A cellphone is not just for calling, texting and taking pictures anymore. Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are using phones to help people, especially in developing nations, to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're going and even diagnose their ailments. MIT News reports.
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... Improving the delivery of health care in rural areas has been one major focus of these research efforts. Patients in a remote village, for example, now may have to spend a whole day or more traveling to the nearest clinic in order to be tested, diagnosed and receive treatment or a prescription drug for their health problems. But a new open-source software system developed by students who formed a nonprofit company called Moca could provide a faster way.
Using a menu of questions downloaded to a cellphone - and, if necessary, a picture taken with the phone's built in camera - a patient can transmit enough information to a doctor or nurse in a remote location to get a preliminary diagnosis, and to find out whether the condition warrants a trip to the clinic or not.
While Moca aims to improve people's health, some new cellphone ventures also aim to build users' wealth. One such plan is a project called Zaca, which initially aims to empower farmers in the poor, rural Mexican state of Zacatecas.
Farmers there have been doing so poorly that many have already emigrated to the United States (it is estimated that up to 1 million Zacatecans now live in the U.S., compared to about 1.3 million still in the state). The Zaca team hopes to alleviate the situation by giving the farmers more information, allowing them to make deals through their cellphones to sell their crops directly instead of having to deal through middlemen, and giving them details of crop prices and growing practices that can help them make better decisions about what to plant each year.
“The standard function of a mobile phone is talking and texting,” Veli Pohjonen and the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs said. But it can also be used, he added, to access the Internet and run queries regarding carbon prices or exchange rates.
Veli Pohjonen and his son Matt have been testing the system on eight farms in the country’s central highlands, where the average farmer is earning approximately 1000 Birr, or $80, every six months from their carbon offsets.
-- In the five years between 2003 and 2008, the number of subscriptions in Africa grew by more than 500 percent.
-- In Gabon, the Seychelles, and South Africa there are 100 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people.
-- In Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the mobile industry has only penetrated 10 percent of the population.
-- The U.N. report says monthly Internet access in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic and Swaziland is more than $1,300, the highest in the world.
-- And only five countries - Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia - account for 90 percent of Africa's broadband subscriptions.
-- While Internet access in Africa remains largely elusive, according to the U.N. report wireless Internet is spreading fast in other developing regions. India registered almost 100-million new wireless subscriptions in the first half of 2009.
Telecoms operator Safaricom has integrated its M-Pesa money transfer service and data platform to enable users book and pay for their domestic air, road and rail travel through their data-enabled mobile phones. Kenya's Daily Nation reports.
The company has signed partnerships with local airlines — East African, Air Kenya and Aircraft Leasing Services (ALS), the Rift Valley Railways and bus companies such as Akamba, Crown bus and Busways to offer this service.
For millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, t solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary. stuff reports.
... Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information.
Mobile phone penetration in these regions has been held back by a lack of electricity: there is simply no way to charge a cell phone in many rural areas of developing countries.
An estimated 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity at all, while another 1 billion people have no electricity for much of the day, according to estimates by development groups.
Fortuitously, perhaps, most of these people live in sunny climates. And this is where solar mobile phones come in.
For those in developing nations, a mobile phone is more than a communications luxury. These tiny handsets act as hubs for mobile banking, entrepreneurship, fact-checking, and public health announcements - and they may be the key to women's economic equality. Jezebel on last week's report on telecoms in emerging markets from the Economist.
The innovations in technology have been able to provide women with various ways to make a living.
Bouncing a great-grandchild on her knee in her house in Bukaweka, a village in eastern Uganda, Mary Wokhwale gestures at her surroundings. "My mobile phone has been my livelihood," she says. In 2003 Ms Wokhwale was one of the first 15 women in Uganda to become "village phone" operators. Thanks to a microfinance loan, she was able to buy a basic handset and a roof-mounted antenna to ensure a reliable signal. She went into business selling phone calls to other villagers, making a small profit on each call. This enabled her to pay back her loan and buy a second phone. The income from selling phone calls subsequently enabled her to set up a business selling beer, open a music and video shop and help members of her family pay their children's school fees.
Business has dropped off somewhat in the past couple of years as mobile phones have fallen in price and many people in her village can afford their own. But Ms Wokhwale's life has been transformed.
Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market worldwide. Entrepreneurs and development organizations are eagerly seizing the opportunity presented by such growth. They are creating mobile phone applications for profitable and nonprofit ventures across the continent. Millions of Africans, for example, now use their mobile phones to transfer money, turn on water wells, learn soccer game scores and buy and sell goods.
The penetration of the mobile phone is far greater than that of the Internet in Africa, especially in rural areas, making it the most accessible communication tool, said Jon Gossier, founder and president of Appfrica, a technology company with headquarters in Uganda.
