mobility - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

26 Nov 09

Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

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10 Nov 09

31 Oct 09

The boom in smart-phones: Cleverly simple | The Economist

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The market for smart-phones is expected to grow so quickly in part because they are changing. Expensive pocket computers such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, which let users watch videos and download whatever applications they want, are giving way to new models that come with popular services built in, but are less versatile or run on open-source operating systems, and are often cheaper. All this reflects a broader trend in the industry, where value is migrating from firms that run networks and make hardware to those that make software and offer service
New handsets from Motorola, an industry veteran, and INQ, a rising star, illustrate these changes. They both feature built-in support for online services, including popular social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. On the iPhone, in contrast, the necessary software has to be downloaded and installed. What is more, both phones can automatically add contacts from such sites to their address books.
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- Technical specifications are not important provided customers can use their favourite online services with ease.
- INQ and Motorola are also both betting on Android, an open-source operating system developed by Google. Although the internet giant’s operating system only has a small piece of the market, it is clearly gaining momentum. According to Google, as many as 20 handsets based on the software will be available by the end of the year.
- Prices are now on a downward spiral, says Ben Wood of CCS Insight, a research firm. Several other handset-makers are already offering cheap smart-phone-like devices. Android allows cut-price Chinese firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market, which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software. Last month T-Mobile, a mobile operator, gave a taste of things to come. Its British subsidiary started selling the Pulse, an Android-powered smart-phone made by Huawei, for only £180. (The cheapest iPhone model sells for £340 in Britain if bought without a contract.)

29 Oct 09

Observations: Why your doctor should know where you have lived

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Mobile Banking: Financial services for mobile devices: new trends from the Philippines

