Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
The ubiquity of mobile phones and the growth of the internet will converge in the next decade. Luke Allnutt of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty thinks this is good news for the developing world. “While the defining technological shifts of the…
At MIT teams of the Media Lab’s Next Billion Network – our next generation of tech movers and shakers – are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous cellphone to help people in developing nations to raise their incomes,…
The latest issue of Anthropology Matters contains an interesting article on the use of mobile phones in Africa: Being cool or being good: researching mobile phones in Mozambique Julie Soleil Archambault Drawing on my fieldwork experience in Inhambane, southern Mozambique,…
Meena Kadri reports on how lunch and laundry delivery in Mumbai – known as the Dabbawalla and Dhobi Ghat services – use sophisticated coding systems to track items within their service chain, in order to ensure accurate delivery. “The Dabbawalla…
A number of articles illustrate the power of the mobile phone in emerging markets: What next after the Mobile revolution in Kenya? by John Karanja MPESA will be on its own a major driver of the economic expansion of the…
Nokia’s senior design specialists are touring India to discover how Indians use cellphones. Leslie D’Monte reports for New Delhi’s Business Standard. Jhanvi Madan (not her real name), who lives in Mumbai , has been talking on her cellphone. Unknown to…
Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase has posted an in-depth presentation and paper on designing mobile money services for emerging markets: “Hang around a telecoms industry conference long enough and you start to get big-number fatigue – as one stack of…
Nokia Life Tools was designed to help improve the livelihood and lives of farmers, students and many people in more remote and rural areas in emerging market countries. It does this by offering easily accessible and up-to-date crop prices, education…
Mobile phones for development and profit: a win-win scenario Rohit Singh Overseas Development Institute, 2009 The number of mobile subscribers globally is estimated to have reached four billion in 2008 (ITU, 2008), with mobile penetration reaching 61%. Around 58% of…
MIT News reports on how MIT students are exploring innovative cellphone uses in the developing world. “Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the…
As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. CNN reports. “Microsoft…
Mobile phones have been a boon to developing countries and to social development. Access to mobiles may indeed allow for better medical information, change the way farmers grow and sell crops, expand the way families interact, influence the way governments…
Katrin Verclas of MobileActive is launching a new series on “deconstructing mobiles for development”. Mobile tech as a tool for social development is making the front pages in 2009. They are hyped as panathea for global issues such as rural…
Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center convened a conversation at Harvard yesterday on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence joined Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experts…
Ken Banks, creator of FrontlineSMS, wrote a guest piece for BBC News. His main claim: “If you want to see how east Africa may respond to the arrival of high-speed internet links, look no further than the mobile phone market.”…
The World Bank is embarking on a new study investigating issues related to the use of mobile phones in education in developing countries. “The study is intended to help to raise awareness among key decision makers in the public,…
One of the projects of AppLab, the application laboratory of the Grameen Foundation, is focused on mobile technology for community health (MoTeCH) in Ghana: “Grameen Foundation has launched an initiative to determine how best to use mobile phones to increase…
In emerging markets, agents are the customer-facing element for mobile banking providers, “who rely on them to open accounts, do customer care, and (crucially) stock adequate amounts of cash and e-float to enable clients to deposit and withdrawal. Yet, there…
Abhijit Kadle explains how the mobile phone can easily be used as a learning tool: “Like all communication and computing devices, mobile phones can be used to learn. The content delivered would depend on the capabilities (features) of the…
Jonathan Donner, a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, has submitted a paper — together with Shikoh Gitau and Gary Marsden — on first-time mobile internet use in South Africa to the upcoming (3rd)…