For retailers, these games and apps offer a new form of mobile marketing that goes well beyond a minibanner ad by rewarding consumers, individually, for their loyalty. And unlike paper cards, stores can use the data they collect from people’s cellphones to learn more about who their customers are and how they behave.

No one in advertising has ever been able to figure out how to do “one-to-one, real-time marketing,” said Drew Sievers, a former advertising executive who is now co-founder and chief executive of mFoundry. “The mobile phone is where that will actually probably happen. It’s the only thing connected and always with you.”

M. Somasekhar’s piece on Hindu Business Line on mobile payments says:

Experts from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Bhutan and Bangladesh among other nations met in Islamabad recently to discuss their experiences in providing mobile phone services for the BoP segment in their respective countries. They agreed that a beginning has been made and the road ahead appeared daunting, but technological progress promised quick results.

Don Sambandaraksa’s  piece “Mobile phones offer hope to ‘bottom of the pyramid” to Bangkok Post focuses on mobile use in farming, transport and banking. Says he:

“ICTs cannot solve all problems, chief of which is land reform, but when it comes to making decisions, lowering transaction costs and going to market and selling, information can make a big difference.

The researched categorised the decision-making process and information value in each from decisions to seed, planting, growing to harvesting and selling.

Information search costs are highest at the beginning of the cycle. Information on deciding what to grow are three times all other costs, and this is where ICTs have a potential role to play.

Sriganesh Lokanathan said that ideally he wanted to change the decision-making chain into a cycle where the decision on what the farmer wants to grow is based on the price when he expects to harvest. For this to happen, prices and supply and demand needed to be predicted and farmers need to get into forward sales contracts which does not often happen in this part of the world.”

Meanwhile we see Pakistan Telecom Authority, the co-organiser takes the message forward. ‘PTA Focuses on Value-Added Services Including E-Commerce, E-Agriculture & E-Education’ was the title of a report from Pakistan Telecom News Bulletin. It says:

Chairman, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Dr. Mohammed Yaseen has said that PTA’s focus is on value added services and with a high penetration level of mobile and low penetration of internet we have to explore the available possibilities which could be gained via mobile 2.0 theories. I very much foresee the further development of presently available technologies and those coming ahead through value added services and content. He was addressing to Connect 2010 ICT Forum – Telecom Session at Expo Centre Karachi and talking to media men on the occasion. He said that our emphasis is on e-commerce, e-agriculture and e-education, it is the time to open doors of opportunities to our young innovative minds and to bridge the unseen gaps between all potentials players of ICT proliferation.

For the full media coverage and presentations,  please see here.

‘Mobile phone calls death’. The ominous title, in Lankadeepa online, is not too uncommon in Sri Lankan media. The story is about the latest victim, who apparently met his death by lighting when talking to his mobile on the bund of a tank. According to Daily Mirror, deaths by lightning in Sri Lanka has increased with 18 people been killed since March 1, 2010, against ten such deaths for entire 2009. Daily Mirror also advices against, inter alia, the use of mobile phones even indoors.

BBC quotes a British Medical Journal letter to the editor that tells about a 15-year-old girl struck by lightning while talking on her phone in a large park in London during stormy weather.

Why mobile phones increase the lighting hit risk? This is the explanation by Swinda Esprit, senior house officer in otorhinolaryngology, an author of the BMJ letter: When a person is hit by lightning, the high resistance of human skin causes the lightning charge to flow over the body – often known as an ‘external flashover’. But some of the current can flow through the body. The more that flows through, the more internal damage it causes. Conductive materials in direct contact with the skin such as liquid or metal objects increase the risk that the current will flow through the body and therefore cause internal injury.

Still it is controversial whether mobile phone is the culprit. Please note both victims were standing on flat lands with no taller objects in the neighborhood. They bodies would have attracted the lightning even without the mobiles in their hands.

So, is it fair to blame mobiles?

Let us wait for the expert opinion.

Rohan Samarajiva is in Pakistan. Near the border, once marked by Mountbatten’s sharp knife, his cell phone links him to India. Airlines do not understand this proximity. Indian participants, to Expert Forum Meeting jointly organized by LIRNEasia and Pakistan Regulator, first travel led west (3 hours to Dubai) and then east (another 3 hours) to cover 678 km between Islamabad and Delhi – a one hour flight if existed.

