February 9, 2012
Buddhist temple offers a service of blessings by SMS
A famous Buddhist temple in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, encourages people to send text messages rather than burn incense to say their prayers. China Daily reports.
This go-green initiative is the first of its kind among Buddhist temples in China. It helps reduce the size of crowds during peak seasons and lowers the risk of stampedes and fires," said Han Xue, a lay Buddhist who works at Guiyuan Temple in Wuhan, which has hundreds of thousands of visitors during Spring Festival.
... The temple, in cooperation with the Hubei branch of China Mobile, a leading Chinese telecom operator, offers a service of blessings sent by text messaging.
A message with eight or fewer characters costs 3 yuan, and longer ones of up to 20 characters cost 10 yuan. Normally, text messages cost no more than 0.15 yuan.
The sender writes the text of the blessing and includes the cell phone number of the receiver. China Mobile forwards the blessing to the receiver.
From 8 am to 5 pm, the messages are shown on an LED board at the southwest corner of the temple. Monks later chant prayers for the senders and receivers.
More than 30,000 people have already tried the service - they have to be China Mobile subscribers with phone numbers in Hubei province.
Read full article.
February 8, 2012
Cheaper and Easier Remittances in the Americas thanks to Boom Mobile Banking
MobileActive reviews Boom, a new mobile banking service that allows people in the U.S., Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala to create bank accounts, and send and access money via a basic mobile phone.
It lowers the cost of sending money between immigrants and their families, and it improves their safety by reducing the risks of handling cash. It also creates new commerce capabilities, as users can receive payment for signing up others for the service.
To use Boom in the U.S., you can purchase a membership kit at participating 7-Eleven stores or by calling Boom customer service. To activate your account, you load money at the same stores, and then call Boom with the load receipt, an ID, and the membership kit.
Read full article.
Other mobile remittance systems:
-- In Haiti, Cell Phones Serve As Debit Cards - Haiti is setting up "mobile money" networks to allow cell phones to serve as debit cards. The systems have the potential to allow Haitians to receive remittances from abroad, send cash to relatives across town or across the country, buy groceries and even pay for a bus ride all with a few taps on their cell phones.
-- Food vouchers on Cell Phones for Syrian refugees - The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has launched an electronic food voucher pilot project to aid 1,000 Iraqi refugee families in Syria.
-- Mama Mikes, offers mobile vouchers to Kenyans and Ugandans - Mama Mikes is an online store catering to Africans who live abroad. The virtual online store allows them to purchase gifts (chocolates, flowers, text books, electronics...), vouchers (food, electricity), and services (airtime, tuition) for their family, friends and loved ones based at home.
-- Buying rice with your cell phone - Mercy Corps, is providing food for people in St.-Marc Haiti who have taken in earthquake survivors. The US government-financed program will be pushing a button once a month, and $40 will automatically go into each person’s cellphone savings account — redeemable at local merchants for rice, corn flour, beans or cooking oil.
Anti-stalking App launches n the UK
Mobile Marketing reports on an interesting new app launched in the UK called PanicGuard, aimed at those who fear they are being stalked. The app works as a gateway to a security service and, once activated, makes use of handsets' GPS and video recording capabilities to alert pre-set emergency contacts.
It is estimated that over 120,000 people a year are victims of stalking in the UK. The app is intended to help the police gather evidence, which is streamed to a secure server rather than being stored on the handset.
Read full article.
New FDA regulations could be death blow to smartphone medical apps
Medical mobile apps can be be very useful in health care, but if the FDA gets involved and demands approval before they launch — it takes a medical device about three years to get approval — developers might just give up on them. The Washington Times reports.
Not if the FDA gets involved. The average time to approve a medical device is about three years and can cost upward of $75 million. In the software market, that is a lifetime. Additionally, if mobile apps are regulated as medical devices, they will be subject to the health care reform law’s 2.3 percent medical-device tax, raising prices as taxes are passed on to consumers. Free apps may no longer be free.
Constraints on speed to market and increased regulatory costs combined with tax-driven price increases may cause developers to move on to other, less burdensome endeavors.