Mobile phones have transformed lives in the poor world. Mobile money could have just as big an impact. A summary of mobile payment options by the Economist.
Across the developing world, corner shops are where people buy vouchers to top up their calling credit. Mobile-money services allow these small retailers to act rather like bank branches. They can take your cash, and (by sending a special kind of text message) credit it to your mobile-money account. You can then transfer money (again, via text message) to other registered users, who can withdraw it by visiting their own local corner shops. You can even send money to people who are not registered users; they receive a text message with a code that can be redeemed for cash.
By far the most successful example of mobile money is M-PESA, launched in 2007 by Safaricom of Kenya. It now has nearly 7m users—not bad for a country of 38m people, 18.3m of whom have mobile phones.
Joshua Goldstein writing for Business Daily describes how African mobile networks are costly because the price of sending an SMS is kept up by high taxes and interconnection fees.
However, there is reason for hope. Mobile companies and regulators around the developing world are recognising the “economics of abundance”— that more users at lower prices will result in more revenue.
In the Philippines, for example, according to telecom expert Steve Song, mobile providers charge less than one US cent per SMS on average. What is striking about this is that they manage to generate three times the revenue per capita from SMS traffic as compared with South Africa where the average SMS costs over nine US cents.
Also, in Uganda, for the first time in the telecom industry’s history, MTN agreed to lower the price of a premium SMS to 5 US cents for Farmers Friend, one of the newly launched Grameen and Google services, aimed at poor farmers.
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, says developer Ken Banks, reports the BBC.
In a continent often painted in a poor light, home-grown innovation has been on the rise. In the absence of high speed internet, most activity has focused on mobile technology.
Today, a tech-savvy programmer with access to a computer, cheap mobile phone, software development kit and the kind of entrepreneurial flare which many Africans have in abundance, possesses all the tools they need to solve a business, technical or social problem. And solving them they are.
Activists who use cellphone text messages to expose missing essential drugs from clinics in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Malawi say the same system would work well in South Africa. The Mail&GuardianOnline reports.
Members of the public run a "pill check", visiting public hospitals to check the availability of drugs at their local clinic or hospital pharmacy.
If they are turned away on the grounds that essential items are out of stock, an SMS relays the news to another cellphone, this time linked to a computer run by the African wing of the civic group Health Action International (HAI).
Software automatically punches a red dot into an online map, as long as the activists use a code. (A normal SMS from a member of the public is put in manually, after staff double-check the information.)
As shortages worsen, the dot swells in size. When an internet user clicks on the dot, a pop-up bubble displays details of what is out of stock -- contradicting possible government denials.
Within one week more than 250 out-of-stock medicines -- including anti-malarials, penicillin, antiretrovirals, diarrhoea medication and zinc tablets -- were reported in the four countries. More than 100 public hospitals and clinics in Kenya alone were exposed for operating without essential medicines.
AfriGadget reports on a solar vest that recharges mobile phones worn by Boda Boda operators, bicycle riders that carry passengers from main roads to villages off the beaten track in Western Kenya.
Wearing Flexible Panels while cycling generates power from sun-up to sun-down, an average of 12 hours a day.
.. The Panel can be attached in a variety of ways. Velcro, Pop Buttons or simply attach Rucksack like straps so it can be worn with any garment. In the latter case the small pouch containing the controller and battery is attached to the back of the panels with Velcro.
The New York Times on how solar power and cell phone converge to distribute water in Kenya.
On the heels of complaints about corrupt distributors and conflicts over the fair allocation of water, a community in Musingini, Kenya, is working with Safaricom and Grundfos Lifelink, a division of the Danish pump maker Grundfos Group, to implement a solar-powered, pay-for-use water vending system using the M-PESA backbone.
The solar-powered well is activated using a smart card, which permits water to flow until either the card is removed or the user’s account runs out of credit.
... ”With this system we can monitor remotely how efficiently the solar well is operating, how much water has been used and how much income has been generated,” Mr. Hansen added.
Mobile Operator Tata Teleservices is testing technology that allows farmers to use their mobile phones to remotely monitor and switch on irrigation pump sets in far flung locations. PC World reports.
The technology, called Nano Ganesh, is being tested in two villages in the Indian state of Gujarat.
In India, where the electricity supply is erratic, farmers often walk several kilometers to where their irrigation pumps are located, only to find that there is no electricity available, Lloyd Mathias, chief marketing officer of Tata Teleservices, said on Wednesday.
By dialing a code number from his mobile phone to a wireless device attached to the pump, farmers can now remotely monitor the electricity supply, and also switch the pump on and off, Mathias said.
The global ICT sector has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the past decade driven by growth in the use of mobile phones, a World Bank report says. All Africa reports.
By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4 billion mobile phones globally. No technology has ever spread faster around the world. Mobile phones now represent the world's largest distribution platform", it states.
