Gauravonomics Blog

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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.  Read More

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

In a recent post I wrote about the promise and challenges of leapfrogging 2.0 –

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.  Read More