Putting people first

For Uganda’s poor, a cellular connection

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:59:51 +0000

In a country where people don’t have electricity, much less Internet access, the Grameen Foundation partners with Google to relay information through mobile phones. Dara Kerr reports from on the ground for CNet:

“The research for this project began a year and a half ago at the Application Laboratory, AppLab, which was set up in Kampala, Uganda, by the Grameen Foundation. It has done field research, quantitative needs assessments, prototyping, and focus group testing to figure out how to design and structure mobile applications that could deliver the information.

Since most cell phones in Uganda have only voice and SMS capabilities, the technology was built for SMS. A person texts a question to a specific code, which goes to the database built by AppLab, then using Google’s algorithms, keywords are identified and the most suitable answer is sent back to the cell phone. ” [...]

“For the next few months, there is a promotional period and all texts are free, which helps AppLab continue to build its database of queries. When the promotional period ends, MTN and Google have agreed to charge agriculture and health queries at half the cost of a normal SMS message, while all the other services will have the standard rates. Meanwhile, Google will be supporting an on-the-ground assessment to make sure these services are having a beneficial impact for the people of Uganda.”

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The digital age of rights

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:47:04 +0000

The digitally deprived have rights too, says BBC News columnist Bill Thompson, who is quite upset about a new French law:

“If it is unacceptable to cut people off from the network because their actions are commercially damaging to the record companies, why is it acceptable to offer them poor or no access to broadband and mobile internet just because providing the service is commercially unattractive to ISPs or network operators?

And if we are to be encouraged to think of access to the internet as a fundamental human right, a prerequisite of having freedom of expression, should we not be prosecuting ISPs over the ‘notspots’ in their mobile or wi-fi coverage, the communities with no access to ADSL because of the telephone network was repaired with aluminium instead of copper, or the areas bypassed by the cable providers? “

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What you don’t know about M-PESA

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:37:57 +0000

Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog. This time she talks about a third player, Sagentia, who was behind the M-PESA success:

“There was also a smaller player that had a vitally important role in the conceptualization and development of the application. That is, Sagentia, a technology consultancy firm based out of Cambridge. The firm not only wrote the software for M-PESA, they also designed the business processes, and provided operational and technical support during the pilot and after launch.” [...]

“They assured me that M-PESA was just the beginning. Using the mobile as a platform, they plan to create developmental services that penetrate other spheres —m-health, agribusiness. They further predicted that the mobile will soon begin to revolutionize these other spaces as well.”

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See also these earlier CGAP posts about her work (oldest posts listed first):

Morawczynski is the author of a forthcoming CGAP brief on M-PESA and recently co-authored Designing Mobile Money Services: Lessons from M-PESA with Ignacio Mas.

danah boyd on new habits in a connected world

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:13:06 +0000

danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, got incensed at an Italian conference and bites back:

“I’m 31 years old. I’ve been online since I was a teen. I’ve grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always. There’s no doubt that I’m not mainstream. But I also feel really badly for the info-driven teens and college students out there being told that learning can only happen when they pay attention to an audio-driven lecture in a classroom setting. I read books during my classroom (blatantly not paying attention). Imagine what would’ve happened had I been welcome to let my mind run wild on the topic at hand?

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement. “

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(via The FASTForward Blog)

Personal transformations in the Internet Age

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:04:03 +0000

In a BoingBoing guest blog, Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, discusses the personal transformations everyone goes through as they age, and how in the new age of connectivity, these former selves sometimes come back to haunt us.

“How will personal transformations be achieved in this era of persistent and vivid reference points from the past? I see these transformations as an integral and necessary part of going through life, a part of creating new selves as one matures, learns, and acquires new life experiences. What tools and practices will we develop to shed the old reference points as a part of such transformations? In other words, what is the new equivalent of the old shoebox or cobwebbed attic in the Internet era?”

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Playful innovation and simplicity by Philips

Experientia — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:54:11 +0000

In an exploration into how games can add value to the innovation process, Philips Design has created ‘Spark’, a board game that stimulates creativity and innovative thinking.

