave in the morning and hope to find some interesting things there to show all of you. Wish you all the best!!!
Oh, I also took some photos of pagodas I went this morning for all of you. Cheers,
By: Dara Saoyuth 26/04/2011Nokia and Microsoft Sign Definitive Agreement Ahead of Schedule
Key contributions to new global mobile ecosystem agreed and significant progress made on engineering of new products
Nokia Corporation
Stock exchange release
April 21, 2011 at 13.10 (CET +1)
Image via Wikipedia
Espoo, Finland and Redmond, US – Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement on a partnership that will result in a new global mobile ecosystem, utilizing the very complementary assets of both companies. Completed ahead of schedule, the definitive agreement is consistent with the joint announcement made on February 11.
In addition to agreeing to the terms of their partnership, including joint contributions to the development of the new ecosystem, Nokia and Microsoft also announced significant progress on the development of the first Nokia products incorporating Windows Phone. With hundreds of personnel already engaged on joint engineering efforts, the companies are collaborating on a portfolio of new Nokia devices. Nokia has also started porting key applications and services to operate on Windows Phone and joint outreach has begun to third party application developers.
“At the highest level, we have entered into a win-win partnership,” said Stephen Elop, President and CEO of Nokia Corporation. “It is the complementary nature of our assets, and the overall competitiveness of that combined offering, that is the foundation of our relationship.”
“Our agreement is good for the industry,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “Together, Nokia and Microsoft will innovate with greater speed, and provide enhanced opportunities for consumers and our partners to share in the success of our ecosystem.”
The relationship is structured around four broad areas:
1. A combination of complementary assets, which make the partnership truly unique, including:
– Nokia to deliver mapping, navigation, and certain location-based services to the Windows Phone ecosystem. Nokia will build innovation on top of the Windows Phone platform in areas such as imaging, while contributing expertise on hardware design and language support, and helping to drive the development of the Windows Phone platform. Microsoft will provide Bing search services across the Nokia device portfolio as well as contributing strength in productivity, advertising, gaming, social media and a variety of other services. The combination of navigation with advertising and search will enable better monetization of Nokia’s navigation assets and completely new forms of advertising revenue.
– Joint developer outreach and application sourcing, to support the creation of new local and global applications, including making Windows Phone developer registration free for all Nokia developers.
– Opening a new Nokia-branded global application store that leverages the Windows Marketplace infrastructure. Developers will be able to publish and distribute applications through a single developer portal to hundreds of millions of consumers that use Windows Phone, Symbian and Series 40 devices.
– Contribution of Nokia’s expertise in operator billing to ensure participants in the Windows Phone ecosystem can take advantage of Nokia’s billing agreements with 112 operators in 36 markets.
2. Microsoft will receive a running royalty from Nokia for the Windows Phone platform, starting when the first Nokia products incorporating Windows Phone ship. The royalty payments are competitive and reflect the large volumes that Nokia expects to ship, as well as a variety of other considerations related to engineering work to which both companies are committed. Microsoft delivering the Windows Phone platform to Nokia will enable Nokia to significantly reduce operating expenses.
3. In recognition of the unique nature of Nokia’s agreement with Microsoft and the contributions that Nokia is providing, Nokia will receive payments measured in the billions of dollars.
4. An agreement that recognizes the value of intellectual property and puts in place mechanisms for exchanging rights to intellectual property. Nokia will receive substantial payments under the agreement.
With the definitive agreement now signed, both companies will begin engaging with operators, developers and other partners to help the industry understand the benefits of joining the new ecosystem. At the same time, work will continue on developing Nokia products on the Windows Phone platform, with the aim of securing volume device shipments in 2012. The scale of the mutual commitment from both companies is significant and is in keeping with the intention to build a new ecosystem based on a long-term, strategic partnership.
Original Text by NOKIA Company
Released on 21 April 2011 Related Post- Nokia press launch N8 & C7 in Cambodia (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- Reputation with NOKIA Symbian^3 N8 & C7 (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- NOKIA Concert (http://sayuth.wordpress.com)
- Press Release from NOKIA issued on September 14, 2010 (https://saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- Nokia X2-01 Review (brighthub.com)
Virtual friends, digital discussions & real worries
Dara Saoyuth steps away from his own Facebook page long enough to talk to anyone in the country who would know about what consequences Cambodian stand to face if they are overly critical online.
My Facebook profile
It went public in 2006, and since then Facebook has become the world’s largest social networking site with more than 500 million active users worldwide. Facebook has increasingly become integrated into Cambodian internet users’ daily experience as more than half of the users surveyed used Facebook at least once a day and another one-third used several times a week, according to an online survey of 468 Cambodian Facebook users published by the Department of Media and Communication.
