Most mobiles…

MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2^nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore.   It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative.  This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones.  The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.

Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana.   This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic.  Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana?  If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.

Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.

Warner Brothers is releasing a re-make of the 2003 Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” (Chakushin ari) in early January.  I haven’t seen either version of the film, but I gather that the mobile occupies a central spot in the plot, allowing unfortunate folks to hear voicemail messages left by their future selves.   The messages are not good news.

On the missed call theme, the film draws from a form of the practice called Wangiri or “one and cut”. At the time of the 2003 film, Wangiri was frequently used to deliver random solicitations for pay-per-call telephone sex line services.  The use of missed calls to drive people to recorded messages (sexy or otherwise) is not so common in India, since it seems that relatively few people use voicemail. 

As for the phantasmal, there are scholarly assessments of the mobile handset as magic device or portal to the afterlife by Jim Katz (see chapter 2) Bart Barendregt, and Jane Francis Agbu, among others. Bart’s paper, The Ghost in the Phone and other Tales of Indonesian Modernity, was originally presented at a conference on Mobiles and Asian Modernities in 2005, and will appear in an upcoming special issue of the Information Society. 

By the way, my literature review on mobiles in the developing world will appears in the same issue; in the meantime, an updated/temporary/working version of the review is available here.