“The private bus industry in Sri Lanka incurs an immense loss of more than Rs.13 billion annually due to the current system of collecting bus change from passengers. The government incurs an annual loss of about Rs.500 million owning to the production of coins each year. The pre-paid card system would benefit everyone and would be far less of a hassle,” he said. The pilot project will be conducted for about a period of one month on the Gampaha-Colombo and Mattegoda-Pitakotte routes.

Full report.

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.

The advertisement’s objective was to show what the policy makers and regulators can do and thereby what the service providers could do to boost up Mobile 2.0 services in Sri Lanka. The advertisement also indicated, that with these changes it can lead to a App-Store model where it can act as a platform  (application store) for mobile content providers to add their applications, with standard contracts from telcos.

Mobile 2.0 at Bottom of the pyramid is project conducted by LIRNEasia. For more details click here

More info about Teleuse@BOP (Survey on SEC D and E) click here

The advertisement ran today in the Daily Mirror Business section

Mr. Jobs also predicted that the ongoing shift in technology away from the PC and toward mobile devices will continue. But rather than disappear, the PC will become a niche product, he said. Mr. Jobs compared the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, to the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation. “All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm,” he said. Now trucks are one in 25 to 30 vehicles sold, he said. “PCs are going to be like trucks. They will still be around.” He then added: “This transformation is going to make some people uneasy.”

Liza Colburn uses her cellphone constantly.

She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.

Svet Tintchev, World Bank expert on the telecom industry in developing countries, says, “The first ones who put in electricity generators in rural areas are the telecom operators … in a way, their leverage goes beyond pure telecom service.” Tintchev calls the local telecom companies “the economic enablers in Somalia”. Four main telecom companies now operate in Somalia and, despite competing for customers, they have cooperated with each other to maintain their networks and set prices to ensure that competition doesn’t become too cutthroat. Horseed Media writes quoting Wall Street Journal.

How best to name the key theme for the next research cycle? We discussed this at length three years back. Rohan’s original idea was ‘Mobile Multiple Play’. We would have agreed, if not for the reason it already meant something else. Then came ‘Mobile++’. We were still not satisfied. Finally we settled for ‘Mobile 2.0’, which didn’t exist then in that sense.

Put simply, Mobile 2.0 was the second wave of mobile applications. Mobile 1.0 = voice communication on the move. Mobile 2.0 = everything else, starting from texts.

My google search did give few hits. I can take a safe bet it was less than 100. Nothing we could take seriously. Things have changed. As of today the hits for “Mobile 2.0” have increased to –verify if you don’t believe – 461,000.

There are multiple definitions too.

Daniel Nations from About.com:

Mobile 2.0: Bringing Web 2.0 to Mobile Devices vs. Combining Web 2.0 with Mobile Devices

It sounds like the beginning of a semantic argument, but there is actually quite a bit of difference between bringing Web 2.0 to the mobile and combining mobile devices and Web 2.0 to create Mobile 2.0. If all we wanted to do is bring Web 2.0 to our mobile devices, we are well underway to doing just that. We simply need a mobile web browser that is capable of handling various technologies used to bring together Web 2.0 websites.

But do we really want to sell ourselves short? Mobile devices are not personal computers. And we don’t want to treat them like personal computers. Instead of just brining Web 2.0 to mobile devices, we want to make Web 2.0 mobile – we want a combination of the two that exploits the advantages of our mobile device.

Is this different from what Wikipedia has to say?:

Mobile 2.0, refers to a perceived next generation of mobile internet services that leverage the social web, or what some call Web 2.0. The social web includes social networking sites and wikis that emphasise collaboration and sharing amongst users. Mobile Web 2.0, with an emphasis on Web, refers to bringing Web 2.0 services to the mobile internet, i.e., accessing aspects of Web 2.0 sites from mobile internet browsers.

