Ken ‘Kiwanja’ Banks wrote a great post last week on the mistakes techies make in developing social mobile applications for the emerging world –
Progress in the social mobile field will come only when we think more about best practices in the thinking and design of mobile projects and applications, rather than obsessing over the end products themselves. By then most of the damage has usually already been done.
Ken gave some great advice, based on his own FrontlineSMS experience: understanding the need gap before entering development, learning from other tools/ players, prototyping early and cheap, partnering with grassroots non-profits, staying lean, being flexible, encouraging local customization, focusing on text and voice, starting small, working closely with early users, and building conversations and community over time. My own approach to MobiChange is similar and I’ll try to follow most of Ken’s advice in the months to come.
It reminded me of another great post in which Russel Southwood critiqued the social mobile space (via Katrin Verclas) and raised several important questions around usability, impact, scale and sustainability –
MobiChange is my work-in-progress muse project: an open-source, multi-lingual mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change. I had earlier written about submitting MobiChange for the Knight News Challenge.
The Knight News Challenge is a great fit for MobiChange both in terms of the stage the idea is in and amount of funding required to realize the idea. Other contests like NetSquared USAID Development 2.0 Challenge and Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Challenge either offer a very small grant or fund projects in a different development stage. So, getting funded by Knight News Challenge may be the most important thing for MobiChange now.
Of course, the Knight News Challenge has multiple rounds of screening and the winners will only be announced in Fall 2009. MobiChange itself is evolving as an idea, I’m still in the process of putting together the rest of the team, the actual development work may only start in Spring 2009, and my grand vision for MobiChange may only be realized by end of 2010. So, MobiChange promises to be a very long journey of (self-)discovery for me.
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?
Specifically, he says that the wisdom of crowds is great at solving three types of problems — cognition problems which involve identifying a correct definitive answer, coordination problems which involve synchronizing our individual activities with others, and cooperation problems which involve acting together despite our self-interest.
However, for the wisdom of crowds to work, four basic conditions need to be met — diversity of opinion to bring in different information, independence of members from one another to avoid the herd mentality, decentralization so that people’s errors balance each other out, and a good method for aggregating opinions to distill the wisdom from the crowds.
Therefore, the wisdom of crowds fails when groups are too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative or too emotional.
Here are the key findings from the 2006 study amongst 8660 respondents (including 6605 SEC D and E respondents) in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand –
- At the BOP, access to phones (more than 90%) is much higher than ownership of phones (20% to 50%) due to heavy used of shared, borrowed and public phones.
- At the BOP, males are heavier users of mobile phones while females are heavier users of household landline phones.
- BOP users make an average of one call per day, mostly local, mostly 2-3 minutes long, mostly to stay in touch with family and friends.
- At the BOP, convenience, in terms of anytime accessibility, is the biggest driver in the purchase of both fixed and mobile phones. The ability to afford the initial cost (up to $50) of getting connected is the biggest reason for not buying a phone even though monthly charges are low (as low as $5).
The story on using mobile innovations for development in Africa has been unfolding for a while now, but it has become even more prominent since the Surprising Africa special at the Picnic 2008 conference in Amsterdam and the MobileActive 2008 conference in Johannesburg.
Here’s what some of the people who are writing the story on mobile-based social innovation in Africa have to say about it.
For social entrepreneurs and investors, the innovation occurring here is a huge sign of progress that could potentially change the continent’s world standing forever. The most exciting aspect for me, however, is the decreased reliance on developmental aid and foreign groups to provide these solutions. The number of African developers who are beginning to create applications that offer solutions for their own communities is increasing and that, more than anything else, will shape the future of Africa.
Speaking in the context of the dotcom meltdown, Jeff Bezos says that while it’s tempting to see the Internet using the California Gold Rush analogy, it’s more useful to apply the electricity analogy.
Both electricity and internet are thin horizontal enabling layers that go across multiple industries. The web applications we have seen so far are, in fact, similar to the first wave of electric appliances. For instance, just like web applications use the physical network infrastructure laid out for long distance telecommunications, the first wave of electrical appliances used the electric network laid out for the light bulb. So, it’s only to be expected that web applications, like the first electrical appliances, will include both life changing innovations and amusing failures.
I believe that Jeff Bezos’ conclusion in 2003 — “there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us” — is equally valid in 2008, and that’s true for both the protocol/ platform and the application/ user interface layers. Which is a good thing, especially for those of us who missed both the dotcom and the web 2.0 booms.
Over the last week, reposts of a rather misleading Trend Micro press release on on spam in BRIC countries1 kept showing up in my Google Alert feed for “BRIC + Internet”. The press release and most of the news articles quoting it verbatim focus on the high incidence of spam in BRIC countries. However, even some cursory math showed me that the incidence of spam in BRIC countries is not unusual: BRIC countries account for 28.5% of the world’s internet users and 27.1% of the world’s spam (according to Trend Micro). In fact, two other reports from Sophos2 and Secure Computing3 peg the contribution of BRIC countries to worldwide spam at 19.7% and 18.5% respectively.
If you compare the three sets of data, three trends emerge strongly –
- USA still remains (one of) the largest contributors of worldwide spam, which is understandable given its high internet user base.
- China’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately low, perhaps because of its strict censorship regime.
- Russia’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately high, so much so that Russia is being called the “spam superpower of the world”45.
The question to ask, however, is: why is spam so high in Russia?
If the value of a “social” network (Reed’s Law) is indeed exponentially higher than the value of a telecommunication (Metcalfe’s Law) or a broadcast network (Sarnoff’s Law), there is significant leapfrogging potential available to BRIC countries. A social network (like MobiChange) that mimics the any-to-any nature of Reed’s network on SMS can create tremendous value in the BRIC countries. However, the more I read about leapfrogging the digital divide, the more convinced I am that leapfrogging is much easier in theory than in practice.
Leapfrogging is the idea that poor countries can skip over stages in technology adoption (especially large-scale, industrial, infrastructure-heavy technologies) and directly adopt newer, better technologies (especially light-weight, distributed, ecologically sustainable digital technologies).
The classic example of leapfrogging is the ubiquitous adoption of mobile phones in the developing world.
However, it seems that mobile phone adoption is the only valid example of leapfrogging and the widespread diffusion of most digital technologies is dependent on the existence of a solid social, economic and industrial infrastructure.
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.
