Burma's emergency telecoms delay

Foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas have been prevented from going into cyclone-hit Burma. The BBC reports.

"Like many charity groups, the Telecoms Sans Frontières (TSF) organisation has so far been denied entry visas by the military-run government.

A TSF team has been waiting in Bangkok, Thailand, with its equipment all week.

If visas are eventually granted, the team will go in to set up phone and other network links.

These will be used by many aid groups to co-ordinate the huge relief effort that is needed.

Locals will also be offered "welfare calls", to make contact with friends and family who will have been worried about their safety.

The UN fears more than 1.5 million people have been affected by Cyclone Nargis which struck on Saturday.

Building digital life lines

Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) steps in when natural disasters occur wiping out electricity, fresh water and communication infrastructures. The BBC reports.

"The group are currently on standby to deploy to Burma; they are waiting for authorisation to enter the country.

"The UN-sponsored organisation specialises in setting up communication links at times of emergency, for use by charities and those affected.

... The first phone call they offered anyone was to an Albanian refugee caught up during the conflict in Kosovo in 1998.

Since then, TSF has deployed on countless missions all over the world, offering calls to thousands of people.

Recent funding of $2m from the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation means that the charity - which still only has 15 permanent staff - can be "in country" for 200 days every year."

Cell phone street repair as an industry

Street repair services for cell phones are a big industry in India. Technicians there get a diploma from a 'Mobile Repairing Institute.' News.com reports.

"Jan Chipchase leads a team at Finnish cell phone giant Nokia that's trying to lower the cost of phones for emerging markets, an effort that's part market development and part recycling.

The group of 15 has scanned bazaars and street shops in places as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, Iran, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, and Mongolia to learn how end users relate to their products--and they discovered surprises that could impact consumer electronics makers within the next 15 years.

Their main finding: there's no limit to how cell phones can be modified and how their life spans can be extended.

And breathing new life into phones usually doesn't take a complex set of tools. In most cases, handsets can be reborn with the help of just a screwdriver and a toothbrush sprayed with alcohol to clean the contact heads.

"The informal repair culture...makes mobile phones something more affordable to price-sensitive customers, increasing the lifetime of products while lowering the environmental-impact risks," he said, adding that with new phones appearing constantly, street mechanics very quickly learn how to work with new models."

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

An 8 page article on Nokia human-behavior researcher and everyone's favorite person, Jan Chipchase, in The New York Times.

Tiny excerpt:

"Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached.

There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services.

Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are.

Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.

Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone. "

Bangladesh adds 2.05 mln mobile phone users in Jan

Bangladesh's six cell phone carriers added 2.05 million new subscribers in January, taking the total number of user to 36.4 million in the one of the world's fastest growing mobile market, official data showed. The impoverished country counts over 140 million people.

[via Reuters]

The Impact of Cell Phones on Grain Markets in Africa's Niger

A new research study published by the Center for Global Development has looked at the impact of mobile phones on the prices of farm produce in the African country of Niger - which faced serious food shortages in 2005.

In theory, the increasing use of mobile phones should have improved distribution efficiency and hence lower the variations in prices around the country. The study set out to see if that was the case.

... As grain markets occur only once per week, traders have historically traveled long distances to potential sales markets to obtain information on supply, demand and prices. Between 2001 and 2006 though, cell phone service was phased in throughout Niger, providing an alternative and cheaper search technology to grain traders and other market actors.

To test the predictions of the theoretical model, the researchers use a unique market and trader dataset from Niger that combines data on prices, transport costs, rainfall and grain production with cell phone access and trader behavior. They first exploited the quasi-experimental nature of cell phone coverage to estimate the impact of the staggered introduction of information technology on market performance.

The results provide evidence that cell phones reduce grain price dispersion across markets by a minimum of 6.4 percent and reduce intra-annual price variation by 10 percent. Cell phones have a greater impact on price dispersion for market pairs that are farther away, and for those with lower road quality.

Read full article.

Rich-poor "digital divide" still broad, says UNCTAD

The digital divide between rich and poor countries is narrowing as mobile phones and Internet use become more available, but the developing world still lags far behind, a United Nations report said on Wednesday. Reuters reports.

"The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said mobile phone subscribers have almost tripled in developing countries over the last five years, and now make up some 58 percent of mobile subscribers worldwide.

"In Africa, where the increase in terms of the number of mobile phone subscribers and penetration has been greatest, this technology can improve the economic life of the population as a whole," it said.

The report said mobile phones were the main communication tool for small businesses in developing countries, reducing costs and increasing the speed of transactions."

Uganda. Mobile Phone Kiosk

A picture of a cell phone recharging center in Uganda, sent in by Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net

Here’s a photo of a mobile charging kiosk in Kampala (this guy also seems to double-up as a payphone operator).