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19 Oct 09

m4Lit: a teen m-novel project in South Africa at mLearning Africa

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28 Sep 09

A special report on telecoms in emerging markets: : Beyond voice | The Economist

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But Uganda’s traditional growing seasons are shifting, so he is worried about droughts or flash floods that could destroy his crop. Michael Gizamba, a local village-phone operator, offers to help using Farmer’s Friend, an agricultural-information service. He sends a text message to ask for a seasonal weather forecast for the region. Before long a reply arrives to say that normal, moderate rainfall is expected during July. Mr Makawa decides to plant his tomatoes.
Rice farmers who had trouble with aphids texted for advice and received a message telling them how to make a pesticide using soap and paraffin. A farmer with blighted tomato plants learned how to control the problem by spraying the plants with a milk-based mixture.
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- More complicated questions (“my chicken’s eyes are bulging”) are relayed to human experts, who either call back within 15 minutes or, with particularly difficult problems, promise to provide an answer within four days. These answers are then used to improve the database.
- Farmer’s Friend is one of a range of phone-based services launched in June by MTN, Google and the Grameen Foundation’s “Application Laboratory”, or AppLab. As well as disseminating advice in agriculture, provided by the Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative, the new services also provide health and market information. The Clinic Finder service points people to nearby clinics, and the Health Tips service explains the symptoms of common diseases.
- Lastly there is Google Trader, a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities. Sellers send a message to say where they are and what they have to offer, which will be available to potential buyers within 30km for seven days.
- “There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand,” says David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation. “It opens the door to information services. It’s not the web, but it’s a web of services that can be offered on mobile devices.”
- Offering agricultural and health information is more difficult than offering a phone service, however, because such information must be localised and must take cultural differences into account. The answer is to work closely with local partners, says Mr Edelstein. Grameen is also experimenting with the idea of “community knowledge workers”—local people who can help others get access to mobile services, reading, translating and explaining text messages where necessary, just as village-phone operators provide access to basic communications.
- Reuters Market Lite, a text-based service that is available in parts of India. Its 125,000 users pay 200 rupees ($4.20) for a three-month subscription, which provides them with local weather and price information four or five times a day. Many farmers say that their profits have gone up as a result.
- Tata Consultancy Services, an Indian operator, offers a service called mKrishi which is similar to Farmer’s Friend, allowing farmers to send queries and receive personalised advice.
- Nokia, the world’s largest handset-maker, launched its own information service, Nokia Life Tools, in India in June. In addition to education and entertainment, it provides agricultural information, such as prices, weather data and farming tips, that can be called up from special menus on some Nokia handsets.
- Services to help farmers have been most widely adopted in China, where China Mobile offers a service called Nong Xin Tong in conjunction with the agriculture ministry, as part of its push into rural areas.
- China Mobile also runs a website, 12582.com, that sends farmers information about planting techniques, pest management and market prices. The service, which costs two yuan ($0.30) a month, sends out 13m text messages a day and has over 40m users.
- Mobile phones are also being used in health care. One-way text alerts, sent to everyone in a particular area, can be used to raise awareness of HIV; sending daily text messages to patients can help them remember to take their drugs for tuberculosis or HIV.
- The mobile service that is delivering the most obvious economic benefits is money transfer, otherwise known as mobile banking (though for technical and regulatory reasons it is not, strictly speaking, banking). It has grown out of the widespread custom of using prepaid calling credit as an informal currency.
- More simply, you could buy a top-up voucher for the amount you want to transfer (say, $10) and then call the village-phone operator or shopkeeper in your family’s village and read out the code on the voucher. The credit will be applied to the phone of the shopkeeper, who will hand cash to your family, minus a commission of 10-20%.
- These methods became so widespread that some companies decided to set up mobile-payment systems that allow real money, rather than just airtime, to be transferred from one user to another by phone.
- The biggest successes in this field so far have been Gcash and Smart Money in the Philippines, Wizzit in South Africa, Celpay in Zambia and, above all, M-PESA in Kenya, which has become the most widely adopted mobile-money scheme in the world.
- Making it easier, quicker and cheaper to transfer money has enormous social and economic benefits. Commissions are lower, and recipients no longer have to pay for transport to towns to make withdrawals. They can also take out funds more easily and frequently. In rural households that have adopted mobile money, incomes have increased by 5-30%, according to Olga Morawczynski, an ethnographer at the University of Edinburgh who has studied M-PESA in detail. It also saves men working in the city having to take time off to deliver the money to their families. The only drawback, say their wives, is that some men now visit home less frequently.
- M-PESA is also used as a form of savings account, even though it does not pay interest. Having even a small cushion of savings to fall back on allows people to deal with the unexpected, such as suddenly having to pay for medical treatment. “An awful lot of people climb out of poverty every year, but a lot drop back in because they have no savings, no buffer, so when something bad happens they have to sell assets and lose a lot of ground,” says Mr Christen. Poor people tend to save by buying livestock, which can get sick or die, or buying gold, which can be stolen, or investing in community-based schemes that may be fraudulent, says Timothy Lyman of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). Mobile banking offers a more reliable alternative, he says, and could have economic benefits comparable to those of mobile phones.
- There were special factors that made M-PESA more likely to work in Kenya: the unusually high cost of sending money by other methods; the unusually large market share (80%) of Safaricom, the main mobile operator (an affiliate of Vodafone); the regulator’s decision to allow the scheme to proceed, even without formal regulatory approval; and, most intriguingly, the post-election violence in the country in early 2008. M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some people regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes. All this makes Ms Morawczynski think that Kenya’s success in mobile banking may not be matched elsewhere. “But I hope somebody can prove me wrong,” she says.
- some banks have realised that teaming up with a mobile operator to launch a mobile-money service will allow them to reach many more customers. After all, mobile operators have far more powerful brands and much greater reach than banks.

