In the end, Microsoft’s best intentions may not satisfy what locals want. The company surveyed 8,000 people in emerging markets and found their most pressing needs for technology often revolved around entertainment and surfing the Internet.
“It reinforced for us that the emerging middle classes are sort of like the middle classes here except they don’t have as much money,” Mr. Toyama said. “It’s sometimes easy for us to get caught up in things and forget we are serving the needs of real people.”
The above comes from a story on Microsoft’s social research unit in Bangalore, an organization LIRNEasia has had many interactions with, and hopes to work with in the future as well.
We were under the impression that they did mostly qualitative research, and that…
Preconference workshop at the 2009 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) | 20-21 May 2009, Chicago, Illinois, USA | Download Call for Papers (pdf)
Mobile phones are becoming increasingly important in bringing people into the Information Society. It is widely accepted that the inhabitants of the future household will carry mobile devices that will be capable of voice and data communication, information retrieval and forms of entertainment consumption. Mobiles are now (and will increasingly become) payment devices that can also send, process and receive voice, text as well as images; in the next few years they will also be capable of information-retrieval and publishing functions normally associated with the Internet. Through such services and applications, industry experts predict that many in emerging markets will experience the…
Tags: BOP, Bottom Of The Pyramid, cellular telephone, conference, emerging markets, ICA, Illinois, international communicaiton association, International Communication Association, mobile applications, mobile communications, Mobile2.0, payment devices, United States.
Sep 4th 2008 | From The Economist print edition
Computing: In future, most new internet users will be in developing countries and will use mobile phones. Expect a wave of innovation
THE World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that leads the development of technical standards for the web, usually concerns itself with nerdy matters such as extensible mark-up languages and cascading style sheets. So the new interest group it launched in May is rather unusual. It will focus on the use of the mobile web for social development—the sort of vague concept that techie types tend to avoid, because it is more than simply a technical matter of codes and protocols. Why is the W3C interested in it?
The simple answer is that the number of mobile…
Tags: Broadband, emerging markets, Internet users, Mobile banking, mobile Internet, mobile phones, mobile Web, Mobile-web access, mobile-web users, Mobile2.0, web access.
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