More pictures out of Africa in kiwanja.net's Mobile Gallery.

The mobile revolution

Along with the internet, with which the mobile phone network is rapidly merging, this is the most astonishing technology story of our time, and one that has the power to revolutionise access to information across the developing world. The BBC reports.

... "It's time that we recognize that for the majority of the world's population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed."

Grameenphone Introduces BlackBerry for the First Time in Bangladesh

BlackBerry smartphones will be available for the first time in Bangladesh, providing Grameenphone's customers with access to a wide range of mobile applications, including email, browsing, messaging, phone, organizer, multimedia and a wide range of other business and lifestyle applications. DesignTaxi reports.

Anders Jensen, CEO at Grameenphone said: “The BlackBerry platform is the gold standard in mobility for business users around the world. We are proud to be the first mobile operator launching the BlackBerry platform in Bangladesh, bringing in the next level of global connectivity for businesses.”

Villagers walk 20 kms to charge mobile phones

While charging our mobile phones is the least of our concerns, there is a small village in India where people have to walk about 20 kilometers every single day just to charge their mobile phones. Mobile Weblog reports.

"What is more interesting in this news covered IBNLive is the popularity of mobile phones despite the absence of electricity. Talk about mobile revolution at its finest.

For more than 50 years this village named Karaj in the Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh has no electricity and no decent roads, causing many people to get sick during the monsoons. Mobile phones have given the people in this powerless village entertainment and power to connect with their family and close friends."

Related: - Romania. Five mile walk to recharge phones

Ka-torchi. Flashlight as selling point for Nokia in Africa

This poster emphasizes flashlight and battery life features<(N> on a Nokia 1200

Photo taken in Uganda last week by favorite Ken Banks, founder of Kiwanja.net "
"Where technology meets anthropology, conservation and development"

Text message helpline for Indian farmers

Embattled Indian farmers facing the threat of drought, pestilence and cyclonic storms are turning to mobile telephones to give them advance warning of livelihood-threatening disasters which could lie ahead. The Telegraph reports.

"Although much of Indian agriculture still relies on the bullock and the buffalo, the use of mobile phones to warn of dangers and share market information is promising to revolutionize life for many.

In a scheme set up by India’s equivalent of Oxbridge - the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai - farmers are using SMS messages to receive alerts and ask questions of experts and colleagues.

Called "aAQUA">aAQUA" - short for "almost all questions answered" - the scheme enables farmers to enquire about everything from projected rainfall patterns, disease forecasts for plants and animals and to how to milk buffaloes more efficiently."

Ecuador wants cell phones for the poor

Ecuador has contacted foreign mobile firms to negotiate new contracts that would impose higher penalties over operational errors and push companies to create a fund that would provide cell phone service to the poor, a government official said on Thursday.

[via Reuters]

Tanzania: Mobile Phones Benefit Fishing Community

A study conducted by two students from Upsalla University, Sweden, in collaboration with the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), has concluded that the use of mobile phones has improved the livelihood of fishermen in Tanzania, reports All Africa.

-- According to the study, the fishermen, used to spending long hours away from family and friends now find it easier to stay in touch as they venture into the sea.

-- The researchers say that the fishermen call their friends already at sea for the weather forecast and no longer rely on the Meteorological Department which in most cases is inaccurate.

-- The fisherfolk also communicate with one another, giving tips on where to get the best catch.

-- Mobile phones also come in handy during cases of emergency. Now fishermen can simply dial the emergency numbers on their cell phones or simply call their friends.

-- Most of all, fishermen are now using mobile phones to gather market information and co-ordinate pickup for their catch, known to be a highly perishable commodity.

-- Customers willing to buy fish simply call the fishermen to place their orders. With this empowerment, the supply chain has now improved.

But it has not been smooth sailing either. Loss of a phone consequently means loss of business. The researchers also suggest that number portability, which allows subscribers to retain their phone numbers across the networks, could alleviate this problem."

Photo from Vagabonding .

Mobile phones reach Uganda's villages

In a village called Kkonkoma, on the roof of a small house there is an aerial. It is a mobile phone antenna for a home-based village telephone service run by 24-year-old entrepreneur Joseph Ssesanga and his family. [via the BBC]

Neighbours make telephone calls from his house rather than walk down the dirt track to the nearest public telephone some five kilometres away.

This is the Village Phone-model, which provides a business in a box. With loans, budding entrepreneurs can buy a mobile phone, a car battery to charge it, and a booster antenna that can pick up signals from base stations situated up to 25 kilometres away.

The handset is loaded with software that tracks revenues from every call.

