more on handset sharing

February 4th, 2009 India, sharing behavior

Molly Steenson and I wrote an article on handset sharing, based on her fieldwork in Bangalore.  The chapter is now available in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell.  In the chapter we describe different forms of handset sharing we observed, and their relationship to the physical spaces in which we observed them. 

We saw lots of instances of basic, conspicuous sharing (X borrows Y’s phone with ’s permission). We also saw stealthy sharing (X borrows Y’s phone, and hides his tracks doesn’t make that clear).  In business settings, we observed mobiles imitating landlines, so that incoming callers were ‘place seeking’, expecting to call a partiuclar business, even if they did not know whom would pick up the line. 

Most quirky of the four modes we saw is ‘person seeking’ or ‘approxi-calling’. If X wants to find Y, but Y does not own a mobile (common among teens in Bangalore in 2006), then X might call Z if he/she thinks it is likely that Y and Z are nearby to each other. The better X knows the social habits of Y, the better chance X has of calling a mobile which will be proximate to Y at the right time of day. Y and Z are thus sharing a handset, but the sharing behavior is initiated by an external and non-proximate third party, X.  

There are many interesting papers in the volume, including “Migrant Workers and Mobile Phones“ by Fernando Paragas, which examines how mobile use provides increased opportunities for temporal and spatial simultanaeity with lives back at home.  

Vodafone on the impact of mobiles in India

January 23rd, 2009 Agriculture, India, microenterprise

Vodafone has released a new set of studies on mobiles in India as part of their Policy Paper Series. This follows important earlier volumes in the same series on Africa and M-transactions (among others). The document includes four research papers:

Kathuria, Uppal, and Mamta offer an econometric analysis of the impact of mobile.  The background sections of this paper present a clear and remarkable history of the rapid spread of mobile telephony in India.  Their theoretical contribution is a model linking mobile penetration to GNP growth at the state level (similar to what Waverman, Meschi & Fuss did in the 2005 Africa Volume in the same series.  I’m not enough of an econometrician to offer an opinion on the strength of the model, but the attempt is made to control first for the (strong) impacts of gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) on mobile use, thus isolating the impacts of rising mobile penetration on GSDP.  They suggest that “a 10% increase in mobile penetration delivers, on average a 1.2% point annual increase in output”.  They also find a threshold effect, suggesting that the positive benefits of mobiles on growth kick in disproportionately in states with higher-than-the-median penetration of 25%.

Gandhi, Mittal, and Tripathi, explore the impact of mobiles on agricultural productivity. This paper presents the results of interviews and focus groups with the users of Reuters Market Light (RML) and another market information system, IKSL, run by the Indian Farmers Cooperative Limited. It is a helpful paper, describing the priorities farmers and fishermen have for information services.  They also delve into farmers’ basic uses of mobiles for work purposes, breaking out benefits of content, mobility, and connectivity (time and travel savings). This offers a significant improvement over some other papers, which tend to conflate mobility and connectivity.   Finally, I like the way the paper mentions constraints – both that phones do not replace face to face interactions (see also Donner and Molony and Overå), and that for all the connectivity in the world, some farmers and fishermen would still face significant infrastructure barriers to acting on that information, such as the lack of roads to transport goods to market.

Sarin and Jain report the results of a survey of usage of mobile in poor urban areas. This paper has some interesting elements, particularly around observed differences in mobile use by gender (men own the phones in many households), and in the assertion that “users and non-users in some sense inhabit different networks, with users much more likely to be in networks with higher mobile usage”.  However, some methodological choices made by the researchers make it difficult to draw many generalizable insights from the survey. Users and non-users are demographically different (a point they acknowledge), but the report is just a series of comparisons of users and non-user self reports, with no statistical controls to account for demographic differences. In addition, (and unless I’m mistaken in my read of the paper), in many cases, users and non-users were asked distinctly different questions. While nonusers were asked ‘baseline’ questions about changes to productivity, earnings, social networks, etc. over the last year, users were asked specifically how the mobile altered these various elements.  This makes comparison quite difficult, and I would have preferred to see the same baseline wording used in the nonuser and user groups.  That said, there is probably a lot that can be done with the survey data (1700 cases!) 

Uppal, M., & Kathuria, R. (2009) consider the impact of mobiles in the SME sector. They touch on a question near and dear to me, so I’m happy to see other researchers focusing on SMEs and microenterprises.  However, while, there are a few anecdotes on subsectors of the informal economy (such as vegetable vendors) and some good sidebars on the mobile-power success stories of individual entrepreneurs. This is more of a forward-looking commentary than a traditional research paper. Perhaps its most important contributions are the examples of mobile-enabled businesses such as labornet, just dial, and radio cabs. These are larger organizations than MSEs, but mobile connectivity is at their core. The paper is worth a read if only for these examples.

