Most mobiles…

Apologies for the lengthy absence – it’s been an unusually busy stretch. 

My paper on “The Rules of Beeping” is now available as part of the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). 

I’ve had lots of fun this month speaking to the broader community about beeping and missed calls, and I’m grateful to many of you for your interest. A piece from Andrew Havens at Reuters kicked off this round of discussion, which has carried into German, Swiss, and Indonesian venues (at least), plus to the Scientific American Blog. 

I also had a chance to do a podcast interview with Kamla Bhatt on beeping/missed calls this week; part one of the interview is here.  I cover a lot of the same ground in the interview as in as the paper…in case some of you prefer just an occasional ‘um’ or ‘ahh’ mixed in with your communication theory.

It was a pleasure to compare notes with Andrew Heavens at Reuters about beeping and missed calls in Africa.  Andrew, based in Khartoum, has just completed an article: Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”  

I had not heard the Ethiopian term for the practice  – “Miskin” (Pitiful) — until now.  It’s perfect. Also good to hear  another datapoint on the proportion of calls on the network which are beeps/missed calls: 

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

I’m sure it varies from network to network, but this instance of 25% of the total dialed calls per day is in line with other estimates I’ve found.

The article mentions an upcoming paper in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.   It is not live yet, but tThe paper is a significantly revised version of my ICA paper from a couple of years ago.   I’ll keep the ICA paper on this site until the JCMC paper is available.

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

Putting people first highlights a new piece of research, which makes me wish I read French. 

The French newspaper Le Monde reports on new research, published today, that shows how mobile phones are increasingly becoming objects of collective use.

The research, which involved six months of field observations and interviews, was commissioned by the French Association of Mobile Operators and managed by researchers of Gripic, a research group of the information sciences school Celsa at the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne.

For monoglots like me, the post on putting people first has relatively lengthy translations of some of the findings, which include observations of family sharing patterns as well as beeping/missed calls.  It’s not exactly focused on the developing world, but the beeping and the sharing make it worth mentioning here.

The BBC reports that Ericsson is providing equipment to bring mobile coverage to the Millennium Villages in Africa.  These villages are the foci of major pilots/experiments in holistic approaches to poverty reduction.  The partnership is great news, as ICTs (and mobiles in particular) are part of the puzzle.

Many of my former colleagues at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are working on the Millennium Villages Project, which is coordinated in collaboration with the UN.

Thanks to a (rare?) confluence of market forces, steady innovation and careful regulation, Most of the world’s population now lives under mobile phone signal, yet the economics of reaching the remain poor rural populations remain challenging. Experiments and pilots like the one announced by Ericsson and the Millennium Villages will be very helpful at this stage.  It is imporant to carefully track how phone ownership and use takes off in the villages, since the patterns that emerge will give us more information on the strength of demand, and the conditions under which any micro/targeted interventions might be necessary (and feasible). 

Recently, I attended HOIT 2007—Home/Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion.  Hosted at IIT-Madras, this was the first time the conference has been held outside the US or Europe. The “next billion” theme of this year’s version provided an umbrella for ICT4D discussions, and included a keynote by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala. 

I presented an updated version of my thoughts on m-banking—although the basic paper is unchanged—as part of a panel called “Living and Livelihoods: ICTs and the Blurring Domestic and Economic Spheres in Emerging Economies”. The panel’s other presenters were my MSR colleague Nimmi Rangaswamy (ICTs in middle class Indian families, with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing), Jan Blum from Nokia Design (street-smart businesses in China and Brazil), and Vinod Gopinath of Novatium Solutions (an overview of Novatium’s netPC).

There were only a few presentations which directly addressed mobiles-in-the-developing-world. Of those, the keynote by David Frohlich of the Digital World Research Centre about the Storybank Project was particularly interesting, Storybank is exploring the use of simple, affordable ICTs to capture to stuff of everyday life in villages in the developing world (David called it community centered design). As the Storybank website explains:

Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focusing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information

This general approach has a long history (e.g., Through Navajo Eyes), but mobile technologies open up new possibilities for these initiatives to capitalize on the handset’s affordances for simultaneity, customization, and ubiquity. New projects like Storybank can help us explore the boundaries of mobile appropriation and community use.

Speaking of digital libraries, some of concepts highlighted by Storybank remind me of similar efforts in the Digital Green project, led by my colleagues Rikin Gandhi and Rajesh Veeraraghavan at MSRI.  Digital green is focused specifically on agricultural productivity, but also relies on content generated by members of the community rather than on content created outside.

The logic of blurring the user/producer dichotomy, so central to recent developments in new media and social software, is currently finding its way into all sorts of interesting projects in the developing world; Storybank, Digital Green, and MobilED are just a few.