There are 255,660 total Facebook users in Cambodia now as reported by socialbakers.com, one of the biggest Facebook statistics portals in the world. Users know that Facebook is an effective tool for networking, communicating or advertising, while tending to ignore or simply not knowing about some important aspects that might lead to legal action, especially involving privacy.
For example, Cambodia is no different from the outside world, where a person can be accused of defamation and face legal action if they post something on asocial networking site that is considered a public place. However, no such case has happened in Cambodia, so far.
“So far, there is no point mentioned in Cambodian laws related to Facebook privacy,” said Sok Samoeun, an executive director at Cambodian Defenders Project, who suggested the possibility that a page might not be a private place anymore if everyone can see its contents or that page has hundreds of friends or members.
Pen Samitthy, the president of the Club of Cambodian Journalists and editor-in-chief of the Rasmey Kampuchea newspaper, said that social networking sites are very good because they create a new form of broadcasting news that he called citizen journalism.
“Now everyone can work like a journalist because they can provide information whenever there is computer and internet connection,” said Pen Samitthy, who acknowledged that there were some negative points with this kind of citizen journalism. He said people who use social networking sites as a tool to disseminate information normally don’t have a professional background, so they cannot balance a story and they just write what they see and put what they think with doing proper research.
Posting, commenting and uploading photos or videos are normally what people do on these sites, to share their experiences and emotions towards daily life. Facebook also allows users to create groups, invite other people to join and make discussions on their topic of interest.
Among the numerous groups created by Cambodians, Khmer Motherland (Meatophum Khmer) is supported by its 1,350 members and Khmer People Network (Bondanh Polrot Khmer) is supported by its 294 members. These are two groups that get updated very often. Most of the topics being discussed by these groups is related to politics and social issues.
A 24-year-old university student who asked to be callled by his nickname of Roumket Roumsomrech Roumtver is a member of the two Facebook groups. He said that normally someone puts up a posting and that leads to a discussion which sometimes turns into an argument.
“Since members try to reflect their personal views, especially on politics and the fact that not all of them have the same tendency, some of them have attacked each other in the form of comments back and forth instead of trying to understand one another,” said Roumket Roumsomrech Roumtver, who explained that by not using his real name on Facebook he felt more confident commenting on politics.
Pen Samitty said it will not cause any problems if a person creates a group to discuss things with a few of his or her friends, but it might lead to problems when putting in links for everyone to see. He added that although there is no law on internet use yet, it may violate another law like defamation if someone went too far.
Facebook is an international website that attracts all nationalities, but AngkorOne.com is the international website that attracts Cambodians living all over the world. To help its members get around any legal problems, AngkorOne.com, a Khmer social networking site with nearly 14,000 members, have created some policies for posting things.
Steven Path, the founder and chief executive officer of AngkorOne.com, said he has staff and members to review all the content to make sure that members are respectful to one another and not get involved in political discussions. “When it comes to political attacks, we see on other websites that they attack very violently and we don’t want this to appear on AngkorOne.com,” he said.
“It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. We are not concerned about having thousands of posts every day, but we do get about 300 to 400 posts per day that are quality ones.”
By: Dara Saoyuth
This article was publish on LIFT, Issue 66 published on April 13, 2011Related Articles
- Meeting Cambodian politicians on the internet (saoyuth.wordpress.com)
- យុវជនកំពុងប្រើប្រព័ន្ធអ៊ីនធឺណិតដើម្បីផ្សព្វផ្សាយសំឡេងរបស់ពួកគេទៅកាន់ពិភពលោកទាំងមូល (saoyuth.wordpress.com)
Schools Led by Students
Although poor funding is almost certainly the main obstacle standing between Cambodian students and an internationally competitive education, it is certainly not the only thing that needs to be addressed for the Kingdom to start producing world-ready intellectuals. Dara Saoyuth looks at plans turn things around that will put students behind the wheel.
learning how to grow vegetables / by: World Education
Carrying a green sack on her right shoulder, 7-year-old Chan Eng was opening a rubbish bin along the riverside with a 10-year old boy, looking for empty cans and bottles to sell. Last year she went to a school and studied in grade 1, but three months later, she had to drop out of school because her parents, who work as scavengers, could not afford to pay for her studies. She was asked to scavenge and to make some money to support the family.
She is not the only child in this predicament. About one-third of children in Cambodia aged five to fourteen work, leaving them with less time to concentrate on school, according to a document released in January 2010 by the American Institutes for Research.
In article 48 of the Cambodian Constitution adopted in 1999, it states that “the State shall protect children from acts that are injurious to their educational opportunities,health and welfare”. It is also a government policy to provide children with basic education, from grade 1 to grade 9.
The Child Friendly School, or CFS, is a programme that has been tested and practiced in Cambodia by the Ministry of Education and its development partners in order to implement this policy.
