Posts Tagged ‘mobiles’

During the tragic post-election violence in Kenya late last year, a couple of technologists with ties to Kenya created Ushahidi, an innovative web service that allows witnesses to report crisis news from their mobile phone or computer. From the Swahili word for “testimony,” this non-profit has created a platform which allows for the crowdsourcing of reporting. It has already been proven useful in South Africa to track anti-immigration violence, and I’m sure sundry other uses will pop up.

I’m really excited for the possibilities this opens up. Ushahidi was an important tool for making the crisis in Kenya more transparent and capitalizes on the mobile penetration in Africa. Allowing more people to have the ability to express what they see is an important goal and Ushahidi is doing so in an open-source way which will make this as accessible as possible to all. Congratulations to the team!

The WSJ reports a surge of outside interest in the African telecommunications firms. With a population of nearly 1 billion people and a mobile phone penetration below 30%, the potentials for growth are astounding. Many non-African players are recognizing this including American hedge funds, British telecom giant Vodafone and Indian investors. Notably absent are American carriers including Verizon who today announced the purchase of Alltel to become America’s largest mobile-phone company.

In a way, I’m happy that AT&T et al. are not getting involved in Africa. They have shown a failure to innovate in the USA and using their billions to buy a stake in a quickly evolving market would likely lead to stagnation. I hope that the new players, regardless of location, recognize the need for investment to build out the networks and technologies in Africa.

Kevin Kelly has a new post where he relates a recent speech by Iqbal Quadir who is the founder of GrameenPhone, a Bangladeshi service which provides cell phones to those who traditionally could not afford them. The phone serves as a business (rented to others) and a source of connectivity to others. Quadir believes this distributed entrepreneurial approach is essential to eradicating global poverty.

Quadir is deeply skeptical of government spending to alleviate poverty, especially in unitary states. In his native home of Bangladesh, “everything of importance” was located in the capital, Dacca. I found this to be the case when researching development in Thailand last semester; Bangkok is disproportionately wealthy and healthy compared to the majority of the country - agricultural regions. The paper (PDF) I wrote sought ways to decentralize the state so that opportunities for advancement were present outside of the Bangkok Metropolitan Region. In both Thailand and Bangladesh, this centralization has led to corruption and stagnation. When all money flows through a couple hands, the potential for corruption is increased.

Of course, centralization has tangible benefits: increased productivity through ease of communication is an obvious one, efficiency another. However, Quadir thinks that “technologies that connect” are the key to bringing these advantages to decentralized systems.

Mobile phones are demonstrably effective in this regard. I do, however, worry that given the economies of scale and monopoly status of many telecoms, a new centralized power does, in fact, emerge. Although the Grameen organizations sought a mutually beneficial business ecosystem which alleviated poverty through profits, other businesses, ISPs included, may not be as socially responsible. Frequently, the head of the mobile phone networks in developing countries are related to the country’s leader. Serious thought should be given to the intermediaries’ ability to control “technologies that connect.”

Quadir is now examining other industries which might be “decentralizable” so that the benefits of, say, energy production can be distributed.

[Photo: MIT Legatum Center]

On Wednesday, the White House announced that it was permitting Americans to send Cuban relatives cell phones. This followed Raul Castro’s policy change which allowed the ownership of cell phones in the oppressive one-party state. To me this is a no-brainer and hopefully indicative of a broader American policy which recognizes the failure of the 40 year embargo which has neither removed Communist rule or bettered the economic position of the Cubans.

Not only should free speech and its tools be encouraged in the States, the agency enhancement - economic, political and social - which results from mobile communication should be actively supported abroad. For example, amidst Kenyan post-election turmoil earlier this year, a tool was created called Ushahidi which allowed Kenyans to report in real-time, via text message, incidences of violence. More generally, the merits of cell phones are often noted when producers need to determine distant market prices.

However, even though Cubans may now own cell phones, questions of infrastructure remain. A joint venture between the Cuban carrier and Telecom Italia is said to be expanding, but as long as we are in the business of providing wireless communication to Cuba (as we do with Radio and TV Marti) why not provide cell phone coverage and encourage Americans to send unlocked mobile devices?

No sooner had I returned from Berkman@10 than I learned of BlabNote, the purely vocal social network. Instead of interfacing through a web browser, like Facebook or MySpace, a user just calls BlabNote which recognizes the caller ID and allows them to do a number of typical operations: create groups, leave voice mails, conference call, etc. As TechCrunch puts it, BlabNote will have a long, uphill battle.

