Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The mobile: more common than a toilet.
NYTimes; Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge.
America went into a frenzy last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.
Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.
The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.
From Kenya to Colombia to South Africa — the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology.
In Africa the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone. These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa.
In India, the cellphone is used in citizen election monitoring, and in equipping voters, via text message, with information on candidates’ incomes and criminal backgrounds. Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories, offer job-hunting services via text message.
Recognizing the role of cellphones in developing nations, the White House last year made a point of releasing President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo, in 13 languages over text message.
Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”
Because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.
Read more here on why the 'west' and the developing world are travelling down different paths with global communications innovation.
America went into a frenzy last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.
Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.
The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.
From Kenya to Colombia to South Africa — the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology.
In Africa the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone. These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa.
In India, the cellphone is used in citizen election monitoring, and in equipping voters, via text message, with information on candidates’ incomes and criminal backgrounds. Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories, offer job-hunting services via text message.
Recognizing the role of cellphones in developing nations, the White House last year made a point of releasing President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo, in 13 languages over text message.
Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”
Because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.
Read more here on why the 'west' and the developing world are travelling down different paths with global communications innovation.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Interesting article Matt. I was surprised the American writer ignored all technical factors, including the telecoms market background:
The growth of mobile in the United States was hampered by poor coverage and complicated, competing standards; by the existence of a good reliable land-based set-up in non-State hands (Bell telephone and the baby bells) and by the fact that initially at least, the recipient of a call had to pay for all of the "cell" phone call, which didn't make callees keen to prolong these calls! (later the cost was split 50:50). International 'roaming' ability was not a priority. It was hard to innovate with this background.
The growth in mobile in the third world has been entirely on the back of the enormously successful GSM standard developed in Europe. We take GSM for granted, because all our mobile phones are made to this standard. GSM grew so well in Europe for a host of reasons, not least because it developed outside the clutches of State telecoms monopolies in Europe's biggest countries, which monopolies often offered indifferent service and less innovation. Customers flocked to alternatives providers. European governments sought a common technical standard, Europe-wide.
The unified GSM system now adds more customers globally each year than all the "cell" phone customers in the US. Costs for GSM phones has plummeted and innovation has soared. The US is now engaged in a slow fitful move to GSM but are lagging in mobiles generally. A notable case of Europe getting its act together, also a story about the importance of agreed international standards.
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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I think the journalist was basically trying to make that point; that the US risks on the one hand over innovating for an internal market with shiney & expensive gadgets like the ipad and missing out with global communication trends which can be cheaper and more effective, such as the mobile innovations he pointed out. He's implying that global communication trends may already be coming from different areas of the world.
I like another example I've read about before which is the farmers in Africa using mobiles to track market prices for their crops within their country/region as they go to their local market to sell to a middleman, who is no longer relied upon entirely for that market price info. Being ripped off is a less likely scenario.
Saw a BBC News 24 piece tonight about internet use. It compared Korea to (I think) a village in Nigera. Two Korean families were asked to go without for a week and report back how that changed their lives. Korea has the highest connectivity and fastest broadband in the world. They actually started playing with their kids and talking to their neighbours and shopping locally. :) The two Nigerian individuals were given mobiles by the BBC and connection time paid for. They got very excited by the experience of being 'connected to the world' and didn't want to give up the experience. The BBC let them keep the phones.
The report said that 1.5 billion people are internet connected and that that will double fairly quickly. Most of that increase coming from the developed nations and a lot of that will be via mobile.
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The American writer appears to be oblivious to the technical background I've outlined. As a writer in a big country, he is less able to put these things into the wider context required. It's no accident that any of the observations he makes, have happened.
Any suggestion that the iPad is going down some techno dead end is seriously wide of the mark. The iPad will be an enormous success, just as the iPhone before it: and Apple made damn sure that the iPhone was GSM compliant. These things also act as a spur to boost the lagging GSM infrastructure in the US.
The iPad will create a huge new market for tablet devices that was also seriously lagging due to its previous dependence on "innovation" from that well-known convicted monopolist, Microsoft. If the Beast of Redmond had been split up at the end of the 1990s (into separate App and OS companies) as the initial Court ruling called for, the US would not have lost so much ground. The election of Bush & the Republicans in 2000 caused the Department of Justice to ease off on MS. The Beast of Redmond has tried to stifle innovation on anything except their old DOS-Windows platform.
As things have turned out, Apple has managed to out-manoeuvre and is now out-innovating Micro$oft, still deeply wedded to the old DOS-"Windows" cash-cow operating system for PC boxes. The monopoly supplier of PC operating systems was never well placed with regard to the Internet. But now, MS is poorly placed in the biggest growth area of all: portable devices, while a genuine innovator (Apple) has never been better positioned. (It is possible that within 24 months Apple's market capitalisation will surpass The Beast. Apple's shares reached $238 recently, an all time high.)
The iPad does not exist in conflict with the development of mobile: on the contrary, in the US at a minimum, it should spur deployment of the global standard and eventually, trickle down to the third world.
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