“We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the risks it faces.

In a world that is rapidly moving toward an era of mobile computing, this is a troubling issue for Silicon Valley’s brightest star — particularly since much of Facebook’s growth right now is in countries like Chile, Turkey, Venezuela and Brazil, where people largely have access to the Internet using cellphones.

Facebook is not the only company struggling to translate the success of its Web site to mobile devices, where screen space is at a premium and people have little patience for clutter or slow loading times. It is a problem that plagues companies as diverse as news publishers and the streaming radio service Pandora, and it is likely to loom larger. There were more global shipments of smartphones than of personal computers in 2011, according to a recent report from Canalys, a research firm.

Report.

Is this a problem for us in South Asia. Yes, for the TOP (top of the pyramid) customers who actually receive bills. But for our clients, the bottom of the pyramid teleusers, there will be no shock; just disconnect. Because 99.7 percent of Indian BOP customers are on prepaid plans and 94.6 percent of Sri Lankan BOP customers are on prepaid. How can we address their problems? Lower priced data plans would be a good start.

A 2010 study by the F.C.C. found that one in six mobile device users had experienced bill shock, with 23 percent of those users facing unexpected charges of $100 or more. A separate F.C.C. report noted that 20 percent of the bill shock complaints it received during the first half of 2010 were for $1,000 or more in overage charges. Expensive charges can also be incurred for roaming, when a user travels out of a company’s defined area of coverage or, as often occurs, when traveling overseas.

Even so-called unlimited data plans often have a cap limiting downloads each month to a certain number of megabytes — a technical measure that, unlike a number of calls or minutes, cannot easily be tracked by the uninitiated. Last October, the F.C.C. highlighted the case of a 66-year-old retiree in Dover, Mass., who received an $18,000 bill after a promotional no-limit data plan expired without warning.

That’s not what is relevant for us. Does this love exist only at the TOP? What parts of the brain would be activated if fMRIs were run on the BOP?

We wouldn’t know an fMRI if it hit us on the face. But we do have video of people talking about their feelings toward their phones: I cannot live without it; losing it is like a death in the family, and so on. Seems the best available evidence, until someone does fMRI.

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

The market revaluation has been triggered by rule changes in the activity period allowed for prepaid users and the effect of mandatory SIM registration. Previously, users would see their services terminated if they had not recharged their prepaid cards or placed/received a call within a period of 180 days. In 2010, that period was reduced to 90 days and, recently, the TRAI has reportedly reduced the period to just 20 days. The regulator is measuring the number of active subscribers via its visitor location register (VLR), a temporary database of subscribers who have roamed into a particular area. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR; hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time. VLR data is calculated based on the date of Peak VLR of the particular month and gauged from the switches having a purge time of not more than 72 hours.

For a government official who has no in-depth understanding of how people actually use telecom services, 20 days may seem reasonable. But we differ. Based on our research on multiple SIM use, this seems counter-productive.

To give one case. There are many people at the BOP who work in the city and have family in a rural area. The signal coverage is such that not all SIMs work in the rural area. But the SIM that works in the rural area is not optimal for the city. So the urban-rural dweller has two SIMs, each with its affinity group.

Now what does the arbitrary rule about 20 days do? The user cannot be compelled to go to the village every 20 days, to keep the SIM alive. Why not let these things be decided by people with the best information, which is not the government officials? As second best, we will offer to make a presentation on the Teleuse@BOP 4 results to TRAI and DoT.

The source story.

The same day, my brother sent along a link for a new app (leafsnap) that allows users to identify trees by submitting photos of leaves. What a smart way to juice that nature walk, I thought. The next day I saw a Twitter message from Pierre Omidyar (@pierre), the eBay founder, in which he attached a photo and asked, “What is the name of this purple and white flower bush?” Seconds later he had his answer: lilac.

Then my sister wrote to ask how she could identify the bird building a nest on her deck. “Take a picture and put it on Facebook,” I said. “You’ll have an answer within the hour.” She bet me it wouldn’t work, but within 19 minutes two friends had confirmed it was a Carolina wren.