By contrast [to Web 2.0], Mobile 2.0 refers to services that integrate the social web with the core aspects of mobility – personal, localized, always-on and ever-present. These services are appearing on wireless devices such as Smartphones and multimedia feature phones that are capable of delivering rich, interactive services as well as being able to provide access and to the full range of mobile consumer touch points including talking, texting, capturing, sending, listening and viewing.

So what exactly Mobile 2.0? Can we agree on a common definition?

Now we have a powerful ally: the New York Times.

With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should be allowed to treat Web users differently, based on the users’ consumption.

While we were researching the subject, we did not take a position on net neutrality, but we now agree that its blind application in our settings will harm our constituents, the teleusers at the bottom of the pyramid. We do agree with the statement below, also excerpted from the NYT:

But there is a big flaw in the concept, according to the operators: Networks have never been neutral. They have always been actively managed to some extent since their inception in the 1980s to ensure that all customers get a basic “best effort” level of service.

If an operator could not restrain bandwidth hogs, who typically make up 15 percent of customers but who generate 80 percent of the traffic, most Internet users would experience poor service.

While net neutrality is an emotion loaded minefield that is not the most hospitable for evidence based discussion, we are at least happy that the mobile piece of the argument is running parallel with ours.

Few weeks later, I was at a relative’s place, the kind of place where you still have to go to the garden to get a decent signal (much improved from when I was DGT when one had to stand in a precise location in the middle of a paddy field). Again a question arose on what medicine was what. While everyone else was dialing pharmacists (unsuccessfully) and searching for prescriptions, I wandered off to the garden, googled the brand names and came back with the answer, thanks to the doctor in DC. Plan for driving to the nearest town to get the answer was scrapped.

The Economist has a good piece on the special applications for medicine from wireless.

Doctors are an obvious early target for wireless health. A forthcoming report by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), a think tank, estimates that two-thirds of American physicians already have smart-phones. Over one-third of American doctors use Epocrates, a program for mobiles and laptops which offers instant information on drug-to-drug interactions, treatment recommendations and so on. The software will soon be able to access electronic health records (EHRs) via mobiles—which the author of the CHCF’s report thinks could be “the killer application” of wireless health.

So it seems the DC doctor was not googling, but using a specialized database optimized for mobiles. But what my little emulation showed was that Google is not too bad either.

“This is one of the highly effective tools for achieving financial inclusion. But the system is suffering because of the lack of interest among government agencies. There needs to be a policy change to take the model further and make the system financially viable,” says IIM-A Professor and LIRNEasia‘s Senior Research Fellow, Subhash Bhatnagar, PhD.

The research is a part of a larger study conducted by LIRNEasia on the use of mobiles for more-than-voice.

Read the full article here.

Mobile 2.0 describes the use of mobiles for “more‐than‐voice”. Mobiles are increasingly becoming payment devices which can also send/process/receive voice, text and images; it is envisaged that in the next few years, they will also be fully capable of information‐retrieval and publishing functions, normally associated with the Internet.

Mobile 2.0@BOP has been researched from two aspects: vertical and horizontal issues. Horizontal issues are the basic competitive and regulatory conditions that affect the emergence of Mobile 2.0@BOP. The vertical components explore how particular aspects such as micro‐payments and remittances, agriculture applications, voting applications, e‐government services, disaster warning, etc are taking shape and form.

The research findings will be disseminated by the respective researchers as follows.

New Delhi, India on March 4 and 5, 2010

Payal Malik – Issues in licensing and Spectrum allocation
Tahani Iqbal – Mobile Number Portability

Dhaka, Bangladesh on March 28-29, 2010

Erwin Alampay, PhD – Mobile payments
Tahani Iqbal – Mobile Number Portability

Nirmali Sivapragasam – Mobiles, payment and logistics, based on a case of study of CellBazaar, Bangladesh

Bangkok, Thailand on March 30, 2010

Erwin Alampay, PhD – Mobile payments
Puree Sirasoontorn, PhD – Mobile value-added services, based on Buzzcity case study

Media coverage will be added here as they happen.