The loan providers, so-called microfinance institutions, take on the task of ordering the equipment and transporting it to those who cannot afford to travel long distances. "

A $50 Billion Investment to Blanket Africa With Mobile Phones

At the Connect Africa summit, the GSM Association says that the mobile industry plans to invest more than $50 billion in sub-Saharan Africa over the next five years to provide more than 90% of the population with mobile coverage.

[via Cellular News]

How Safaricom gives voice to Africa

An interesting article from the FT, on flashing in Kenya, something related to cell phones and that has nothing to do with indecent exposure.

"To flash is to call a mobile and hang up before the call is answered, a cost-free way of letting the owner know you want to be called back. People do it because they are low on pre-paid credit, or because they think the other person has a better reason to pay for the conversation.

t is a habit borne of poverty in an African country where gross national income per capita is $530 a year and 46 per cent of its 36m people live on less than a dollar a day.

But flashing, which congests the network, bothers Mr Joseph so much that, for no charge, customers can now send a standardised text message that reads: “Please call me. Thank you.”

“It gets people off our network to allow other people to make calls that will mean revenue for us,” says the chief executive."

Related article: - Africa is in the grip of a mobile phone revolution

Poorer workers ring in India's mobile phone revolution

India's legion of self-employed, which comprises half the workforce, has benefited the most from India's mobile phone market, the world's fastest growing.

"Maids, cooks, autorickshaw drivers and construction workers have bought mobile phones even on incomes as low as 100 dollars per month.

"It's no longer a status symbol. It is increasingly becoming a necessity like water and electricity," Arvind Singhal, the chairman of retail consulting firm KSA Technopak said.

Now when a carpenter sticks up advertisements at a local grocery to find business "he has a mobile office" where people can call him, he said.

Despite the surge in mobile users, the growth is still largely confined to cities. A huge market in rural areas, where nearly 70 percent of India's 1.1 billion population lives, remains untapped.

Telephone penetration in urban India is around 25 per 100 people but just 1.6 per 100 in rural areas.

The country's total "teledensity" -- the number of people owning a telephone out of every 100 people -- also remains low at 21.20 percent in August, according to official data.

But mobile phone companies are rolling out coverage to rural and remote areas to increase their clients.

"Landline networks are not very effective in many of these places. So, mobile phones are a big necessity in rural areas," Singhal said. "It's not an indicator of wealth any more. A mobile phone is now a tool that is likely to improve productivity dramatically."

Mobiles for the 'world's poorest'

Nearly half a million people, described by the UN as "the poorest of the poor", will soon be able to make mobile calls. The BBC reports.

"As part of a UN programme to tackle poverty in rural Africa, 79 villages across 10 African countries will be hooked up to cellular networks.

It is hoped that the connections will help improve healthcare and education, as well as boosting the local economy.

A 2005 study showed that an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people could increase GDP growth by 0.6%.

The plan to extend the mobile network to people that would not normally be considered a priority for mobile phone firms is part of the UN Millennium Villages program."

[via SMSText News ]

Mobile Phoning from Uganda thanks to kiwanja.net

Ken Banks, one of textually's favorite people, founder of Kiwanja.net - where technology meets anthropology, conservation and development - is in Uganda at the moment doing workin with Grameen.

In his own words:

"During my spare time I’ve been snapping photos of various mobile-related things, and thought that since you liked my earlier ones of South African mobile phone shops, you might like these.

-- The first one is of a car battery converted to charge mobile phones, in a village not far outside Kampala. Very clever in a place where electricity isn’t guaranteed.

-- The second one is called a ‘BodaPhone’, named after Vodafone, obviously! Boda bodas are the bikes people use to get around on, so it’s a nice friendly play on words. But very clever, again. =)

-- The last one is a village phone, this one taken in a rural area. This phone is actually a mobile (you can see the aerial) - some operators prefer them because they are bigger, stronger and have longer battery life.

It’s funny hearing people ask for bigger phones, rather than back home when all we seem to want is smaller and smaller things.

More pictures in Kiwanja.net mobile gallery.

Thank you Ken!

Cairo Phone Kiosks

Spotted on Jan Chipchase' Jan Future Perfect blog, a Nokia cell phone kiosk in Cairo.

Kenya. Wind Powered Cell Phone Base Stations

Spotted on Afrigadget, winafrique's hybrid wind and diesel turbine systems for powering cell phone base stations.

Cellphones blamed on broken mariages in Kenya

According to AllAfrica, cell phones are breaking mariages in Kenya.

"An opinion poll commissioned by the Sunday Nation reveals that, for many a couple, spying on each other has become a fulltime pre-occupation. Many relationships are falling apart courtesy of the cell phone.