Read full article.
February 7, 2012
Are mobile solutions overhyped?
This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and Global Public Square.
But the ubiquity of the mobile phone - and its application to a diverse and growing set of development goals - doesn?t guarantee economic or social progress.
Are mobiles just another high-tech solution to what are essentially systemic and deeply rooted problems? Are mobile solutions for combating global poverty overhyped?
CNN asks Kentaro Toyama, Researcher at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cheerleaders for mobile development point out that there are nearly six billion active mobile accounts in the world, and that mobile phones are increasingly used by the remotest rural villagers. It?s hard, indeed, to overhype the business success or the consumer appeal of mobile phones.
Market penetration, however, is not the same as meaningful impact.
Technology amplifies human intent and capacity, but technology by itself doesn?t fix challenges of intent or capacity. What?s overhyped is a belief that mobile-centric programs are a cost-effective means to combat disease, improve education, or alleviate poverty, as if mobile or not were the essential question. What?s overhyped is technological innovation as a primary solution to complex social problems, at the expense of tested-and-true interventions that nurture people and institutions.
Read full article.
Study: ‘App Economy’ has created 466,000 U.S. jobs
A new study out today documents the impact of apps on the U.S. economy, concluding that 466,000 jobs have been created by the “App Economy” since 2007 — including programmers, marketers, interface designers, managers and support staff working on apps and infrastructure for platforms including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry, Facebook and Windows Phone. CNet reports via GeekWire.
... The research was conducted by economist Michael Mandel for industry group TechNet based on trends in help-wanted ads, in addition to other economic data. A summary of the findings is available here.
Read more.
Using cell phones to conduct a census of refugees and asylum-seekers in the Dominican Republic
From a UNHCR article via @mobileactive
... UNHCR, for the first time, is using mobile phones rather than pen and paper to record and digitalize this information, saving valuable time and resources. This equipment will also enable UNHCR-trained and supported census staff to take pictures and include satellite navigation data [GPS] as part of the registration process. The exercise will continue into March.
... The census will also provide an overview of the documentation status of this population. Most refugees in the Dominican Republic were recognized as such in the mid 1990s, but were never able to obtain legal residence in the country. Asylum-seekers have been waiting in some cases for more than 10 years for their claims to be decided, holding state-issued certificates which need to be renewed every three months and do not allow them to work.
Read full article.
Few SMS health applications have been evaluated
The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published a research paper called, SMS Applications for Disease Prevention in Developing Countries, that found while there have been many text message-powered health initiatives, very few of them have been sufficiently evaluated. Mobilehealthnews reports via @jranck.
The researchers stated that most of the applications they reviewed were pilot projects “in various levels of sophistication” with “modes of intervention varying between one-way or two-way communication, with or without incentives, and with educative games.”
Of those five SMS applications that did have evaluation findings available, the researchers said that the “primary barriers identified were language, timing of messages, mobile network fluctuations, lack of financial incentives, data privacy, and mobile phone turnover.”
Efficacy studies for all mobile health services — not just those for developing markets — is shaping up to be one of the big trends of 2012.
Read full article.
Talking with Texts: How Cellphones Empower Deaf Children in Uganda
A wonderful article on how SMS is being used to help deaf children in Uganda. By Ken Banks for National Geographic.
In this edition of “Mobile Message”, Cambridge to Africa’s Sacha DeVelle, explains how her organisation has been using mobile phones in specially designed education programmes to help deaf children in Uganda communicate. By getting everyone in their schools to help out, the projects also happen to be making them the coolest kids in school.
Read full article.
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February 6, 2012
The average person looks at their phone 150 times a day
Excerpts from Tomi Ahonen talk at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg last Thursday via TechCentral.
-- Also, mobile device users are addicted to their devices. Nokia reported at MindTrek 2010 that the average person looks at their phone 150 times a day, or once every six-and-a-half minutes of every waking hour.
-- In Africa, it’s 82 times a day, according to Young and Rubicam in its Mobile Mania Report published in April 2011 — thus, even, in Africa mobile users check their devices on average every 12 minutes.
