An interesting article in the Times of India, documents the varied use of missed calls among mobile phone users in India, based on LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 findings for 2008. Although the title of the article is slightly misleading (missed call use was, in fact, prevalent in all the countries studied; see here for more information), it nevertheless brings home the point that missed calls are being regularly used to communicate messages of various kinds in different contexts.
In our work on teleuse@BOP, reports on the use of missed calls attracted a great deal of attention. It seems to be generating even more press at the MobileActive conference in South Africa: “Donner said in a phone interview with MobileActive.org: “I started writing on [missed calls], based on being an outsider. We just simply don’t use missed-calls (in the US). But if go anywhere else, particularly in the developing world, where there are pre-paid systems, and pay-as-you-go, and people really watch their minutes, you’ll see it everywhere.