Psychologists, marriage counsellors and the church have their hands full trying to restore harmony among couples whose marriages have been put to the test by a spouse's tendency to scroll through the partner's text messages.

The poll shows that 47.3 per cent of the respondents have been actively engaged in domestic espionage in the last three months.

"Anybody could answer the landline including junior. This meant a lady having a relationship with a married man would be plainly insane to call him at home.

With mobile phone, things are fast getting different. A woman seated opposite her husband on the dinner table could be busy texting, "Darling, I'm really missing you..." to some fellow across town.

Mrs Tabitha Murungu, a counsellor with Hearts of Gold, says the coming of the mobile phone has seen an upsurge in clients. They are married and their problems are related to the mobile phone.

Image of a woman texting from MobileAfrica

Story Bank: Indian villagers share stories

Computer scientists at Swansea University are working on a collaborative project that is using new mobile phone technologies to help villagers in India record and share their stories and experiences. innovations repor reports.

"The StoryBank project is providing people in the Indian village of Budikote, 100km from Bangalore, with mobile devices that allow them to make videos, record sound and take photographs, and then edit the material into short films or “stories”.

Dr Matt Jones, who manages the project at Swansea University, said: “The people of Budikote have a strong tradition of visual and oral history, so we were interested in how we could develop digital technology to enable them to communicate their stories in new ways.”

Stories created by the villagers can be “gifted” to the StoryBank by using wireless connections from their mobile devices and uploading videos and pictures to the system. In the same way, users can download stories from the StoryBank to their mobiles.

“The mobile phone digital story authoring application we have developed is giving members of this isolated Indian community a new, lasting record of individual stories, shared experiences and history. The digital library will have a wide reach and should be a useful resource for the whole community,” said Dr Matt Jones, who is based in the Future Interaction Technology Laboratory at Swansea University’s Department of Computer Science."

The 18-month, EPSRC-funded project, worth over £400,000, ends in February 2008.

Vodafone unveils two inexpensive phones for emerging markets

According to Reuters, British Vodafone Group unveiled two new own-branded mobile handsets it plans to sell for $25 to $45 to boost sales in developing economies of Asia and Africa.

"The world's biggest mobile operator by sales, increasingly reliant on developing markets to drive growth, said it expected to sell over a million of the two phones within a year."

How mobile phones promote economic growth

How do mobile phones promote economic growth? Robert Jensen for The Economist, describes how mobiles helped the Kerala fishermen increase incomes and pay for the phones. [via Emergic]

Fishermen's profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare, he concludes.

... One criticism levelled at such studies, says Mr Waverman, is that it is difficult to tell if mobile phones are promoting growth, or growth is promoting the adoption of mobile phones, as people become able to afford them.

But detailed analyses of micro-market data like Mr Jensen's, he says, show how phones really do make people better off.

Furthermore, says Mr Jensen, phones do this without the need for government intervention. Mobile-phone networks are built by private companies, not governments or charities, and are economically self-sustaining.

Mobile operators build and run them because they make a profit doing so, and fishermen, carpenters and porters are willing to pay for the service because it increases their profits. The resulting welfare gains are indicated by the profitability of both the operators and their customers, he suggests.

All governments have to do is issue licences to operators, establish a clear and transparent regulatory framework and then wait for the phones to work their economic magic".

Nokia trains in India

Alongside their sales trek through India's countryside in Vans, Nokia will be renting rail time to promote their products in the New Dehli area, reports Gizmodo.

"Nokia hopes to target rural customers with their lower-end products by parking their train in stations like a Bookmobile. And if this model is successful, Nokia is open to operating their own commuter trains."

Related:

-- For the rural poor, cellphones come calling - Nokia has sent two dozen vans staffed with sales representatives on continuous six-month treks through India's countryside. Their task is to explain why anyone in a small farming community would want a mobile phone in the first place, and a Nokia in particular.

Uganda: Motorola Starts Solar Project

Motorola has launched its global 'Motopower' solar recharge project in Kampala.

"Through the Motopower program women are given the opportunity to run their own businesses, learn valuable entrepreneurial skill and generate a positive income," Nikesh Patel, the senior sales director for Africa, said at the launch.

Patel said the process had started to select 50 women to spearhead the project to run their own Motopower kiosks.

The kiosks will offer free, solar-powered mobile phone recharge services."

[via AllAfrica.com]

Sun aims for ultra-cheap cell phones

According to News.com in an answer to Nicolas Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child", Sun hopes to sell a version of Java to phone companies that will bring cheaper network access.

"Java will play a central role in bringing the Internet to the planet," Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said during a news conference. "It will be the software to build the devices to bridge the digital divide."

In a brief speech at the show, Schwartz indicated he believed the Java-powered mobile phones could be sold for $30 to $50 apiece."