To play Spark, the players move counters representing different characters around the board, with each space along the way describing a certain situation. By considering the potential outcomes for the particular character and situation, a lot of genuinely creative and even ‘out of the box’ ideas are generated. These are used to enrich insight generation during the workshops. The game has proved so successful that there is talk of developing versions for other regions (at the moment it is targeted specifically at Europe) and also using it in other sectors within Philips.

- Read full story
- Download backgrounder (pdf)

Related info:

Video interview with Birgitta ten Napel, Director Market Driven Innovation at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, on how ‘Spark’ adds value to the innovation process
Essay by Slava Koslov, Senior Consultant Strategic Futures at Philips Design, on how serious games can generate new ideas and future scenarios

Philips Research meanwhile has created SimplicityLabs as a testing ground for upcoming technologies and applications. It is a place where users can see, evaluate and contribute to new interaction concepts. It allows the company to get user feedback early on, and to improve their applications to suit user needs, well before they hit the market.

(via uselog)

Nokia patents gestural phone controls

Experientia — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:33:11 +0000

A promotional video earlier today, and now a patent application — too much of a coincidence:

“We know that Nokia is looking into more areas than just buttons and touchscreens for phone controls, and a recently revealed patent has shed light on an option the Finnish phone manufacturer is considering.

The patent looks at wearable electronics as a way of controlling handsets and appears to be one possible physical implementation of gesture control, something Nokia has admitted to be looking into previously.

The patent sees embedded sensors in fabric that react to the movement of human skin. As the skin stretches, the fabric would work out what kind of gesture your hand was making and wirelessly send the command to the phone.

As well as phones, this kind of input could also be adapted for game consoles, media players and laptops and alternatively the wearable electronics transmitting the commands might take the form of glasses or jewellery.”

Read more

Nokia’s Younghee Jung on mobile gesture design

Experientia — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:23:37 +0000

The Nokia Conversations blog reports:

Designing gestures to help you interact with your device in intuitive ways is a challenge that Nokia is grabbing with both hands and welcoming with a respectful bow. Younghee Jung is one of Nokia’s explorative designers, and she’s keenly leading the design investigation process into what makes a gesture work in real life and what it means to real people from different countries and cultures.

In this video Younghee explains more about what goes into designing gestures for Nokia devices, and conducts some live research on the streets of London, speaking to local people and equipping them with a plastic mono-block phone prop, to find out how they would use gestures for certain tasks.

Craiglist founder on the changing balance between authority and the crowd

Experientia — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:27:04 +0000

In a short video interview on Nokia’s IdeasProject Craigslist founder and customer service expert Craig Newmark says Internet connectivity is adjusting the balance between centralized expertize and the power derived from online consumer reviews, networking and other forms of user feedback, lending weight to our existing system of grass roots democracy.

- Watch interview
- Related content: Wired video – Huffington Post article

Augmenting Venice

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:15:59 +0000

The MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory has just published a recent project about location-based media, focusing on how the future of mobile contents are related to the physical environment. The project, Locast, was made in collaboration with RAI New Media in Italy.

Locast is an innovative platform for sharing and discovering location-based user-generated videos and production quality multimedia content provided by RAI New media. It consists of a combination of Mobile and Wearable Computing elements supported by a distributed Web application.

Locast seeks to shift the innovation from the wide-spread concept of Web 2.0 to the promising framework of Space 2.0 that keeps the physical and social characteristics of the Italian cities and augment them with the potential offered by pervasive computing.

MIT MEL ran a user test in Venice (Italy) during the days between July 2 and July 10, 2009.

Book: Mobile Communication

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:07:13 +0000

Mobile Communication
by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner
Polity, 2009
200 pages

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us.

Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three themes: 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

Rich Ling is senior researcher at the Telenor Research Institute in Norway.
Jonathan Donner is researcher for Microsoft Research India.

Privacy requires security, not abstinence

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:40:45 +0000

In a long essay on Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel reflects on what protecting an inalienable right might mean in the age of Facebook.

