LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 research findings on ownership levels of mobile phones versus radios at the BOP have been cited in both MobileActive.org and MediaShift Idea Lab. Seemingly surprising findings reveal that in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, more people own mobile phones than radios. Read the two articles here and here. MediaShift Idea Lab, 19 Aug 2009: In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don’t have built-in radios.
What LIRNEasia tries to do with its teleuse@BOP research is to understand how and why people use ICTs at the bottom of the pyramid. We do this from the demand side. That has its advantages, but disadvantages too, such as cost, shortcomings in memory, etc. Therefore, we were thrilled to see someone else engaged in the same project, but from a different angle. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, believes that mobile phones offer more than a way to communicate.
SciDev, a prestigious science communication channel, has featured our cell broadcast report, the first of the Mobile 2.0 reports to be released. Texting short messages through mobile phones could help in early warning of natural disasters in the Maldives, says a new report. The technology, called cell broadcasting, helps to deliver messages simultaneously to multiple users in a specified area. “In the case of the Maldives, if an early warning is introduced, it must be able to reach all of the outlying islands including tourists on resorts.
Sri Lanka hurriedly banned mobile phones at schools, not just for students but teachers as well, following a suicide of a Museaus girl, allegedly after an incident involving a mobile phone. Pity that they never reflected on the other side of the story. Mobile phone is a security device that enables critical communication between parents and children. Take it away and the results can be disastrous because that makes a child vulnerable. Take the story of Lasantha Gimhana Kanewela (10), for example.
This was not a representative sample survey like Teleuse @ BOP, but still it was conducted in a remote village in the Polonnaruwa district in Sri Lanka as part of a community communication effort. The numbers they came up with were much higher than ours. We also spoke about the advantages of using mobile phones to complement the radio productions. 3G was not present in all areas, and in any case, few of the handsets supported audio streaming. That said, the production team said that upwards of 95% of all households owned at least one mobile.
LIRNEasia is on record supporting tariff forbearance, another word for deregulation. But that does not mean that we support it in all circumstances. The key is that consumers have a choice of suppliers. For that to happen, there must be multiple suppliers. In places such as airports the owner of the building/space usually concessions out the payphones, partly to make his life simple and partly to generate revenue.
This episode of The Interview features an interview with Executive Director, Rohan Samarajiva on telecom regulations, disaster mitigation, preparedness and early warning, mobile phone usage at the BOP and a number of other technology related issues. The Interview – Rohan Samarajiva from CPA on Vimeo.
Remember in Star Trek Dr. Leonard McCoy, nicknamed Bones, would use a handheld device (shaped like a mobile phone) to scan the vital signs report of a patient; the little screen on the device would make some electronic noises and display some random illuminated pixels, which he would interpret to diagnose the condition of the patient; thereafter, he would use the same device or the wrist device to call “Sick Bay” tell them what to do with patient diagnosed outside of the facility. He would even transfer the diagnostic report to Sick-Bay for the on duty staff to pickup to get ready before the patient arrived. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkley are using mobile phones that display faint blue dots on the screen received through a text message to diagnose signatures of Malaria. The Science and Technology article of the Economists tells the story about Dr.