Nokia life tools

November 4th, 2008 Agriculture, India, hybrid media, m-learning, text messaging

Nokia announced its intentions to provide agricultural information and education content to lower-end feature handsets in India.  The service, called Nokia Life Tools, will wrap an SMS data channel with a graphic-rich interface.   Reuters Marketlight is the content partner for the agriculture side.  Idea Cellular is the first operator to sign up. OnMobile, another Indian mobile content provider, is also on-board, contributing astrology and ringtone services. 

Over time, it will be interesting to see the relative take-up of the various instrumental and expressive services on offer.  In the meantime, think the fusion of a graphic interface and the SMS channel is particularly notable for developing-world contexts. (Also see the mobile-XL browser).  These forms bypass the need for a GPRS-enabled handset or data plan, and stretch the capabilities of the ‘humble’ SMS. 

Ken Banks at kiwanja.net has a longer write-up.

too much news – example, grameen and obopay

August 8th, 2008 India, m-banking

As much I enjoy posting to this blog, it is clearly not the place to go for a comprehensive run-down of all-things-mobile.  There’s just too much news and I don’t have a chance to comment on everything. If I crack 2 posts a week I feel prolific. The daily dish, this is not.

Today’s example: the announcement that Grameen solutions and Obopay are launching a “bank a billion” initiative in India and Bangladesh, with m-banking at its core. It is a great story but one I don’t know much about beyond what I’ve seen in the press coverage, to which others have already linked.     

So, please note the new feed on the lower-left hand column of the blog.  This contains links to interesting posts I’ve recently read on other blogs about mobiles, ICTD, m-banking, etc.   Going forward, I’ll try to keep this feed stocked almost daily with good stuff, even if I don’t comment on the content in a standalone post.    

just give a missed call

July 19th, 2008 India, beeping/miss calls

Why bother with a toll-free number?  Just tell prospective customers to “give a missed call”. Everyone knows that means you will call them back (and thus pay for the phone call).

Thanks to Rikin Gandhi for spotting this sign –a bit of evidence of the ubiquity of missed calls as part of the accepted communications repertoire in India.

If any readers have seen similar signs elsewhere, please let me know.

Stages of design in technology for global development

June 20th, 2008 India, microenterprise

My colleagues from the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at MSR India and I have an article appearing in the new issue of IEEE Computer.  It both provides an overview of some of our team’s work as well as an argument to expand the conceptualization of an ICTD intervention/project beyond that of the technology itself.

We believe that three elements are critical for progress in ICT4D research: time in the field, honesty about what works, and willingness to accept simple technical solutions.

Updated m-banking paper

May 29th, 2008 India, m-banking

Camilo Tellez and I have completed a substantially-revised version of the m-banking paper I presented at the 2007 ICA preconference on mobile communication.  

The new paper will appear as part of a special issue of the Asian Journal of Communication on ICTD, edited by Mark Levy.  Here is a .pdf of the pre-publication draft, which will remain on this site until the special issue is available.

Title: Mobile banking and economic development: Linking adoption, impact, and use

Abstract:  Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Yet relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/m-payments use. Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective “adoption” or “impact” research. Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community. The paper identifies three crosscutting themes from the broader literature—amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multi-dimensional definition of trust—each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.

My review of mobile research, appearing in The Information Society

May 6th, 2008 Africa, India, Latin America / LAC, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, m-learning, microenterprise, sharing behavior, text messaging

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the research literature about mobile use in the developing world.   I first presented a version of this review at a conference in Hong Kong in 2005.  Now, thanks to Leopoldina Fortunati’s efforts to pull together a special issue of The Information Society, the review has finally been published.  Thanks also to the editors at the Information Society, and to the reviewers who provided such valuable feedback at various stages.

There’s a lot more of the literature to cover than there was when I started this back in 2005.  And, since it is an interdisciplinary review, I’m sure to have missed some citations.  Nevertheless, it has been a great exercise for me to get a sense of what’s out there, and to become familiar with the diverse work of an amazing set of researchers along the way.

I hope some of you find this review a useful input to your own work. 

Thanks everyone! 

Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature.  The Information Society 24(3), 140-159.

Abstract
This paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research. 

Jan Chipchase in the NYT

April 11th, 2008 Africa, India, m-banking

Sara Corbett just completed a lengthy piece on mobiles and economic development for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.   Its primary focus is the interesting and influential work of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, and it also touches on other exciting developments in the field, including Grameen Village Phone and M-Pesa to kiwanja.net, and the World Resources Institute. 
This paragraph, in particular, is a nice summary of what a lot of us are up to:

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

Is today the day?

April 11th, 2008 India

With over 250m lines in service, India is poised to surpass the US as the world’s second largest mobile market.   According to TRAI, this will happen sometime in mid-April.  Could be today….