Full story.

Our research was presented at a “deep dive” session on m applications attended by around 100 people. The slides are here. You will not be able to the video that I started with, from the above link. The video of Chamara is available here instead.

I concluded by discussing the powerful notes from the CKS interview with Zayad of Bangladesh, where both his current use of mobile voice and the services he would like to see being offered. I had to mention that the biggest barriers facing Zayed include the terrible uncertainty in the Bangladesh telecom sector and the delays and errors in the release of 3G frequencies.

Pakistan has been ranked top among the regional countries in 2010 with the highest number of cellular phone subscribers having more than one connection of different operators, Lirneasia study reported recently.

As per the estimates, the subscribers possessing multiple SIMs are estimated to mark 23 percent share in the overall stated base of the country. The finding reflected the number of mobile phone users carrying multiple SIMs cards have been estimated to increase more than 24 million in the overall base of 105 million by Feb 2010.

The two-and-a-half day workshop brought together experts from mobile manufacturers, research, digital technology, service providers, donors, non-profit organizations, and policymakers to brainstorm on how mobiles could be effectively used for improving social development in India.

Click here to view her presentation. The conference agenda can be viewed here.

Google’s operating system for cellphones has overtaken Nokia’s Symbian system as the market leader, ending the Finnish company’s long reign, a British research firm said Monday. In the three months through December, manufacturers shipped 33.3 million cellphones running Android, Google’s free, open-source cellphone operating system, up from just 4.7 million a year earlier, according to Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England. Shipments of phones running the Symbian operating system jumped 31 percent in the quarter, to 31 million, Canalys said.

Analysts said the figures represented a tectonic shift in the industry, cementing the influence of Google’s advertising-driven business on the mobile Internet. And this year, according to the research firm Gartner, more people will gain access to the Internet through mobile devices than with personal computers.

The paper entitled, “M-money for the BOP in the Philippines” is authored by Erwin Alampay, LIRNEasia Research Fellow, and Gemma Bala.

Abstract

This paper explores the reach and use of m-money among the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in the Philippines using survey data from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Mobile 2.0 surveys. It looks at m-money’s potential and actual use for remittance among internal and external migrant workers and their families. The results are triangulated with focus group data and literature on mobile and electronic money, and framed using Van Dijk’s (2006) Stages of Access to digital technologies. Although usage of m-money among the BoP remains low, the ICT infrastructure for this is in place. Compared to other Asian countries where the survey was also conducted, Filipinos are more familiar and have higher trust in mobile electronic transactions. Managing their resistance to change from current offline remitting practices remains a challenge.

Read the full paper here.

There are plenty of studies that insist that smartphones will begin to replace the PC as the common vehicle for accessing the Internet. Analyst firm Informa Telecoms & Media projects that smartphone traffic will increase 700% over the next five years. IT research firm Gartner predicts that smartphone sales will outpace PC sales by 2012, if not earlier. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company’s mobile business has doubled over the last year, has expressed this sentiment as well. As smartphones continue to feature more memory, storage capability and stronger processing power, consumers will increasingly rely on them for Internet use instead of their clunky PCs.

Click here to view presentation slides.

Presentation slides from the talk will be posted shortly.

As latest ITU data reveals, active mobile subscriptions continues to increase the world over. Just under two years ago, mobile subscriptions were reaching the six-billion mark. 2009 data from the ITU suggests we are well on our way to reaching seven billion connections. Developing countries, in particular, experienced a 19 percent increase in mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants between 2008 and 2009, compared with a modest 5 percent growth in developed countries according to the ITU.

Mobile subscriptions in the Asia-Pacific alone have now passed the two-billion mark; according to the ITU, mobile subscriptions per 100 rose by 22 percent from 46 in 2008 in 56 in 2009. However, total fixed telephone lines (which reached a peak in 2006) continue to decline both in developed and developing countries. In the Asia-Pacific, the number of fixed lines declined by 6 percent from 15 to 14 per 100 inhabitants between 2008 and 2009.

