Most mobiles…

Shareideas.org  and the ICT4D section of the World Bank’s Development Gateway both recently highlighted an application called MobilED.  It is a mobile-learning application, piloted in South Africa, which allows students to (a) query Wikipedia via SMS messages (b) hear the results of the query played back to them as audio text and (c) post new entries to their own class’s wiki by recording audio off their handsets.

I haven’t seen the system first hand, but I think it is interesting for two reasons:

1) It is a hybrid media form, which complicates all the theorizing some of us like to do about text messages, mobile calls, internet sites, etc.  What is it? A web application? A mobile application? A mobile web application? My bet is the kids don’t care as long as it helps them learn and is easy to use.

2) Its hybridity accomplishes something still relatively rare: it breaks down the walls between web content and SMS content. In doing so, it demonstrates a way in which some rich, dynamic internet content can be made accessible to (and can be created by) communities using relatively affordable & common basic mobile handsets. Since the worldwide ratio of mobile users to internet users is roughly 2:1, this is a good thing for both groups.  

Vodafone, Nokia, and Nokia-Siemens Networks have released a new collection of papers on m-banking in the developing world, called “The transformational potential of m-transactions”. As was the case with Vodafone’s earlier collection on mobile phones in Africa, the report has attracted a fair amount of attention (e.g., Economist,  NYT, blog1, blog2).  The word “transformational” makes a few more appearances than some might prefer, but all and all, it is a great addition to a small but growing literature on m-banking.

Three of the six core papers deal with regulatory and business model issues.  One contrasts some of the leading systems (m-Pesa, Wizzit, and Globe) in more detail.  The remaining two describe user-level experiences with systems in Kenya and Egypt.

The more granular user data is found in the piece by Walia and Goodman on Airtime Services in Egypt.  Airtime transfer is sort of a cousin/antecedent to currency-based m-banking; it allows users to share load between accounts, which opens up all kinds of opportunities to share, barter and transact in real time. I am unaware of any other detailed surveys of airtime transfer behavior, so I was happy to see their segmentation of airtime sharers into “heavy users”, “sharers”, “receivers”, and “light users”.   Their paper points to some of differences in norms and expectations at play between, say, proximate families sharing minutes, émigrés sending minutes back home to their families, and business partners using airtime as a proxy for currency (which the authors point out is the exception, not the norm).  One of Walia and Goodman’s propositions is that “balance transfer use supports social networks”.   Probably so, although as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’d like to see more attention paid to how social networks support and structure balance transfer use.

The parody site mutiny.in has released ’secret details’ of Apple’s plans for the iPhone India Edition. Among them is MMS — in this case, Miss Call Management Service, which “allows you to make calls to friends without giving them a mill-second to pick up your call”. Might be useful…particularly if your friends are quick to answer their mobiles.

The spoof requires a kernel of truth; missed calls are indeed pervasive in India.

Kudos to Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth for arranging a great conference in Sydney last week.  Mobile Media 2007 welcomed attendees from around the world, and did a great job pushing new themes within the mobile research community.

There were more than a few papers dealing with mobiles in the developing world, although they were interspersed throughout the conference panels.  Thus, I missed a few good papers, including Thomas Apperley’s talk on mobile gaming inVenezuela, and most of the papers about SMS/MMS in China. 

I did however, get to see Jack Qiu’s presentation on the ‘Information Have-Less’ and their use of ‘Working-Class ICTs’, a topic he continues to explicate with a great mix of ethnographic/micro observations and macro-level summary data from the rapidly changing telecommunications environment in China. (earlier presentation here)

Genevieve Bell also touched on issues relevant to mobiles in the developing world, during her keynote. She mentioned the phenomenal success of handsets and services to support the needs of Muslim users (example), and mentioned beeping/miss call behavior. In general, Genevieve emphasized the importance of exploring the regulatory and infrastructural factors which both support and complicate the ways people use mobiles in different locations. Indeed, she questioned whether there is really a single device called a ‘mobile’, asking us to consider instead the whole range of mobile devices and functions, notably GPS.

I presented a small paper on differences in perspectives towards mobile phones vs. PCs, among small businesses in urban India. This is based on a Q sort I put together a few months ago, but only with the assistance of Gaana Nair, Gautam Prakash, and Arundathi Vishwanath, all students (past or current) at Christ College in Bangalore. Thanks again!