“CFS is a school where educating techniques focus more on children’s rights and all stakeholders have to work together to produce a learning environment that is more friendly to students and to assure them that they can get knowledge, have life skills, have good behaviour and be able to live in society peacefully,”said Mom Meth, a Technical Assistant at the Secondary Department of the Ministry of Education.
The CFS programme is also focused on child centered learning, which means that children take anactive role in their learning and work in a more independent way to discover their potential and uniqueness, while the teachers’ role is to facilitate them.
There are six dimensions in the CFS programme. The first dimension is inclusive education. The second is effective learning; the third,health, safety and child protection;the fourth, gender sensitivity; the fifth, engagement with children,parents and communities; and the sixth, support from educational management structure.
The CFS pilot programme was implemented in 2000 by the Ministry of Education. Some NGOs and development partners such as UNICEF, Save the Children and Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE) are helping with some primary schools in Cambodia.
Kou Boun Kheang, a Senior Education Program Advisor at Save the Children, said the organisation has supported CFS since 2000, but is mainly focused on the first, second and sixth dimensions that relate to schools seeking out excluded children, effective learning and school management structure.
“We look around so we can clearly find children who are not able to go to school,” Kou Bounkheang said when explaining how they find excluded children. He added that after finding them, his organisation will then make contact with their parents, explain things to them and give a loan or scholarship to the family and children to make sure they can go to school.
Minister of Education Im Sethy officially approved and announced on December 14, 2007, that all schools in the country should implement the Child Friendly School programme.In the Education Sector Plan for 2006-2010 from the ministry,one priority is to initiate CFS in all 24 provinces to build some quality in basic education.
Por Sokhoeun, a director at the Hor Namhong Sangker secondary school in Kampong Cham, said he adopted the CFS programme in March 2010 and has organised classrooms, school environments,teaching and learning techniques based on the CFS programme.
“It’s different from schools that haven’t practiced the programme because here, students are mobile from one room to another according to the subjects they are studying, unlike in previous times when they had to sit in one room for all subjects,”said Por Sokhoeun. He added that this has improved the quality of education because both the students and teachers can find all the equipment they need for each subject.
Por Sokhoeun gave, as an example,a geography class where there are maps, globes, pictures and tools related to the subject of geography, so students feel they are sitting in a room full of knowledge and they can absorb as much as they want.
No matter how good the programme is, it has not yet reached all schools in the Kingdom, especially for secondary education.
Liesbeth Roolvink, a Basic Education Advisor at World Education,said: “Officially the policy refers to CFS as a policy for basic education. However, the strong focus has been on primary schools and only a small number of pilot schools in lower secondary have applied the policy so far.”
She also acknowledged that the number is expanding and mentioned the project she is working on, Improved Basic Education in Cambodia(IBEC), is being implemented in 101 secondary schools in Kampong Cham, Kratie and Siem reap,and Care International is supporting it in lower secondary schools in Ratanakiri.
“For some schools that never received support in the process of adopting CFS, this may be a little difficult and therefore, they have decided to make three different development stages, basic, medium and advanced,” said Liesbeth Roolvink. “The basic level has a small number of very basic CFS requirements that schools are expected to do and this should be possible with the use of programme based budget and guidance of district technical monitoring teams.Once schools have the basic requirements in place and successfully implemented, they will move up to the next development level and for this level, there are new and more activities that must be implemented,”she explained.
Chum Sophea, director of the primary education department at the ministry of education, agreed that the level of practicing CFS is not the same for all schools based on the resources each school has.
“In some primary schools, there are only classes from grade 1 to grade 2 or 3 with a few teachers, so practicing CFS cannot be the sameas other schools that have enough resources,” said Chum Sophea, who added that the ministry plans to build more rooms and provide more teachers for schools that don’t haveclasses from grade 1 to 6 and lack teachers, so every school can develop their level of the CFS proagramme.
“Now we have 6,767 primary schools across the country and we plan to build around 400 more this year, so with 95-96 percent of children in school presently, there will be no Cambodian children that are out of school in 2015.”
By: Dara Saoyuth This article was publish on LIFT, Issue 65 published on April 06, 2011
My stand upper – Exercise in video production course
05/04/2011 By: Dara SaoyuthIt is one week already after this video was submitted to my video production lecturer, but I just had time to upload it. I know that there are some errors in the video since it’s our practical exercise related to stand upper lesson. I was asked to act as I was at the scene reporting the situation in Japan after the damage of nuclear power plants followed by subsequent earthquake. Let’s check it out and give me some comments for future improvement!
DMC to host a party for Khmer new year
Department of Media and Communication (DMC) is celebrating a party, which is participated by all year level students, former students of DMC, foreign and Cambodian lecturers. The event covers a lot of activities including praying ceremony, Khmer traditional game, singing, dancing of new style and nice dinner. DMC always hold the party annually in order to celebrate for upcoming Khmer New Year.
02/04/2011 Text by: Sun Narin & Dara Saoyuth
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