In the backdrop of Thimpu SAARC summit Rohan asks the same question he has been asking for sometime. (But this time in Bangladesh media): Can’t telecom bring these South Asian cities closer? Should they remain artificially distanced?   

Read the article here.

These health workers (few of them are in the photo with their backs to you) were given training and mobilized with the mHealthSurvey, mobile phone application, for submitting patient disease/syndrome data for the surveillance of epidemiological events. Data that used to take over 15 days to relay up to the paper chain, but was not subject to any detection analysis (i.e. just reporting), now takes several seconds. Moreover, the RTBP collects all communicable and non-communicable diseases along witht their syndrome opposed to a handful of diseases (i.e. Integrated Disease Surveillance Program S and P list of diseases). Each Primary Health Center sends over 100 patient records (probable, suspected, and confirmed cases) a day that is now subject to, RTBP introduced, real-time health event detection analysis. Although there were some errors due to misspelling at the begining, once they were asked to be cautious and were made aware of the consequences of the errors resulting in false statistics that may lead to false alarms of disease outbreaks, they have reduced the error rates to almost zero.

Dr. Ganesan M., (Senior Program Officer, RTBI – extreme left seated at head table, facing you, talking the Health Workers in the photo), present the paper titled: “Real-Time Bio-surveillance Program: Field Experience from Tamil Nadu, India” at the 7th Indian Association for Social Sciences and Health (IASSH) conference on Health, Poverty and Human Development held at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi from 5th to 7th March 2010. Dr. Ganesan is part of the research team at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) conducting the RTBP action research in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

View the conference presentation slides

Read a brief on the conference participation

Global shipments of handsets had been falling every quarter since the third quarter of 2008, when the global financial crisis erupted, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

But shipments surged by 10 percent in the last three months of 2009, “signaling an end to the industry’s year-long recession,” Strategy Analytics said in a January 29 report.

Smartphones alone grew even faster in the fourth quarter, jumping 30 percent.

Sony Ericsson and Samsung, the world’s second biggest mobile phone maker behind Nokia, have small slices of the smartphone segment, which is dominated by Nokia, iPhone-maker Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM).

Samsung unveiled its new touch-screen handset, the Samsung Wave, on Sunday, as part of its plans to triple its smartphone sales to 18 million units this year.

“This is a new era, the smartphone era,” JK Shin, the head of Samsung’s Electronics mobile business, said at a launch party for the Wave.

“Samsung is committed to making the smartphone era available for everyone. We are committed to making the smartphone era a true democracy for billions of people on all continents in all corners of the world,” Shin said.

As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

__________________________________________________________________

Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

The story would have been different if he had a mobile

Take the story of Lasantha Gimhana Kanewela (10), for example. (Divaina, August 17, 2009) Having his extracurricular activities called off, this ten year old, a student of Sri Medhankara Vidhyalaya, Horana, had no way of requesting his parents pick him. He heads away for home alone and meets a tragic accident on the way. This is all his father had to say: “If he had a mobile phone, he could have asked me to come and pick him. Then this would have never have happened”

Sadly, the message will reach deaf ears. The story will never receive the same prominence from the biased media. Authorities, while equipping their own offspring with mobile phones, will continue to block the benefit of this easy mode of communication to rural and poor children.

It couldn’t be certainly the lack of evidence, that prevents them taking intelligent decisions, because we know for sure over 99% of the Bottom of the Pyramid teleusers see a mobile phone as a security device with over 71% saying it significantly improved their ability to act in an emergency. This is from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Teleuse at BoP survey. (See below) What more evidence they need?

The wisdom at the bottom which never made to top

“The challenge for mobile operators is to make a remittance service as simple as handing over the money and a slip, with hand-written transfer details, to a bank clerk,” said the study. On average, a Sri Lankan migrant sends home US $ 137 per month. The most common method of remittance is through the banking system. In addition, some either carried money home as cash, or sent cash or cheques, in the post. However, these methods were used by less than 25% of migrants. As much as 84% of Sri Lankan migrants had bank accounts. Over half of Sri Lankan recent migrants surveyed (54 %), also owned a mobile phone.

This line from the popular Sinhala song ‘Saroja’ (sung by the wife of a powerful minister of the current regime) tells it all. First it was for students, but now the government wants to extend the mobile phone ban for teachers too. Not a surprising move by a government that wants to block  ‘Adults Only’ films watched by…er, adults.

