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The real opportunity in the mobile services business is at the two extremes.
At the top end of the market, mobile phone are really compact, but really powerful, location-aware, always-on computing devices. This model presumes ubiquitous and unlimited data access (including wi-fi access), and a Java-enabled smart phone with GPS and a sophisticated mobile browser. Japan and South Korea have already established the proof of concept for this model and iPhone and other smart phones are creating a mainstream market for it. Most of the oomph and much of the money in the mobile services business is at this end of the market, but the number of users is still small (less than 300 million worldwide).
At the lower end of the market, mobile phones are the only communications device people have access to. The mobile phones themselves sell for as little as $20 and usage is primarily driven by voice and text messaging. This end of the mobile services business has little oomph but there is some serious money to be made here, because of the sheer size of the user base (almost 3.5 billion worldwide).
The idea behind MobiChange — a project that hopes to use the power of mobile social networks to mobilize social change — is really simple.
You start by stripping off layers from the typical smart phone associated with mobile social networking — take out the GPS, then the data plan, then the mobile browser — until you are left with a basic $20 mobile phone that essentially has a phone book, apart from voice and text messaging capabilities.
Then, you add back the social networking functionality to the mobile phone, so that the social network sits in the cloud but is accessed by the mobile phone via (many-to-many) text messaging. This creates a social networking platform that 3.5 billion people around the world can potentially use. This also creates a social networking platform that can be potentially used to spread commercial and non-commercial messages to 3.5 billion people.
Then, on top of this ubiquitous mobile social networking platform, you add the understanding of how to use social media for social change. Then, you open-source the platform, so that any non-profit, anywhere in the world, can customize it to create a local mobile-based community around their own cause. Then, you connect these local mobile-based communities with other local mobile-based communities.
Now, imagine thousands of cause-based local communities, each local community loosely connected to other communities, in an ever-expanding and truly ubiquitous mobile web built to mobilize social change.
That’s the simple idea behind MobiChange.
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