I’m interested in BlabNote for another reason though. As I chronicled in my recent post, mobile phones are incredibly pervasive in the world. Within 5 to 10 years more than 80% of people will own a cell phone and these will be increasingly powerful. This GapMinder animation shows the rapid adoption of mobile devices throughout the world.

Mobile communications right now are predominately vocal. Although advanced phones do include Internet browsing, the main form of communication is spoken. A major benefit to developing world users is that they need not worry about literacy. Where educational institutions are weak, vast swaths of the population can be illiterate or even if they can read and write in a local language, little online content is available outside of major languages like Mandarin or English. For example, take a look at the distribution of Wikipedia languages where English more than doubles the closest competitor.

These two trends make voice-only services a viable alternative in the developing world. The most obvious problem? The speech-recognition software which has improved dramatically for English is not available in Cheyenne or Zulu. If BlabNote could port the technology to other languages, they might have the possibility to provide a useful service to consumers and businesses in the third world who place great importance on mobile phones.

The second day of Berkman@10 was less structured and involved a number of smaller panels and discussions. Haven taken a course in economic and political development, I was particularly excited to see the panels on the developing world’s use of technology.

The “Open World” session was led by a number of people doing work in the area. Key points I took away were the importance of both “hard” topics like infrastructure and policy and “soft” ones like culture and language. Because of the oft-discussed digital divide, there is a “latent ingenuity” in poor countries where people are not given the agency to create or innovate with the same ease of their rich peers. Even where ICT infrastructure exists, it is often costlier; for example, African ICT traffic must flow through third parties (e.g. British ISPs) driving up the cost in net hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you create policies which induce infrastructure construction? These are difficult tasks which Ethan Zuckerman thought were possible to avoid in certain cases. He gave the example of cell phone service in DR Congo where an entrepreneur was able to start with just one tower and built it into a billion dollar business, piece by piece. In other words, where nothing exists, something is better than nothing.

The conversation shifted to issues of access. Frequently Internet access is considered a panacea, but access is not everything: people need skills and abilities - literacy is a major one. While the Internet requires literacy, many times in English as local language content is lacking, mobile devices rely on vocal communication which is more accessible. Also, because people are less likely to trust third party institutions or sources in the developing world, mobile phones offer opportunities to communicate with the social network people already trust. Where people are accessing content, say in Central Asia where Beth Kolko does a lot of research, they want entertainment and sports news, not just agricultural prices or weather.

Finally, on one last issue of infrastructure, Professor Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras lamented the poor state of power sources. Not enough effort has been put into developing inexpensive, reliable power sources which can stand up to the unique tests of the developing world.

The second session I attended was led by Ellen Miller and Micah Sifry who are involved with the important Sunlight Foundation which works to promote government transparency. Please see this post for a lot of the great sources they referenced.

The next session I attended was in much the same vein as the first. It was led by Beth Kolko and Michael Best. It was framed as a debate over the relative benefits of the OLPC versus mobile phones. Is a mobile phone solely a communication and information delivery device, not a platform for deep/rich content, like the OLPC? Or is the mobile phone the best ICT environment for the global South? An audience member for Nokia had interesting commentary about the richness of voice and the difficulty in determining the difference between phones and laptops. Storage, portability and programmability are no longer the domain of just one type of device; a convergence has occurred. Unanswered question: has a convergence of use followed?

Since technical capability may be the same in many cases, what are the policy and ideological implications? Discussion turned to the role of intermediaries. As you know, cell phone carriers exert incredible control over their networks (even though it has lessened slightly recently). With 4/5 of the world owning a cell phone in 5-10 years, do we want these companies to exert such control over the major ICT? Using Zittrain’s framing in his book “The Future of the Internet,” are these devices bound to be sterile (that is without the generative capabilities of PCs or the Internet)? I noted that even though these devices are sold as-is, the presentations of Jan Chipchase suggest that people are quite adept at forcing generativity - opening their phones and forcing new capabilities out. I’ll have more to say about this as soon as I finish Zittrain’s book.

The final session I went to was led by Jonathan Zittrain about “Netizenship” which is his term for the ways in which people vote through their bandwidth or CPU cycles. When people edit Wikipedia or utilize Folding@Home, they are signaling an approval of the goal - universal knowledge or cancer research. Zittrain and a team have created Herdict (not open yet) which will work with the OpenNet Initiative to better quantify and reify the phenomenon of Internet filtering. It is a great example of the entrepreneurial nature of Berkman.

Overall, the conference was eye-opening and enlightening. It gave me a lot of leads and ideas over which to stew. More to come as a result.