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In my previous post on Nokia’s research on mobile phone use at the bottom of the pyramid, I talked about the practice of sharing mobile phones and the challenges in designing a user interface for illiterate mobile phone users.

In this post, I’ll talk about the informal service infrastructure that supports mobile phone use at the bottom of the pyramid.

Here, Jan Chipchase documents informal repair cultures in the developing world and asks –

What can we learn from informal repair cultures? Aside from the benefits, what are the risks for consumers and for companies whose products are repaired, refurbished and resold? Given the benefit to (bottom of the pyramid) consumers are there elements of the repair ecosystem that can be exported to other cultures? Can the same skills be applied to other parts of the value chain? And, given the range of resources and skills available what would it take to turn cultures of repair into cultures of innovation?

Here, Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns explore street hacks for mobile phones (an update of the informal repair culture presentation) –

Here, Stuart Henshall (not from Nokia) shares his experience in buying a ‘China phone’ at Mumbai’s Manish Market.

Even as I’m painfully aware of the myth of leapfrogging, I’m endlessly fascinated by how young people in urban India have embraced mobile phones.

I have been able to persuade new friend Priyanka Matanhelia to blog about the findings of her doctoral research on mobile phone usage amongst Indian youth and she is off to a quick start.

Consider her post on SMS romance in India where she references some interesting sources like the 2002 Asia Times story titled “India’s Love Affair with Hi-Tech Flirting” and the 2002 India Today story titled “Love, Sex and SMS” —

In most cases, hi-tech flirting - often punctuated with smileys and winking ‘emoticons’ - is a private display of affection. You can hear them in pubs, meetings, seminars, fashion shows, sit-down dinners, drawing rooms, even in bedrooms. The buzz of the SMS has become an omnipresent, everyday rhythm, sometimes the secretive smiles giving away the frenzied exchanges between couples even as they sit in the same room watching a fashion show or attending a corporate conference. Some users confess that they spend a good part of the night making SMS love. It is indicative of a paradigm shift in personal communication among Indians, for many of whom explicit talk about love and sex is restrained by conscious cultural reminders, but continues to simmer inside.

In my last post, I wrote about the Nokia Open Studio design competition in slums in Mumbai, Rio De Janeiro and Accra.

Over the weekend, I have been going through research conducted by Nokia’s Jan Chipchase, Younghee Jung, Raphael Grignani and others and here’s a selection of their most interesting research on mobile phone usage at the bottom of the pyramid (more research to follow in another post).

Jan Chipchase on mobile phone usage amongst illiterate users at LIFT 2007 conference –

Jan Chipchase and Indru Tulusan on shared mobile phone usage –

- 3.3 billion people out of 6.5 billion people in the world have mobile phones. Another 1 billion people will have mobile phones within two years. Most of them will be from emerging Asia and Africa and will have limited literacy. In fact, out of the 774 million illiterate adults in the world, 270 million are in India (UNESCO Institute for Statistics)!

- Three types of literacies are relevant for mobile phone usage — textual literacy, numerical or arithmetic literacy and ‘proximate literacy’, the ability to rely on others who are either literate or at least sufficiently competent in using the device.

Nokia ethnographers Jan Chipchase and Younghee Jung share their experiences in conducting the Nokia Open Studio design contest in 2007 across three slums around the world — Dharavi (Mumbai, India), Favela Jacarezinho (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Camp Buduburam (Accra, Ghana) –

Ethnographic research methods guide the design research phase for innovation as far as creating opportunities through which we can understand the present living and underlying motivations behind why people behave the way they do. But it often does not let us see beyond the barriers of the present living: people who are not using technology not because they do not need it but because they cannot afford it; people who do not have time or social network to introduce them to new tools. Through open studios, we wanted to lift these barriers and understand how people see the relevance of technology in their lives, sometimes for the future, sometimes in relation to what is lacking today. It is not a marketing tool, and it is not a tool to hunt ideas to implement in products directly. But it is a tool that supports our thinking and projection about the future. (Younghee Jung)

(Cross posted on my fellowship blog)

TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb have written about a slide shared by Yahoo!’s Principal Research Scientist Elizabeth Churchill on geographical locations where Flickr users are more likely to post their photos with privacy settings (red) or use the default public setting (green). The sample set was 1 million Flickr users who self-reported their locations, in 2005.