It analyses the development impact of high-speed Internet access in third world countries and provides policy options for rolling out broadband networks and addressing the opportunities and challenges of convergence between telecommunications, media, and computing.
Important marketAccording to the report, the mobile phone market is especially important for developing countries, where it is growing most rapidly and where it is seen as a "leapfrogging" tool.
More than a third of Uganda's population, about 10 million people own a cell phone - a counry where only 10 percent of the population has electricity - and many more have access to these phones through family members and neighbors. Cell phones can be found in every desolate corner of the countryside, where 85 percent of the country's residents live. With the dire need to be connected, people go to great lengths to use cell phones, charging them with car batteries or solar chargers.
Several nonprofits have begun thinking that the best way to reach the country's poor and get them much needed information is through their phones.
Real time information about farming, health and trading will be available to mobile phone users in Uganda with new technology services developed by the Grameen Foundation, Google and telecom operator MTN, writes The Seattle Times.
Peter Bladin, Grameen Foundation executive vice president, said AppLab builds on the success of an earlier project, Village Phone, in which local entrepreneurs rent cell phone use to villagers for pennies a call. Uganda now has 50,000 Village Phone and pay phone operators and nine million cell phone subscribers.
Bladin said he sought out Google and MTN Uganda to help scale up the applications and roll them out to other parts of Africa, where Google has seven offices.
The new services can be accessed by existing Village phone operators, as well as by people with their own phones.
Tens of thousands of mobile users in Bangladesh's flood and cyclone-prone areas will now receive advance warning of an impending natural disaster through an alert on their cell phones, reports Reuters.
... Bangladesh, with a population of around 162 million, has more than 46 million mobile phone subscribers.
Syed Ashraf, communications specialist for the country's Disaster Management Bureau, told Reuters by telephone that the messages would not be the usual SMS format, but would flash automatically on the screen of mobile phone sets, instead of going to message boxes.
This way, people would not have to even push a button on their handsets, making it very user-friendly, he said.
Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies, reports the BBC.
The project aims to deploy 5,000 automatic weather stations across the continent mounted on phone masts.
They will gather data on aspects of weather such as rainfall and wind, and send it to national weather agencies.
Former UN chief Kofi Annan says the project could help save lives of people on "the frontlines of climate change".
"The world's poorest are also the world's most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change, and the least equipped to deal with its consequences," he said.
"Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now."
Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful pilot program in India, a company executive said Monday. Yahoo Tech.
Nokia is now formulating plans to roll out Life Tools, which includes agricultural and educational services for rural mobile users, in other emerging markets following the "great success" of a trial conducted in India.
Nokia sees emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere as an important source of growth as the number of mobile subscribers increases and many come to rely on their handsets for Internet access.
A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. TechCrunch reports.
The report goes into the various schemes that have been implemented to help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people on the planet that do not own mobile phones.
That number include people who live in areas where wireless networks offer coverage, something that is not always the case because operators tend to shy away from underdeveloped markets because of limited chances of financial return on investments. Apparently, the key to be able to tap into this vast pool of potential customers in these so-called ‘emerging markets’ lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.
India now adds more cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role there — more so, it seems, than in the wealthy countries where it was invented. The New York Times reports.
Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only a third of the population. But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states.
What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions of people.
Imagine what it was like — in the Pre-Cellular Age — to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. What phones exist are centrally located.
The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.
Mobile phones are being used to diagnose and treat crop diseases that cause massive losses to farmers. The East African reports.
An initiative in two districts of Uganda, has community knowledge workers sending text messages to farmers in a given locality.
The information may include how to arrest the diseases, and where to buy uncontaminated seeds, as well tips on how to improve soil quality to increase yields.
“We have trained the workers on how to use mobile phones to get information to the farmers. They offer agricultural tips and advise through the phones on what to do and not to do to control the diseases,” said Whitney Gantt of Grameen Foundation, a global anti-poverty organisation.
Many small scale farmers in Africa still rely on little more than their instincts and past experience to decide which crops to plant.
They lack access to information specific to their farm areas including type of soil, fertilisers, best seeds, climatic conditions as well as market prices.
According to The Hindu, many rubber farmers and dealers in Kerala are tracking the prices of the commodity real time, helped by a service by the Rubber Board which through SMSes updates the farmers with rates in the global as well as domestic markets.
The Rubber Board provides the update of both national and international rates of natural rubber through SMS throughout the country at rupees two per SMS.
"On an average 300-400 SMSes are received on a daily basis from around Kerala," a senior Board official said.
A simple SMS system is revolutionizing medical care in Malawi, where scarce resources and a skeleton hospital staff must serve thousands of people spread over hundred of square miles. The Guardian reports.