“Privacy matters. Data privacy protects us from electronic crimes of opportunity–identity theft, stalking, even little crimes like spam. Privacy gives us the right to meet and speak confidentially with others–a right that’s crucial for democracy, which requires places for political ideas to grow and mature. Absolute privacy, also known as solitude, gives us to space to grow as individuals. Who could learn to write, draw, or otherwise create if every action, step, and misstep were captured, immortalized, and evaluated? And the ability to conduct transactions in privacy protects us from both legal and illegal discrimination.

Until recently, people who wanted to preserve their privacy were urged to “opt out” or abstain from some aspects of modern society. Concerned about having your purchases tracked by a credit-card company? Use cash. Concerned that E-ZPass records might be used against you in a lawsuit? Throw coins at that toll booth. Don’t want to show your ID at the airport? Drive. Don’t want your location tracked minute by minute? Turn off your cell phone. And be in a minority: faced with the choice of convenience or privacy, Americans have overwhelmingly chosen the former. Companies like TJX haven’t even suffered from allowing their customers’ personal data to be leaked.

Now, however, abstinence no longer guarantees privacy. Of course, it never really did. But until the past two decades it was always possible to keep some private information out of circulation. Today, although you can avoid the supermarket savings card, the market will still capture your face with its video cameras. You can use cash, but large cash transactions are reported to the federal government. You can try to live without the Internet–but you’ll be marginalized. Worse, you won’t be able to participate in the public debate about how your privacy is wasting away–because that debate is happening online. And no matter what you do, it won’t prevent your information from being stored in commercial networked systems.”

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(via InternetActu)

The rating game

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:38:18 +0000

The spread of Internet rankings and reviews is freeing consumers to focus on the decisions that matter, writes Kevin Maney in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

“The more technology can help with decisions, the better life will be. Guided by ratings and personalized suggestions, I’ll more likely end up doing things I enjoy and using professionals who do their jobs well. On the other end, I won’t waste so much time or money trying to find the right kickboxing class or financial adviser. I can then devote my brain cells to higher-level problems the Web can’t yet solve, like how to get my teenagers to clean their rooms.”

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(via InternetActu)

Introduction to service design

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:10:57 +0000

Culminatum Ltd – Helsinki Region Centre of Expertise has published a great online tool, entitled Introduction to service design.

“The purpose of this digital communications tool is to establish a common ground and a starting point for discussion on service design. By publishing this tool we wanted to make it possible for any service sector professional to become aware of service design and to gain better understanding of service design in practice.

‘Introduction to service design’ gives you an overview on service design process. Some of the most commonly used tools and practices are also introduced.”

The online tool, which was financially supported by the City of Helsinki and Laurea University of Applied Sciences, consists of four chapters — Why service design?, Customer journey, How to design the service experience? and Is service design for you? — and also contains a helpful terminology section.

The main authors were Maisa Kuha, Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences (Chapter 2), Birgit Mager, University of Applied Sciences Cologne (Chapter 3, 4 and key terms section) and Markku Nurminen of Zone Interactions Ltd.

Unfortunately the interface is entirely in Flash, which makes copying text or printing it out virtually impossible. No pdf version seems to be available.

Rural India

Experientia — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:26:01 +0000

The Wall Street Journal and India Knowledge@Wharton present a unique mix of reporting, analysis, interviews and video on life and business in rural India. The Rural India reader resource combines specially-commissioned material with recent articles.

A selection of articles relevant to the topics of this blog:

Vikram Akula: mobile banking could be the future of microfinance
In an interview with India Knowledge@Wharton, Vikram Akula, founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance, spoke about emerging trends in microfinance.

India’s rural poor: why housing isn’t enough to create sustainable communities
The real story of rural India must be told with more than five hundred million characters who live on less than a dollar a day, most of them in terrible living conditions.

The poor deserve world-class products and services
C.K. Prahalad has long championed the notion that business — rather than government handouts — represents the most effective solution to poverty.

Rural India Snaps Up Mobile Phones
India’s cellphone industry continues its steady growth, led by demand from rural consumers, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Doing well by doing good?
The mobile phone is now one of the hottest development tools world-wide, with corporations eyeing untapped rural markets in the hope that new mobile-phone services can boost rural incomes and corporate revenue at the same time.