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.
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more here on why the 'west' and the developing world are travelling down different paths with global communications innovation.