27 Sep 09

Telecoms: The power of mobile money | The Economist

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an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points, according to the World Bank.
With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message.
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- By far the most successful example of mobile money is M-PESA, launched in 2007 by Safaricom of Kenya. It now has nearly 7m users—not bad for a country of 38m people, 18.3m of whom have mobile phones. M-PESA first became popular as a way for young, male urban migrants to send money back to their families in the countryside. It is now used to pay for everything from school fees (no need to queue up at the bank every month to hand over a wad of bills) to taxis (drivers like it because they are carrying around less cash). Similar schemes are popular in the Philippines and South Africa.
- The incomes of Kenyan households using M-PESA have increased by 5-30% since they started mobile banking, according to a recent study.
- Mobile banking is safer than storing wealth in the form of cattle (which can become diseased and die), gold (which can be stolen), in neighbourhood savings schemes (which may be fraudulent) or by stuffing banknotes into a mattress. In the Maldives many people lost their savings in the tsunami of 2004; it hopes to introduce universal mobile banking next year.
- why is mobile money not more widespread? Its progress has been impeded by banks, which fear that mobile operators will eat their lunch, and by regulators, who worry that mobile-money schemes will be abused by fraudsters and money-launderers. In many countries mobile money has been blocked because operators do not have banking licences and their networks of corner-shop retailers do not meet the strict criteria for formal bank branches. And some mobile-money schemes that have been launched, such as one in Tanzania, failed to catch on. As recently as a year ago people wondered whether M-PESA’s success was a fluke.
- Some banks, meanwhile, have come to see mobile money not as a threat but as an opportunity, and are teaming up with operators. And phone companies have studied Kenya closely to learn how to establish and market a successful mobile-money scheme. MTN, Africa’s biggest operator, has launched a mobile-money service in Uganda in conjunction with Standard Bank; it appears to be doing well. MTN is fine-tuning its service in Uganda before rolling it out across Africa.
- Instead of lobbying against mobile money, banks should see it as an exciting chance to exploit telecoms firms’ vast retail networks and powerful brands to reach new customers. Tie-ups between banks and operators will help reassure regulators.

23 Jul 09

Victor Keegan: Barcodes will be the next net revolution but only with smartphone support | Technology | The Guardian

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we haven't cottoned on to the potential of the new generation of two-dimensional (2D) "dynamic" codes. They can turn any space on which they appear – a tree, an advertisement or photo in a magazine – into a direct link to the web. Once the software is loaded onto your mobile (from sites such as get.beetagg.com) the phone can read the 3,000 odd squares on the barcode and take you straight to a website. The quickest way to grasp this is to type a URL
You can put your own photo in the code if you want – they are reckoned to have 30% to 40% design flexibility so can be played around with a bit. The barcode created can then be placed on anything from a business card to an advertisement (zazzle.com) to provide a direct link to a website.
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- there is a street game in Spain where participants drop out when a rival snaps the barcode on their T-shirts. For other uses see the Fluid Forms blog.
- Why have barcodes taken off in Japan but not here? It is partly the fax machine syndrome. One is useless; ubiquity is nirvana. Japan had everything going for it – they were early adopters of high-quality smartphones with web access and they agreed on a freely available standard, QR. And the software was mainly pre-loaded into the phones so there was no need for any downloading.
- Could it happen here? There are definite signs of change, particularly in Germany, Holland and Spain, even though Nokia, the world's biggest phone manufacturer, seems curiously to be backing away from pre-loading the software in its phones. It is not in the new N86, Nokia's most powerful cameraphone.
- Once again the iPhone is leading the way by making it easy to access the web from a mobile, especially through its treasure trove of apps (that hardly anyone mentioned when it launched). There are various downloadable barcode apps on the iPhone for consumers. But developers may find that barcodes left in public places (from posters to T-shirts) could provide a direct route to selling their apps rather than being lost among the thousands of others in the App Store.
- Barcodes are something of a marketer's dream. This is not only because mobile phones, unlike the web, are a mecca for micropayments but, as Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Quik Communications, has pointed out, this is "pull" marketing, getting people to come to you directly, rather than "push" – using a scattergun and hoping something will stick.
- n Japan there are newspapers and books consisting almost entirely of barcodes. There is huge scope for tourism, paperless ticketing, identification, self-branding, affiliate marketing and numerous applications as yet unknown. Is it too much to ask that our operators and manufacturers do two things: first, agree on a barcode standard and, second, preload the software into all smartphones? If that happened barcodes could play a major creative role in the era of mobile web browsing that is only just beginning.

12 Jun 09

Mobile? Tethering? Yeah But.. - Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect

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In Japan - the length of time spent outside the home; high levels of intensive mobile phone use; and a power connector that is standardised over almost all mobile phone manufacturers have combined to enable a market for top-up batteries that simply slot into the device
In India - fast food joints and longer distance buses offer charging services, in China it is more the domain of restaurants.
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- There's a lovely form of tethering in Ulan Bataar - where mobile phone kiosks (the white phone ladies) walk alongside customers making a call - with the jangly phone cord stretching between them.