It should be noted, however, in the case of ITU data, that mobile subscriptions should not be equated with mobile ownership. Richard Heeks’ essay points out several reasons. One of them, evidenced by LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP3 study, is that mobile owners may own multiple subscriptions or SIM cards, thus overstating “ownership” levels (Figure 1).

Figure 1: SIM card ownership (% of BOP mobile owners)

LIRNEasia’s third consecutive study on ICT ownership and use among the poor, Teleuse@BOP3 (2008) reveals trends in mobile and fixed growth, similar to the ITU findings. The study was among the bottom of the pyramid (BOP, or those belonging to socio-economic classification groups D and E) in Bangladesh (2008 only), Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand. Figure 2 shows that over 75 percent of all respondents had used a phone in the last three months to make a phone call.

Figure 2: Use of a phone in the last three months to make a phone call (% of BOP respondents)

Figure 3 compares changes in the use of one’s own mobile for making phone calls between 2006 (when the previous study was conducted) and 2008. All countries with the exception of Thailand recorded increases in the use of personal mobiles as their primary mode of communication; India, in particular, recorded the highest growth, a massive 194 percent. Interestingly, though, Thailand actually recorded a decline in the use of personal mobiles.

Figure 3: Use of personal mobiles as a primary mode of communication (% of BOP teleusers)

Internet use

While LIRNEasia identifies drawbacks in the methodology used by the ITU in calculating Internet users,, such data, nevertheless, points to emerging trends. One significant finding is the rising number of mobile broadband subscriptions over fixed broadband, particularly in developing countries. While both types of subscriptions have grown in number, mobile broadband growth far exceeded that of fixed. Developed countries experienced a growth of 44 percent in mobile broadband subscriptions, compared with 9 percent in fixed, according to ITU data. Likewise, developing countries reported increases of 63 percent and 24 percent in mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, respectively.

In the Asia-Pacific, mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions have grown to 5.4 and 4.6 per 100 inhabitants respectively, a 26 percent and 18 percent change between 2008 and 2009. Again, one should keep in mind that subscriptions do not necessarily equal ownership or usership; the problems in accurately assessing the number of Internet users in a country (besides through large-scale demand-side surveys which are nationally representative; Teleuse@BOP is only representative of SEC D and E in the respective countries) is something that LIRNEasia is looking at in research which will be released shortly.

LIRNEasia’s study confirms that that the BOP were much more likely to own a mobile phone than a household personal computer, and, likewise, more likely access the Internet over a mobile than a PC (Figure 4). However, Internet awareness and use among the BOP is still low, particularly in South Asia. Over 95 percent of respondents in the South Asian countries studied had never used the Internet before; over 55 percent in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India had never even heard of it. This contrasts with the Philippines and Thailand where only 9 and 20 percent of respondents reported never having heard of the Internet.

Figure 4: Ownership vs. use of ICTs (% of BOP teleusers)

In our most recent demand-side ICT study, Teleuse@BOP3, we asked bottom of the pyramid (BOP) phone owners if and how often they used their phone (mobile or fixed) for business purposes or any other financial or work-related purposes. The responses we got were quite encouraging:

Teleuse@BOP4 is almost underway. This time, we have decided to seek out the wisdom of the crowds in designing and fine-tuning some of the questions that we ask in Teleuse@BOP4.

Responses to the question of business use of phones are important in this research cycle, where we are trying to understand , inter alia, what services (including telecom) would better equip SMEs (many of which are owned by or employ people at the BOP) to participate in the knowledge based economy.

Similarly as important are the reasons that prevent greater use of phones for these purposes (trust, alternatives, cost, culture, etc). Here is a draft question to seek out this information; we invite comments, suggestions and feedback on how this question can be improved.

“Q: What prevents you from using the phone for these purposes (business, financial or work related) at all/more than you do currently?

a. It is more convenient communicating on these issues face-to-face than over the phone

b. I am not sure if I can trust the other party when talking about these things over the phone

c. Other people prefer to talk face-to-face

d. I don’t engage in such  activities

e. other”