Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The number of people using mobile devices to purchase goods and services is expected to more than double by the end of 2012 globally, research firm Gartner Inc. reported. The impact is to be felt most in developing world…
In Asia, Africa, Europe and elsewhere, cell phone technology has always been way ahead of what’s available in the states. Around the world, people use their phones in innovative, creative ways. For example, mobile phones help rural farmers gather information…
Leading up to the 2009 Mobile Money Summit CGAP, an independent policy and research centre dedicated to advancing financial access for the world’s poor, is running a podcast series with some of the key people involved in the CGAP/DFID Branchless…
Global Post reports on how millions in Ghana are entering the banking system through mobile phone system. “Nobody stands to benefit quite like Africa’s increasingly powerful telecom companies, the conglomerates who built this continent’s cellular towers and enable its calls.…
Stephen Wolak, the brain behind Vodafone’s Betavine community, has launched a new social change community “where we look at how mobile technology and mobile services can bring about positive social change, particularly in developing countries.” The concept, he says, “is…
Dr Paul Twomey, president of the internet admin body Icann, talks about the net’s potential for change. “The mobile global internet is growing quickly to connect billions of people, devices and things. It offers much greater productivity and lower barriers…
Erik Hersman reports on his blog White African from the e Fletcher mBanking conference in Nairobi. Talking Mobile Banking in Kenya Notes from the panel “Perspectives on Mobile and Branchless Financial Service” Volume vs Value in Mobile Payment Systems Talk…
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven Princeton University Press Hardcover, May 2009 Abstract About forty percent of the world’s people live on incomes of…
Our friends at Adaptive Path have posted some information on a design and research project that aimed to understand how mobile technology can work more effectively in emerging markets. The company went to rural India to investigate the impact of…
The blog series on New Media Practices in International Contexts, which I announced in January, is now complete. It covers the unique characteristics of digital media user behaviours in very different socio-cultural contexts of China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan…
Anand Giridharadas, South Asia correspondent at International Herald Tribune, describes what makes the cellphone special in India, and what it means for democracy. “The cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice,…
Steve Wolak is the founder and head of the Betavine, Vodafone’s developer outreach website — recently much heralded by Vodafone’s CEO Vittorio Colao — and he just started blogging. His central question: “Crowdsourcing, open and collaborative innovation, the long tail,…
Today I spent some time looking through the CHI 2009 papers. Here is a personal selection (and you need an ACM membership to access them): A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India Neil Patel,…
What on earth are anthropologists doing playing with mobile phones, asks Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and creator of FrontlineSMS. “It’s widely recognised that projects can succeed or fail on the realisation of their relative impacts on target communities, and…
Research ICT Africa!, a network of universities and research institutions from 19 African countries, has a site with some interesting research papers and presentations: Mobile telephony access and usage in Africa (2009) Chabossou, A., Stork, C., Stork, M., Zahonogo. Z.…
Last week, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative organised a workshop on the “Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development” in Maputo, Mozambique. The workshop set out to understand the specific challenges of using mobile phones…
ACM reports that “a top researcher for Nokia Design [addressed] the need for effective cross-culture design research when developing informed and inspired designs for future mobile technologies. Jan Chipchase, who studies how people around the world behave, communicate, and interact…
Rich Ling is a sociologist at the Telenor research institute and a visiting professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, who is particularly interested in understanding the social implications of mobile telephony. He just posted a short paper on the…
Richard Heeks reflects in the latest edition of “Communications of the ACM” on how information technology can be best applied to address problems and provide opportunities for inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries. “In terms of IT, the three key…
Information Technologies and International Development, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with economic and social development, is a gem. And the entire contents are available for free online. Here are some…