A MobileActive.org whitepaper on scaling mobile services for development

Scaling Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org has published a whitepaper entitled “Scaling Mobile Services for Development: What Will It Take?”.

The paper, originially commissioned for the World Economic Forum, discusses the opportunities and critical success factors for scaling m-services – services and products for development delivered over the mobile platform. It discusses some of the barriers for scaling m-services and it addresses how industry, donors, and civil society organizations can move from some of the many promising pilot projects in m-health, m-agriculture, and m-payments to economically viable m-services that increase the quality of life and drive economic growth for the poorest of people.

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January 12, 2010 | Experientia | Comments Closed

In praise of design-hacking

Windmill hack The Design & Society group within the UK’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has published a pamphlet by Scott Burnham, entitled “Finding the truth in systems: in praise of design-hacking”.

In this pamphlet, writer Scott Burnham traces the phenomenon of hacking from one originally associated with audacious breaches of private electronic systems, through to one which increasingly invokes a broader range of stunts and sabotages of convention and asks: is design-hacking merely another post-modern phase in the history of design, or does it reveal a civic ingenuity and resourcefulness that decades of industrially-fed consumerism has masked?

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January 7, 2010 | Experientia | Comments Closed

Designing mobile money services for emerging markets

Sente Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase has posted an in-depth presentation and paper on designing mobile money services for emerging markets:

“Hang around a telecoms industry conference long enough and you start to get big-number fatigue – as one stack of seemingly impressive statistic blurs into the next. The numbers that have stuck with me over the years came from our research into the lives of the working illiterate: people who have jobs and want to keep them – spending time with people who work 16 hours days, 7 days a week with just a few days off per year is not uncommon. Who benefits more from the introduction of mobile money management services – a white-collar worker in New York City or a migrant manual labourer living out of a dormitory in Xi’an? For many access to mobile money services is a game-changer.

For practitioners working in this space (hei) the most useful section is likely to be on mobile phone practices and behaviours: covering mediated use from the perspective of customers; agents and the service providers themselves; charging; and multiple-SIM card practices.”

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November 9, 2009 | Experientia | Comments Closed

Mobile phones for development and profit: a win-win scenario

Singh Mobile phones for development and profit: a win-win scenario
Rohit Singh
Overseas Development Institute, 2009

The number of mobile subscribers globally is estimated to have reached four billion in 2008 (ITU, 2008), with mobile penetration reaching 61%. Around 58% of subscribers are in developing countries, and subscriber growth in Africa – more than 50% per year – is the highest in the world.

Studies have shown that this rapid increase in mobile penetration has contributed significantly to economic growth. Fuss, Meschi and Waverman (2005) looked at 92 countries, both developed and developing, to estimate the impact of mobile phones on economic growth for the period 1980 to 2003. They found that a 10% difference in mobile penetration levels over the entire sample period implies a 0.6% difference in growth rates between otherwise identical developing nations. The effect of mobiles was twice as large in developing countries as in developed ones (Waverman, 2005).

Mobile phones have brought three kinds of benefits (id21, 2007).

First, incremental benefits, improving what people already do – offering them faster and cheaper communication, often substituting for costly and risky journeys. Fishermen in India, for example, can earn more money and waste less fish by phoning coastal markets to see which market has a shortage of supply.

Second, transformational benefits that offer something new. Innovative applications, such as m-banking and m-commerce, are bringing banking services to millions for the first time, and enabling people to use mobile phones to pay for goods and services.

Third, production benefits that result from the creation of new livelihoods, not only through professional telecommunications jobs but also through activities like re-selling air-time or phone cards. Since the liberalisation of Nigeria’s telecommunications sector in 2000, the industry has become a key source of new jobs in the economy, employing about 5,500 professionals, and responsible, indirectly, for another 450,000 jobs.

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(via MobileActive)
November 4, 2009 | Experientia | Comments Closed

Student projects explore innovative cellphone uses in developing world

Head MIT News reports on how MIT students are exploring innovative cellphone uses in the developing world.

“Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are using phones to help people, especially in developing nations, to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they’re going and even diagnose their ailments.

Some of these projects will be field-tested this summer as student groups fan out around the world to fine-tune and improve their concepts and launch new businesses. Many were developed as entries for MIT’s IDEAS or $100K business competitions, or as part of the MIT Media Lab’s NextLab program to develop cellphone applications geared toward the developing world.”

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(via textually.org)
November 2, 2009 | Experientia | Comments Closed