Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
What happens when a large % of your target market wants your brand cachet but is happy with a decent-enough quality fake? Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase has published an essay on the current state of the fake mobile phone…
Via Dina Mehta, founder and managing director of Mosoci India, I found out about Progress, a highly interesting new website set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet: “The Progress Project is the initiative set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet…
Dina Mehta, founder and managing director of Mosoci India, reports on how Nokia Life Tools actually gets used in India, and more in particular, how the how the Learn English program, a part of Nokia Life Tools, really works on…
Yesterday, Nokia launched Nokia Money, a new mobile financial service enables financial management and payments from a mobile phone – aimed specifically at emerging markets. From the Nokia press release: “Nokia Money has been designed to be as simple and…
Abdul Bayes, professor of economics at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh, has written a nice article in the Daily Star newspaper where he condenses some recent research on mobile phones, farmers and the rural poor. “Coming back to the Bangladesh…
Today, Microsoft is launching OneApp, an app for people running Windows Mobile phones with slow processors and not a lot of memory. Basically, it’s a lightweight app that lets you run more intensive apps by grabbing just the basics of…
Jonathan Gosier, a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur in Kampala, Uganda, shares his ideas on what augmented reality could mean for Africa. “Already people are recording audio, video, and blogging to keep donors abreast of their work in the…
CGAP has published a brief entitled “Poor People Using Mobile Financial Services: Observations on Customer Usage and Impact from M-PESA”. “Despite growing agreement on the potential of technology to expand access to finance, or branchless banking, there is surprisingly little…
Paula Fortner, iHealthBeat senior staff writer, reports on how innovative mobile technologies are helping to fundamentally transform health care in many developing countries. “Last month, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $100 million initiative to strengthen health systems in Africa…
Millions of Africans are using mobile phones to pay bills, move cash and buy basic everyday items. So why, asks the BBC, has a form of banking that has proved a dead duck in the West been such a hit…
Michael Trucano explains on the World Bank’s EduTech blog why the World Bank will be kicking off a study next month looking at “The Use of Mobile Phones in Education in Developing Countries“. “This study is intended to help to…
Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjöblom recently spent three months in Tanzania for their master’s thesis in Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, to investigate mobile banking services from a user perspective. In which contexts…
Nokia’s MeraNokia (Majha Nokia in Marathi) is actually a Nokia Life Tools (NLT) application coded into the 2300 and 2323 handsets being used in the pilot. Farmers and villagers pay around Rs 2 per day, every 10 days, for the…
Both the Guardian newspaper’s PDA blog and TED itself are posting regular updates from the current TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, UK. (TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and it’s an exclusive conference that brings togethers thinkers and doers from…
In a country where people don’t have electricity, much less Internet access, the Grameen Foundation partners with Google to relay information through mobile phones. Dara Kerr reports from on the ground for CNet: “The research for this project began a…
Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog.…
Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner Polity, 2009 200 pages With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile…
The Wall Street Journal and India Knowledge@Wharton present a unique mix of reporting, analysis, interviews and video on life and business in rural India. The Rural India reader resource combines specially-commissioned material with recent articles. A selection of articles relevant…
Last week Google announced a suite of SMS services in Uganda. In a follow-up post on the main google blog, the company explains that it is the result of more than a year of true user-centred research and design. “We…
David Simoes-Brown alerts us on UK’s Nesta Connect about an excellent new collaborative book about The Future of Innovation where hundred of authors give their views. Over 350 leading thinkers from business, government, consulting and academia from around the…