Josh Nesbit, an undergraduate at Stanford University in California teamed up with Ken Banks, the founder of Cambridge-based FrontlineSMS – free text message software aimed at charities and NGOs – and created FrontlineSMS:Medic
Community health workers, most of whom had never seen a mobile phone, let alone owned one, were trained to send text messages containing medical information back to the hospital staff.
If health workers sent a drug name in a text, the system would automatically respond with information on dosages and usage. Health workers can also give status updates on particular patients or make a call for further medical information to help them treat cases on the go. It is particularly important in a country where HIV and Aids are rife – with infection rates as high as 70% in some areas.
The pilot project, which has been running for five months, has already had a significant impact: as well as getting emergency medical attention for 130 people who would have otherwise gone unseen, it has allowed the hospital's tuberculosis officer to treat twice as many people because his time can now be more used more efficiently.
Bill Gates' charitable foundation has pledged $12.5m (£8.6m) to help the world's poor access banking services. The BBC reports.
Working in conjunction with the mobile phone industry, the foundation aims to help provide a basic service that local banks are unable or unwilling to give.
It is thought that more than a billion people worldwide do not have a bank account but do have a mobile phone.
The foundation says that extending banking services to the world's poor is vital for economic progress.
... Research by consultants McKinsey estimates that the mobile money market for people without a bank account could grow to $5bn over the next three years.
"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world. The New York Times reports.
In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.
The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.
Examples of the mHealth projects included:
-- Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
-- Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
-- In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
-- In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has agreed to help fund a massive rollout of projects enabling poor mobile phone users to transfer money using their handsets, an industry body announced Tuesday. From Yahoo Tech.
The GSM Association, which represents 750 mobile phone networks in the world, said a grant of 12.5 million dollars (9.8 million euros) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would help fund 20 initiatives in Asia, Africa and South America.
Money transfer via mobile phone is seen as a potential area of growth for network operators in developing countries, where millions are without access to the banking system.
"There's 1.7 billion people in the emerging markets who don't have a bank account but do have a mobile phone, so they could use their mobile phone to conduct financial transactions," explained Michael O'Hara, marketing director or the GSMA.
"The target is to reach 20 million additionnal unbanked people with the service by 2012," he added.
About 12 mobile phone banking programmes have been launched worldwide in the last few years, with about 10 million users benefiting so far.
The Gates Foundation said the grant was part of its programme to extend financial services to the poor who are often without access to a simple savings account.
"The foundation believes that setting aside small sums in a safe place allows people to guard against risks and build financial security," said spokeswoman Susan Byrnes in a statement received by AFP in Washington.
The GSMA estimates that the money transfer market on mobile phones could represent 5.0 billion dollars by 2012.
Three foundations have announced their intention to join in a "mobile health" effort to use mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide. The BBC reports.
The UN, Vodafone, and the Rockefeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance aims to unite existing projects to improve healthcare using mobile technology.
The alliance will guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how they can save lives in the developing world.
The partnership is now calling for more members to help in mHealth initiatives.
The groundbreaking "mHealth for Development" study produced by the UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership lists more than 50 mHealth programmes from around the world, showing the benefits that mobile technology can bring to healthcare provision.
The report also outlines how such programmes offer value to the mobile industry.
Dr. Cedrick Ngalande has announced a new project called Green Erg, which harnesses (literally) a person’s movement energy to create electricity.
Designed to work perfectly on all types of road, ground or floor conditons. Will generate power when attached to a person walking or to a moving skating board, bike, ox-cart, farm animal...
"At normal walking speeds we have gotten more than 2 watts which is more than enough for running cell phones or radios."
... Improving the delivery of health care in rural areas has been one major focus of these research efforts. Patients in a remote village, for example, now may have to spend a whole day or more traveling to the nearest clinic in order to be tested, diagnosed and receive treatment or a prescription drug for their health problems. But a new open-source software system developed by students who formed a nonprofit company called 
Small farmers near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, are testing a carbon offset market facilitated by mobile phones. 
Some interesting figures from a 
Telecoms operator Safaricom has integrated its 
For millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, t solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary. 
Mobile phones have transformed lives in the poor world. Mobile money could have just as big an impact. A summary of mobile payment options by the 
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, says developer 
The global ICT sector has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the past decade driven by growth in the use of mobile phones, a World Bank report says. 
Tens of thousands of mobile users in Bangladesh's flood and cyclone-prone areas will now receive advance warning of an impending natural disaster through an alert on their cell phones, reports 
Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies, reports the 
A new report from
India now adds more cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role there — more so, it seems, than in the wealthy countries where it was invented. 
According to 
A simple SMS system is revolutionizing medical care in Malawi, where scarce resources and a skeleton hospital staff must serve thousands of people spread over hundred of square miles. 
Bill Gates' charitable foundation has pledged $12.5m (£8.6m) to help the world's poor access banking services. The 
"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's 
Three foundations have announced their intention to join in a "mobile health" effort to use mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide. The 