Neither Michael Arrington nor Marshall Kirkpatrick share any details of the methodology behind the map, but a quick Google search led me to the presentation from which this slide seems to be taken: ‘Sharing Preferences and Privacy Cultures‘. The presentation itself is based on a paper by Elizabeth Churchill and Shyong K. Lam titled ‘The Social Web: Global Village or Private Cliques?’ The paper is behind a firewall but the presentation gives some more data about the research —

- More than 90% of users younger than 25 post their photos as public. In the 25 to 40 age group, public photo sharing behavior drops, almost in s straight line, to 80% and goes as low as 70% for users in their late 50s and early 60s.

Here is some more interesting data from the Universal McCaan study that validates the conclusion that we use the internet for expanding our network of contacts but use the mobile phone to maintain our current network.

In the earlier post, we looked at the number of contacts we stay in touch with using different communication channels. In this post, we’ll look at which communication channels we use to stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues. In the table below are the percentage of respondents who stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues using different communications channels (normalized by the face-to-face field) —

The Universal McCann analysts used the data to reach a rather confused conclusion –

The most remarkable trend is the influence of the virtual connection on our most personal of relationships. Nearly 38% of respondents say they keep in contact with their partner via SMS, 30% via email and 10% via Instant Messenger. All very significant compared to the 55% who stay in touch with a partner face to face. Staying in touch with children is a very similar pattern, remarkably 16% stay in touch by text and 13% by email, which again are very significant numbers considering just 34% have children and stay in touch face to face.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

I had earlier used data from the Wave 3 of the Power of the People Social Media Tracker by Universal McCann to do a comparative analysis of social media usage in BRIC countries.

Now Universal McCann has published some more findings from the same study in another report titled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet turned us all into influencers. The report is a treasure trove of interesting findings on how digital media is changing how we look at relationships and influence and I’m sure that I’ll return to it often in subsequent posts.

However, in this post, I want to focus on Universal Mccann’s findings on how we stay in touch with our personal contacts –

The evolution of the web as a social platform and primary communication channel has had a dramatic impact on the scale and nature of our friendship networks. Figure 8 shows the global average number of friends and personal acquaintances we maintain via different forms of communication including face to face, digital and letters.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s the latest world map of social networks based on Alexa data (via Oxyweb) –

– and Indian and Brazil are the only two countries in the world where Orkut is the most popular social network.

I have often wondered what joins Brazilians and Indians in their love for Orkut. The answer is a combination of serendipity, first mover advantage, faster loading time, simplicity of the name, similarity of the name to Hindi/ Portuguese sounds, simplicity of the user interface, and association with the Google brand name, but the most powerful reason is the lax attitude towards privacy common to Indians and Brazilians.

In spite of the contrary results on the Synovate survey on online privacy, both Brazilians and Indians share generally lax attitudes about online privacy.

This is reflected in the much less fine-grained privacy controls (only friends and friend-of-friends), the excessively open, almost exhibitionist profiles (especially by Brazilian women), the very voyeuristic and totally transparent browsing behavior of Brazilian and Indian men (and their tendency to ask strange women to be friends), the general tendency to add strangers as friends, the open “crush” and “favorite” features, and, finally, the open and often spammy scrapbooks.

Here are some highlights from a survey conducted by research firm Synovate amongst 13,000 respondents aged 18-65 in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US (via eMarketer) –

- Only 42% of the respondents knew about social networking, even though a higher percentage of younger respondents were aware of social networking.

- Only 26% of the respondents were members of any social network. Some markets (like India) seemed to favor multiple memberships and some seemed to stick to one or two major ones.

- 51% of the respondents expressed concerns about privacy and security issues online. Brazilians (79%) and Americans (69%) were most concerned about such issues while Indians (19%) were the least concerned. Amongst members of social networking sites, only 26% were comfortable giving out personal details. Indians (57%) were amongst those most comfortable sharing personal details while Brazilians (23%) and Americans (30%) were amongst those least comfortable.

I’ll be speaking about my off consumption experiment at the Interesting New York unconference on September 13.

It’s basically a cool unconference where people talk about interesting things they are doing, or things they are really passionate about.

The Interesting unconference is the brainchild of Russel Davies and his colleagues at the Open Intelligence Agency. The previous Interesting events have been held at Sydney, Amsterdam and London. The New York event is being hosted by David Nottoli and it was because of Jinal Shah’s thoughtfulness that I came to know of it.

The list of previous speakers at Interesting unconferences includes some very smart people and Grant McCracken is one of the speakers at Interesting New York. Grant McCracken is one of my favorite thinkers about culture and marketing and I can’t tell you how excited I am about finally getting to meet him.

If you are in New York on September 13, I would strongly urge you to join us at the unconference. You can follow Interesting New York on Twitter or register for it on Facebook.