Reported Daily Mirror:

“I have heard that the Nuwara Eliya incident had taken place involving a teacher and the other incident was connected to a female student. Education Minister Susil Premajayantha has taken measures to prohibit the use of mobile phones at public schools. However, I think the rule must apply to both students and teachers. Hence, it is most appropriate if teachers also refrain from using mobile phones during school hours,” President Rajapaksa said.

The President expressed these views while addressing the ‘Nena Guna Weduma’ ceremony under the National Education Programme at Temple Trees to give away appointment letters to 415 graduate teachers by the Western Provincial Council.

Read the full story here.

The incident that triggered this move was the suicide of a fourteen year old girl of a leading school in Colombo, whose mobile phone, with personal information, has been confiscated by the prefects. We are bit confused why no ban on school ties – what the girl used to hang herself in the wash room. Please note: No international conspiracies to tarnish the image of the country have not been indicated so far.

Bangladesh did demonstrate herself as competitive in eight components, including lowest rates among all the countries surveyed with regards to monthly telephone charge and monthly gas charge.

However, it remained less competitive in most areas related to foreign investment, including container transportation, land price of industrial estate, internet connection fee, monthly internet fee, telephone installation fee, mobile phone subscription fee, and corporate income tax among others.

The report, however, highlighted high internet fees among these.

“Particularly, the Monthly Basic Payment for Broadband Internet Service in Bangladesh is continuously holding highest position among all the participating countries in this survey.”

How was the telecom market affected? In the same report, a figure shows how the subscriber base increased over time. However, the rate of growth declined in recent quarters. In 2007, the rate of growth was 9.9 percent; 2008 ended with a minus 0.3 percent growth. The average revenue per user went from USD 3.1 in the last quarter of 2007 to USD 2.58 during the last quarter of 2008.

Similarly in Sri Lanka, government has seen the mobile industry as an easy source of revenue through taxes and levies. There may be lessons for Sri Lanka from the counter-productive outcomes of Pakistan’s efforts to milk the golden mobile goose.

LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 study conducted in 6 Asian countries indicated that only 38 percent of households at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan have access to mobile phones. There are consumers waiting to adopt mobile phones. Shouldn’t the government make efforts to make them available to them? Getting more people connected and taking a reasonable share of their payments as tax would be more productive than imposing taxes that bar them from becoming customers and deprive the government of tax revenues.

The PTA is to be applauded for doing these kinds of analyses. One hopes that the government of Pakistan will take remedial action to get telecom growth back on track. One hopes that other regulatory agencies will conduct and publish similar studies.

And wireless phone carriers might well start calling them something else entirely as they race to begin selling laptops with bundled data plans directly to consumers.

“We have been flying the carriers around the world,” said Michael Rayfield, the general manager of mobile products for Nvidia, one of many chip companies producing parts for these new laptops. “They all want to meet the manufacturers and come up with their own look and feel.”

A 30-person company called Mobinnova worked with Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn for just four months to make what amounts to the thinnest, most power-efficient laptop for the carriers. Called the Elan, the Nvidia-based device can run for up to 24 days on a single charge if it is just playing music or run for 10 hours straight playing high-definition video.

Mike Holland, Mobinnova’s vice president for business development, said that one telecommunications company, which he declined to name, will start offering the product before the Christmas shopping season at a price of $49 to $99.

The full story.

About 100 delegates — from academia, industry and the financial and entrepreneurial worlds — participated in the event, which concluded Wednesday evening with a lively roundtable discussion that included Mr. Gore and Mr. Hart, as well as Ratan N. Tata, the chairman of the Indian carmaker Tata Group and the manufacturer of the new, low-priced Nano automobile, and H. Fisk Johnson, the chairman and chief executive of the household product giant, S.C. Johnson & Son.

Mr. Johnson, whose company was praised by Mr. Gore as “one of the most sustainable in the world,” chatted about S.C. Johnson’s development of natural insecticides in Rwanda and the company’s use of biofuels to power factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.

“Disruptive,” Mr. Hart said, invoking the buzzword of the evening.

Mr. Tata pointed to the mobile phone’s ubiquity in the developing world as an example of a disruptive, leapfrog technology (albeit not exactly a green one) that has proliferated in poorer nations, providing communications to millions of people in places where landline infrastructure remains sparse or nonexistent.

“When I was a kid, you waited seven years for a telephone connection,” he said.

Full story.