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.

The news media breathlessly chronicle each of Mr. Tharoor’s supposed Twitter missteps in editorials and talk show discussions. One news channel scrolled his latest Twitter updates across its screen under the rubric “Breaking News.”

Twitter enthusiasts say the news media make a fuss about it because it usurps its traditional role as intermediary and interpreter between the powerful and the masses.

“By constantly associating Twitter with controversies, Indian media will successfully dissuade other politicians from joining the social networking site,” Ajit Narayana, an avid Twitter user who is organizing a conference this month on Twitter’s use in India, wrote in an e-mail message.

Not only in Sri Lanka that there is a conspiracy behind everything. But not a bad story.

Over the past month, I’ve had the opportunity to present my research on mobile money for remittances in two different conferences, with different audiences (the paper and PPT presentation can be downloaded here and here).

On October 10, I presented my research on the use of mobile money for remittances in a panel on Mobile Adoption and Economic Development. This was for a conference held in New Brunswick on Mobile Communications and Social Policy, hosted by the Rutgers School of Information and Communication.  Harsha de Silva also presented his paper in the same panel on the “Role of social influence on mobile phone adoption: Evidence from the BOP in emerging Asia.” His paper and presentation can be downloaded here and here.

On October 23, I then presented the same research, this time to a Filipino audience in the 2nd Living the Information Society conference at the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City

The audiences for both conferences were academic in composition. Their reactions, however, were different. Those in the largely Northern audience, still had an abstract understanding of how it all worked, and their questions  tended to focus more on the methodology, and notions of how it would impact on social capital and community relationships. With the Filipino audience, I was fortunate to find people who were able to relate their own personal experiences in using mobile cash. One shared how he learned to use it regularly to send money to his relatives. Despite the initial apprehension, he vouched that it was safe, reliable and costed much less. On the other hand, another person said that she first used the service to purchase something online. Enrolling, and the process of changing money to mobile currency for her was a complete hassle, although she did say that for the seller/vendor, this would have been very convenient.

All in all, the audiences were quite different from the regulators, I previously had to present to TRE research to, and different from the IT and Development group and IDRC network I’ve been meeting with in recent months, and much different from the people at the LIRNEasia colloquia I’ve had the privilege of first discussing this research with.

The good thing about moving around your usual circles is the chance to expand your network, and getting new perspectives about your own work.  Interestingly, it was the serendipitous encounters I had with people not directly connected with the conferences that I discovered greater interest in what I was doing.

In New Jersey, I bumped into Gil Lacson, who works for the Women’s World Banking in New York. He told me this was the very same technology that someone presented to his group the previous week. Likewise, when I got back to Manila, I receieved an email from Grameen Foundation. Apparently, Grameen wanted to put together a conference in December, focused specifically for technologies that microfinance institutions can utilize in their services. They were able to attend the last day of the conference, but due to an error in my email, they missed my presentation by a few minutes.  However,  I did end up giving them a personalized presentation of my paper.

One of those who came with them was Mr. Eric Severino, whose company called ENCASH is doing some interesting work in providing rural ATMs where the unbanked can also encash money from. I haven’t personally seen how this works, but as he explains it, the transactional fees are based on the distance the ATM is from the nearest urban center (the farther it is, the higher the fee—although he says it will still be much cheaper than the transportation cost), and non-account holders get to withdraw money using Mobile PINs that are texted to them along with the amount that they can withdraw.   I see this as a potentially good complement to m-remittances, as the problem of converting mobile money to actual cash is one of the major issues that came out in my research.

In the end, these conferences and chance encounters show that many people are looking to reach the unbanked. Hopefully, with the aid of innovations in mobiles that go beyond voice, the benefits reach them soon.

***

In addition to the above two papers presented, LIRNEasia research on m-health, led by Nuwan Waidyantha, was presented by Dr. Gordon Gow at the conference. The paper can be downloaded here.