Most mobiles…

A little while ago, Ken Banks and Kiwanja.net announced the winners of the first nGOmobile competition, designed to illustrate how grassroots use of mobile communincation (particularly SMS/text messaging) can be applied in creative and powerful ways.  You can find details on the winners in the announcement here.

Or, check out the press release

In Kenya, the Centre for Training and Integrated Research for ASAL Development
(CETRAD) will begin using SMS to work with local communities to promote the
protection and sustainable use of environmental resources.

In Uganda, NETWAS will launch an SMS-based service for rural communities allowing
them to ask a range of water-based questions on topics such as sanitation, hygiene,
water harvesting and water technologies.

In Mexico, The Equilibrium Fund will deploy a range of SMS services to help rural
Central American and Mexican communities solve problems of deforestation,
poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and the marginalisation of women.

In Azerbaijan, Digital Development will begin helping grassroots and politically
excluded people understand their human and legal rights, and to engage them
further in the political process, through their mobile phones.

Each of the winner’s models contains a plan to leverage the flexibility and interactivity of the medium in a way that extends beyond pushing bulk SMS messages to otherwise passive receivers.  The Uganda and Kenya models deepen the two-way interactions between the NGOs and their communities; in the Mexico case, the NGO will host a system that will allow small Maya Nut producers to coordinate with customers. In Azerbaijan, the messages start as get-out-and-vote reminders, but participants are encouraged to forward the messages to 5 of their friends/family, creating potentially powerful network effects.

It would be great to see updates from some of these winners as the projects go live. 

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.

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….