-- “US jewellers Tiffany’s e-commerce website wasn’t optimised for mobile. After optimising it, sales grew 125% from the website,” says Ahonen. He says this proves there isn’t going to be “one Internet”.
-- In China mobile newspapers have converted 39% of their readers to pay for MMS news headlines. “’Tomorrow’s headlines today’ is the selling point.” China Mobile has 40m paying users on SMS- and MMS-based twice-daily headline services of branded newspapers’ headlines.
-- "Mobile is the fastest growing industry ever,” Ahonen adds. “It went from naught to $1 trillion in 2010, and is set to double by 2020.”
Read full article.
Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires., reports The Guardian.
A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.
... Hofmann told the Guardian: "Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.
"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time.".
The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.
Read full article.
How Siri, if opened up to third-party apps, could enhance news consumption
As tech writers predict that Apple will open up Siri to third-party apps as early as this summer Poynter.org reports on how voice recognition technology could change the way we consume news.
Raluca Budiu, user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group, said voice technology makes it easier to input information, which is important on mobile.
"Mobile devices are used in a variety of contexts, and it’s often easier to speak than to type,” she said via email. “Plus, typing on the small screen is tedious and error-prone."
Read full articles.
Facebook to Launch 'Featured Story' Ads on Mobile, says FT
Facebook is introducing feature adverts on mobile devices as part of its offering to marketers and advertisers, according to The Financial Times. Taking the form of 'featured stories' appearing in users' news feeds, these ads are expected to be rolled out in March.
Read more.
Learning from Kenya: Mobile money transfer and co-working spaces
TheNetWeb on M-Pesa in Africa and how the heads of Visa, MasterCard and American Express could learn from it.
“The funds transferred by M-Pesa are equal to 25% of the country’s GNP,” said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, an economist at the company. It’s even more remarkable when you consider that most of the transactions are for fifty cents (U.S.) or less.
Kenyans use the service today to pay for water and electric and cable bills, as well as for their children’s schools. They can use it to make purchases at certain stores, even mom-and-pop shops.
They can withdraw or deposit their money through a network of more than 2,000 sales points throughout the country, where they can buy the scratch cards containing the codes needed to fill their account.
“M-Pesa makes people’s lives easier and helps them save money while traveling,” Waceke Mbugua, director of marketing and communication at Sararicom, explained.
Read full article.
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Facebook’s Mobility Challenge
Although more than half of its 845 million members log into Facebook on a mobile device, the company has not yet found a way to make real money from that use. The New York Times reports.
Facebook is not the only company struggling to translate the success of its Web site to mobile devices, where screen space is at a premium and people have little patience for clutter or slow loading times. It is a problem that plagues companies as diverse as news publishers and the streaming radio service Pandora, and it is likely to loom larger. There were more global shipments of smartphones than of personal computers in 2011, according to a recent report from Canalys, a research firm.
... Overall spending on mobile advertising in the United States is expected to reach $2.6 billion this year, up 80 percent from $1.45 billion in 2011, according to research by eMarketer.
Read full article.
Too much texting makes teens shallow
Here's a new one. Too much texting makes teens shallow. According to a new study, young people who text frequently focus on wealth and image; less on moral or spiritual goals. WebMD reports.
"Heavy texters do seem to be a little more materialistic and less concerned about inward growth," says Paul Trapnell, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.
Researchers surveyed more than 2,200 college psychology class students about their texting frequency. They were ages 18 to 22. Data were collected from 2007 through 2011. These findings were presented at a medical conference. They should be considered preliminary as they have not yet undergone the "peer review" process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.
Read full article.
February 3, 2012
Bill would require ‘pings’ of missing persons’ cell phones
A House Committee has heard testimony on a bill that would clear the way for cell phone companies to provide cell phone location information to law enforcement in certain missing persons cases. Misourinet reports.
Missey and her husband, Greg Smith, are proponents of the bill commonly named for their daughter Kelsey, who was kidnapped from Overland Park, Kansas and found murdered in southern Jackson County in 2007.