I found this on LIRNEasia’s blog today — a pointer to an interesting article on Grameen Village Phone by Richard Shaffer at Fast Company.  The whole thing is worth a look, but the point is this: as more people in Bangladesh acquire mobile phones, operating a village phone franchise isn’t quite as lucrative as it used to be.

Ten years ago, Begum provided the sole telephone in Patira and the surrounding area, the only connection for nearly 10,000 people. Today, she must vie with 284 other Village Phone operators nearby, plus all the cell phones her neighbors have bought for themselves as prices have come down. As a result, Begum’s phone rentals these days bring in monthly profits of only $22. “If I didn’t have so many other businesses,” she told me, “I couldn’t afford to be in this one.” Says her loan officer, Salim Khan, general manager of a Grameen Bank branch: “She is fortunate that she began when she did. Today, poor women who go into the phone business stay poor.”

Of course, this general shift toward handset ownership and increased ‘teledensity’ isn’t surprising – there are clear advantages to owning a phone of one’s own.  Thanks to phone ladies, people who previously could not make calls at all are now able to place calls, from time to time. Meanwhile, new mobile owners, who previously had to rely on public phones, now can make and receive calls, whenever they want.

But the shared phone dynamic isn’t disappearing entirely (yet). For the time being, it is just getting more complex.  As detailed in the article, Begum is losing clients in three ways 1) some are buying their own handset. 2) some are going to other, presumably more convenient village phones and 3) some are borrowing from an increasingly broad range of friends and family.  I’d like to understand the relative importance of (2) vs (3), and the choices non-handset-owning people make about when to use either option. My hunch is that relying on a shared (friendly) phone has both advantages and disadvantages over the village payphone—but some more data would be helpful here.

Here is a nice piece in the New Scientist, outlining some of the ways smartphones are being used in a variety of important initiatives in the developing world: microfinance, m-banking, civil society, health surveillance, and education.  The crux/core quote: 

“Smartphones are probably much more revolutionary for developing countries,” says John Canny, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is creating educational video games that run on smartphones… “Here smartphones are a bit gimmicky. In the developing regions you have hostile conditions for a PC so phones have a lot of potential to become the computing platform for people,” says Canny.

The article starts by describing some applications which run on basic handsets, and then moves on to detail those which are utilizing more advanced functionality like photography, audio recording, and data transfer. I’d put a slightly finer point on things, and would emphasize that hardware and connectivity costs still limit the settings into which smartphones can be deployed.  What the more broad-based, often occasional, applications lack in processing power they make up in accessibility and ubiquity.  For example, the M-PESA system, like many m-banking systems, runs as well on a $30 handset as it does on a smart $300 handset.

On the other hand, we are seeing fascinating smartphone initiatives, where a relatively small number of devices are distributed into specialized settings with relatively intense informational needs (such as classrooms or microfinance organizations). The costs of the smartphones are often surmountable as long as the devices can be dedicated to certain high-value tasks, or shared between lots of people.  As the cost of smartphone functionality comes down, and as data access becomes more available and affordable, we’ll see these distinctions blur, and the set of possibilities will continue to expand.

One additional comment on the headline, which I think does the otherwise informative article a disservice. Smartphones are a helpful and affordable way to accomplish many of the tasks for which previously one might have wanted to use a PC. But smartphones are not, as the article’s headline asserts, “the PCs of the developing world.” The developing world is now and will be characterized by a higher ratio of mobiles to PCs, but that does not make PCs irrelevant, unaffordable, or unwanted. Ask the local “developing world” hospital, or the university, or Wipro, for that matter, if they are ready to give up their PCs for smartphones. 

While perusing Balancing Act (Issue #365), I found a link to this story on m-banking in Namibia and Botswana, centered on an interview with First National Bank (FNB) cellphone banking CEO Len Pienaar.  Among the quotes:

“In SA, we have a high density of banking options, such as ATMs, card-accepting devices, and even branches. In Namibia, for example, this is much lower and you have a huge rural population,” explains Pienaar.

He says the bank’s approach to cellphone banking has adapted to the needs of different countries, with customers in Namibia and Botswana having to register for mobile banking in-branch so they can be shown exactly how to use the technology.

“Mobile networks are well-established in most of the countries we are in, and the technology, such as SMSes, is well-known,” says Pienaar.

In the space of just a few lines, Pienaar has touched on many of the factors which will influence m-banking’s trajectory in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world:  an awareness of what m-banking offers, relative to alternatives, the need for some hand-holding to get new users comfortable with the system, and the relative familiarity that people have with the technology (SMS) already.  Sounds like a diffusion of innovations case study, and I mean that in a good way.

DIRSI–Diálogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Infomación–posted what looks like the entire set of presentations and comments from a July 4 discussion in Lima on “Understanding the Contribution of Mobile Telephony to Development in LAC” (Latin America and the Carribean).

More research and background papers from DIRSI are available on their homepages (English) (en Español).