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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)

Atanu Dey on why electricity is the bottleneck for mobile usage in rural India –

We don’t usually associate telecommunications with power. But cellular towers don’t work on love and fresh air (and fresh air is not something that you can take for granted, anyway.) They require power and in areas where the grid is unreliable, you have to spend fairly large sums on diesel generator sets. That, among others, is a major problem in rural India. The cost of energy accounts for a third of the operating costs of a cellular network, I am told. Higher costs means higher prices. So what’s to be done.

I am a firm believer in the market. The market figures out a solution. Recently I came across a firm that has developed cellular technology that is miserly in the use of electricity. It does not require grid and can do without diesel generator sets. It is VNL, a Swedish Indian company. As they claim, “VNL’s WorldGSM™ is the industry’s first microtelecom solution; a complete re-engineering of GSM for the billions of low-income, rural users.”

(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.

Apart from Google’s Project 10^100, I’m also submitting MobiChange at the Knight News Challenge. Here is the full text of my submission to the Knight News Challenge Garage. As you can see, some of the ideas here are based on your feedback on my Project 10^100 submission. As before, I’ll request you to take out ten minutes and share your thoughts on how I can improve my submission,

Describe your project:

MobiChange is a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change.

Even as the ubiquitous use of mobile phones bridges the digital divide between the developed and developed countries, another digital divide — digital divide 2.0 — is opening up between the haves and have-nots. Digital divide 2.0 is not about access to communications devices; it’s about the ability to leverage the power of group-forming social communications technologies to collaborate with others, self-organize into grassroots communities and create crowd-sourced content that is relevant for these communities.

MobiChange will enable disadvantaged communities to benefit from the power of group-forming social networks by bringing these technologies to the $50 mobile phone that can only be used to make voice calls and send text messages.

I’m totally delighted with the great feedback I have received on MobiChange.

Ben Turner commented on the post:

You might want to… focus on another angle: increased robustness of tools through lowest-common denominator design, then seeing if that leads us in any interesting, innovative directions.

@Ben: You hit the nail on the head. Lowest common denominator design is indeed the key to MobiChange.

Lavanya commented on the post –

It would be good if you give an example in words and not just diagrams. So take an NGO by name and say how it will connect to everyone else. The idea is easy to follow, but making it simpler will not reduce its value.

@Lavanya: You are right. I should illustrate the idea with examples of use cases. Coming up soon.

Ranjan Varma commented on the post –

What are the actionable deliverables for this great idea? Everybody wants to learn but doesn’t want to be taught. So, how do you address the challenge of providing relevant content for the idea?

@Ranjan: I’m sure that learning/ teaching will be one of the use cases for MobiChange, but I don’t think that it will be its primary use case.

I’m all set to submit MobiChange to Google’s Project 10^100 (see my earlier post on Project 10^100), but before I hit the submit button, I want to ask for your help in improving the idea. So, here is my complete submission. I’ll be grateful if you take out ten minutes and tell me what you think about it.

- The name of the idea: MobiChange

- The category of the idea: Community

- The idea in one sentence: An open-source mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change.

- The idea in more depth: Communications technologies play an important role in development by enabling better economic decisions, building capability at both the individual and the institutional levels, and having multiplier effects across economic sectors. The mobile phone, by the virtue of being the only truly accessible and affordable communications technology available in many developing countries, is increasingly being seen as the key to bridge the digital divide and unlock the economic potential of developing Asia and Africa.

Ignacio Mas and Kabir Kumar from CGAP have written a great paper on the issues involved in mobile banking — Banking on Mobiles: Why, How, for Whom?¹.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the ideas in the paper —

- Mobile phones offer always-on/ anytime/ anywhere ubiquitous reach and can partially or fully work as four devices: a virtual bank card, a POS terminal, a human ATM and an internet banking terminal. Not only that, mobile phones provide a unique user experience driven by personalization, immediacy and perceived control. Finally, mobile phones combine the tight security of the SIM with the flexible open architecture of the phone itself. Combined with the location awareness embedded into mobile phones, this capability can be the basis for a number of unique services.

- Banks can use the benefits offered by the mobile phones to build services that allow them to achieve one or more of the following objectives: increase penetration, sell more services, retain the most valuable customers, and reduce the cost of providing services.

RBI has recently issued operating guidelines to banks for mobile banking transactions in India¹ (via Ashish Sinha) with the objective of “ensuring a level playing field” (presumably between banks).

Mobile banking is an important piece of the leapfrogging puzzle for BRIC countries because of its twin promises of ubiquitous reach and low cost of reach. At one level, mobile banking can enable banks to service a significant number their existing customers at a low cost, without putting pressure on their branch networks. At another level, mobile banking can be an important enabler to bring the unbanked at the bottom of the pyramid into the economic mainstream.

In a country where the number of mobile phone users (287 million users, including 71 million rural users, at the end of June ‘08, as per TRAI²) is likely to overtake the number of bank account holders (about 400 million³, including 25 to 40 million active credit and debit card users^{4 5 6}) in a few years, it’s useful to ask if RBI’s mobile banking guidelines will allow mobile banking to fulfill that promise and deepen the reach of banking in India.

I was quoted today in a story on smart phones in The Hoyas, the Georgetown University newspaper.

The story also had a quote from Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer of T-Mobile USA.

By the way, Nokia should consider all the free publicity I have given to the E71 (see 1, 2 and 3) and hire me for a testimonial TVC.

Here is the full text of the story –

New Phones Make Students Smarter
By Gregg Re | Oct 07 2008

While technology will never render pen and paper extinct, smartphones are becoming more prevalent on campus and Georgetown and its students take advantage of all that the latest technology has to offer.

The devices are so versatile that some are using them as laptop replacements for academic work.
“For almost six weeks, when I was between laptops, my Nokia E71 was my main computing device,” said Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-2009 Yahoo! Fellow in Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

Smartphones such as the E71 and the G1 feature physical keyboards that can be used for note-taking in addition to text messaging.

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

While reading through chapter 2 of Howard Rheingold’s ‘Smart Mobs’, I started thinking about how the three laws of networked technologies (Sarnoff’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law) relate to social media in BRIC countries –

1. Sarnoff’s Law: The value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers (n).

2. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).

3. Reed’s Law: The value of a group forming network (or a social network) increases exponentially, proportional to 2 raised to the power the number of users in the network (2ⁿ).

In Sarnaff’s network, the only communication possible is one-to-many. In Metcalfe’s network, the only communication possible is one-to-one. In Reed’s network, all types of communication are possible, including one-to-one, many-to-many and some-to-some, so it’s effectively any-to-any.