Greg, now a legislator in Kansas, says if such language had been law then Kelsey might have been saved. “June 2, 2007 was the night she went missing and she was found four days later … Once that information was released by the cell phone company it only took forty-five minutes to recover her body.” A former police officer, he adds, “If you can get that kind of response in a missing person case, that’s just absolutely light years ahead of what we’re doing right now.”
Read full article.
Forbes Top 10 Power Influencers in Mobile. Tomi Ahonen #1
Forbes Top 10 Mobile influencers. They were identified as not device centric, have a global perspective and take a strategic overview.
# Number 1 spot belongs to ex-Nokia executive Tomi Ahonen whose blog Communities Dominate Brands is a fixture on the mobile scene largely because of Ahonen’s comprehensive knowledge of the mobile ecosystem. Tomi is based out of Hong Kong.
#Number 6. Tom Krazit, another PaidContent staffer, who writes about the transition from the PC era to the mobile era.
#Number 7. Vaibhav Sharma of handheld blog, another device-centric source, based in Chandigarh, India.
# Number 8. Next is Steven J. Crowley a consultaing engineer who is on top of US-centric mobile issues.
#Number 9. Zach Epstein of BGR, formerly Boy Genius Report.
#Number 10. K.Kugan of Malaysian Wireless.
Read full article.
Latin America: Gaúchos With Cellphones
Home to sun, surf, margartias, rain forests, coffee, and cocaine…but there’s something else Latin America is becoming famous for – mobile tech. Mobisights reports.
This number is equivalent to the connection numbers we’re hearing out of India right now. The region itself currently boasts 630 million connections. This translates into the fact that 3.6% of the region’s GDP, or $175 billion, are generated by mobile tech. Jobs are also on the rise with 600,000 currently working in the mobile ecosystem with expectations of that reaching 1.6 million in the near future.
Another plus to Latin America is that its mobile network infrastructure is not ancient. Part of the problem with the United States is the costs of upgrading the aging infrastructure or teething subscribers off existing land line usage. By 2015, 305 million subscribers in Latin America are expected to be accessing the net via HSPA or LTE connections.
Read full article. Download full GSMA report (pdf)
North Korea now has 1 Million Mobile Users
Statistics from last year suggested that more than 1.1 million (less than 5 percent) of North Korea owned a fixed-line telephone, which had traditionally been more available than mobile, but the increasingly popularity of mobile means it will likely be dominant soon. However, as a report from The Nautilus Institute noted, the cost of devices and tariffs remain beyond the reach of many North Koreans. TheNextWeb reports.
Read full article and links to related articles on North Korea and cell phones blogged by textually over the years.
Newsflash: Two-Thirds of Tweets Boring, Says Study
Did you know that Twitter is full of inane, boring tweets that nobody wants to read? It’s true, according to science! TIME Techland reports.
According to The Telegraph, people’s biggest pet peeves are too many hashtags, updates on day-to-day routines and negative tweets. The most hated tweet of all is the “conversation tweet,” in which two people have a private conversation (publicly) that everyone else could care less about.
Also not popular: Foursquare check-in tweets, because the only people who care where you just had breakfast are already following you on Foursquare.
The study was conducted with 1,500 Twitter users, who analyzed 43,738 tweets from 21,000 accounts. Some good news for Ashton Kutcher: Twitter users really like self-promotional messages from celebrities.
Read full article.
Samsung Retains Top Spot in American Mobile Phone Market
A study of 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers has found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.3 percent market share. Google Android strengthened its lead in the smartphone market to reach 47.3 percent market share. [via Cellular News]
Sorry Facebook, mobile users just want to text
Mobile content usage spanning everything from downloading apps to browser and social network usage continues to escalate, but nothing is taking off quite like texting. VentureBeat reports.
The data, gathered from a monthly online survey of 30,000 mobile subscribers ages 13 and up, reflects an ongoing shift in the changing behaviors of the more than 234 million American mobile consumers. Mobile users continue to show an increased propensity to consume content, download apps, listen to music, and play games on their devices.
Read more.
February 2, 2012
New App Aims to Fight Poverty through education and opportunity
AppBridge - Opportunity and Education for All Through Mobile from Mobile Movement on Vimeo.
A pilot project gets underway soon to test whether mobile phones can be used to help educate the poor. It’s estimated three quarters of the world’s poor have access to mobile phones. Voice of America reports.
The idea is to link software developers with communities and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. The pilot project is led by a WEF community called Young Global Leaders. It’s made up of about 700 people under age 40 from business, civil society, government and academia.
The early apps are expected to provide skills training.
“In some cases,”Margo Drakos, founder of AppBridge said, “these are going to be very much technically oriented skills, like learning simple automotive or simple electrical or simple plumbing.
Apps could also be used to link entrepreneurs with micro-credit lenders or with markets. “In some cases, women are not able to go and sell their goods from their home unless they know that the store is open and the stores don’t open at a consistent time. So, something as simple and basic as having an alert when the store is open for them to be able to leave their home and go sell their goods,” she said.
Read full article.
Bamboo mobile phone to be launched by British student
A 23-year-old design student from Middlesex University is to launch a mobile phone made largely from bamboo. The Telegraph reports.
Read full article.
Links to articles on other wood phones blogged by textually over the years.
NASA’s Cancer Nanosensing Cell Phone Case
According to Gizmodo via MobileMag, NASA has developped a special chip that could diagnose cancer and measure blood sugar levels in diabetics with nothing more than a breath.
Read full article.
The Knight Foundation study: Real Time Charitable Giving
The Knight Foundation released a study, Real Time Charitable Giving, recently on the giving by text spearheaded in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Allison Fine reports via @jranck
Some interesting findings from the study:
-- More than $43 million was given by text immediately after the earthquake to a variety of support agencies including, but not exclusively, the American Red Cross.
-- Donors to support Haiti were impulse buyers. They just took out their phones and gave right away.
-- A majority of those surveyed (56%) have continued to give to more recent disaster relief efforts—such as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan—using their mobile phones.
Related: Pew Internet Project Report: Real Time Charitable Giving an Impulsive Gesture
Telecom Italia Launches Medical Monitoring Service Via Mobile Phone
The "Nuvola It Home Doctor" system developed by Telecom Italia is enabling chronic patients who are being treated at the Molinette Hospital in Turin to monitor their physiological parameters via mobile phone from their own homes. Cellular News reports.
... Telecom Italian expects that the service will be taken up by other hospitals in the region to monitor as many as 5,000 patients from their own homes.
Read full article.
February 1, 2012
The Mobile Device Privacy Act (MDPA)
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) released a draft of a cellphone privacy bill Monday that would require providers to tell subscribers if tracking software was installed on their mobile device.
The Mobile Device Privacy Act (MDPA) is a response to the Carrier IQ controversy that exploded at the end of 2011.
From the press release:
“While consumers rely on their phones, their phones relay all sorts of information about them, often without their knowledge or consent. I am concerned about the threat to consumers’ privacy posed by electronic monitoring software on mobile phones, such as the software developed by Carrier IQ. Today I am releasing draft legislation to provide greater transparency into the transmission of consumers’ personal information and empower consumers to say no to such transmission. This is especially important for parents of children and teens. I look forward to working with stakeholders on my legislation and collaborating with my colleagues prior to the formal introduction of the final legislation.
Read full press release. [via Mashable]
Telecom monopoly overcharging Mexicans billions
Telephone service in Mexico is run by a monopoly that is overcharging customers billions of dollars, according to a new report by the Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD). [via CNet]
The culprit companies, America Movil (mobile phones) and Telmex (fixed lines), are owned by the world's richest man--Carlos Slim. According to Forbes' list of top billionaires, Slim's net worth is $74 billion; next in line is Bill Gates with a $56 billion worth.
Read full article. Image from Dvorak.
'Mobile Device Privacy Act' would prevent secret smartphone monitoring
Proposed legislation by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) would require carriers and phone makers to inform consumers about monitoring software and gain their "express consent" before collecting information from phones.
[via arstechnica]
