[This post was written by Robert Goodier and originally appeared on Engineering for Change. It is reposted here with permission.]
Three men who believe that cellphone service should be cheap and accessible to everyone have found a way to make it happen. The creators of OpenBTS, the open-source cellphone network, launched a startup and have delivered cheap cellphone networks to the world's biggest mobile tech corporations, governments and other clients on every continent. (Yes, even Atarctica—the Australian base is connected via OpenBTS.)
As we reported last year, OpenBTS is a network built on open-source software and hardware that works seamlessly with the average cellphone. With smart coding and decentralized call processing, the system has reduced the hardware needed and cuts the cost of installing and running a cellphone network to about one-tenth that of a traditional setup.
And, importantly for developing countries, the base tranceivers (the gear in the cell towers) are energy sippers that can run on PV cells. The bottom line: The whole network can reduce the cost of service to about $2-3 per month for subscribers.
We spoke with Glenn Edens, a co-founder of Range Networks, with a resume that includes such titles as former head of Sun Lab at Sun Microsystems, former president of AT&T Strategic Ventures, Chief of Strategic Technology at Hewlett-Packard and others. Edens summed up the last six months at Range Networks and told us what lies ahead for the startup.
Mobile Applications Laboratories Business Plan data sheet 1487 Views
Author:
Vital Wave Consulting
Publication Date:
Mar 2011
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
The goal of the plan is to inform infoDev-supported mobile application labs in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) – and other mobile application laboratory initiatives globally – to develop sustainable business models and transition from a donor-funded start-up phase to a selffinancing, sustainable phase over a three-year period.
The plan's six chapters cover the following topics:
Landscape Analysis describes mobile applications labs and similar organizations, including success factors and challenges across these labs.
Segmentation Analysis offers a typology of mLabs based on relevant defining characteristics and explores examples from parallel fields (e.g., software development, business incubation, technology transfer) to identify the characteristics of labs that function most effectively.
Offering & Promotional Strategies examines the services that best support sustainability for the mLab, and offers strategies for driving branding and awareness.
Business Model and Pricing Strategies defines potential revenue streams for the services that the labs offer, including potential price lists and menus of options that are tailored to regional markets via the companion Business Model Workbook Tool.
Operating Model provides recommendations on resource requirements (e.g., equipment, staffing, skills) and the phased rollout of services and functions over time.
Customer and Partner Strategies including the identification of intermediate clients (e.g., mobile applications developers, SMEs), end clients (e.g., app stores, network operators, equipment manufacturers, governments) as well as potential partners, investors and donors.
As part of the connected MobileActive.org community of practice, we feature relevant mobile research. If you've been following our Mobile Research At Your Desk Series, you already have a sense of wide range of articles that we've gathered in the mDirectory. (For a full list, see below!)
This slidecast outlines findings from a large-scale study carried out by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. Sanjay Gandhi, Gaurav Tripathi, and Dr. Surabhi Mittal interviewed 200 small scale farmers to highlight the best uses of mobiles to support agricultural productivity.
The authors organized 17 focus groups over four months across India, and conducted 46 individual interviews with subsistence farmers. In total, they spoke to 200 people, living in villages where both mobile services and agricultural information sources are available. Farmers grew a wide of crops and average household incomes varied. The researchers partnered with organizations that provided agricultural information services linked to mobile phones.
We have gathered over 230 journal articles, evaluations and reports on mobiles for development in the mDirectory - a one-stop literature bank on mobiles in social change useful for practitioners and NGOs.
In our "Mobile Research At Your Desk" series, we've featured the work of researchers in the ICT4D field, covering a range of applications. Here's a list of our slidecasts to date:
Apps For Development: Lessons From mPowering data sheet 3210 Views
Non-profit organization mPowering is developing customized mobile apps to help reach the ultra poor -- people living on less than $2 a day -- and connect them with funding opportunities and programs in the developed world.
Reaching individuals and supplying resources in remote regions has huge challenges. The goal of mPowering is to leverage existing mobile infrastructure to open up channels of access. The organization has ongoing programs in Nepal and India which provide incentives to poor individuals for reporting to school or work, via mobile application. The organization is also working to create a mobile donor app to further connect the poor with funding opportunities.
Before a mobile app can be developed and deployed, the mPowering team conducts field research and partners with local institutions. We spoke with Kamael Ann Sugrim, Co-founder and CEO of mPowering, to find out how an app is developed.
Programs in Nepal and India
The mPowering organization is a year old and currently has two programs underway which utilize mobile apps. In Bhaktapur, Nepal, women earn points for reporting to work, and the points can be redeemed for food, clothing, and medicine.
In Orissa, India, 175 children in the village of Juanga earn points for attending school and can redeem the points for food, clothing, and medicine. Teachers have been supplied with donated Android phones with the mPowering application. Through the app, they can “scan” children in for attendance.
One of the main goals of the SaferMobile project is to release software tools that allow activists and rights defenders to use their mobile phones as network monitors and sensors. The goal is to help them, and the mobile developers, human rights organizations and people on the street they work with, to monitor network performance and proactively detect blocking, filtering and censorship. SMSTester is the first tool we are publicly releasing within this category, and it is free, freely licensed and open-source. Our first trial run with Short Message Service Tester (SMSTester) was completed in April 2011. The results are written up here.
Targeting women with mobile phones and mobile-based projects can bring great benefits and opportunities, as we outlined in Part 1 of our series on women and mobiles. But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, substitution of money or a change in expenditures, invasion of privacy, and increased control by a male partner.
Changes in Gender Relations and Power Dynamics
When the traditional social dynamic of a household is patriarchal, introducing a mobile phone into the hands of the woman can challenge the existing gender structure. Trina DasGupta, mWomen Programme Director for the GSMA Development Fund, writes in an e-mail to MobileActive.org, “threats to the status quo have sometimes been viewed negatively by community leaders and we have seen examples of this gender discrimination manifesting itself when women gain greater access to empowering tools, such as the Internet or mobile phones.”
Women themselves may not agree. The GRACE project study in Kenya, for example, finds that women do not perceive mobiles at tools for males. “Unlike our literature review that suggested that the mobile phone is culturally construed as a male tool, the women entrepreneurs did not perceive the phone as such. However, the study does indicate that usage of the phone is culturally construed, with an increase in responsibilities and empowerment for one or other profession socially construed as women’s work.”
A paper by Aramanzan Madanda looks at gender relations and ICT adoption in Uganda (the work will soon be published in book format) and finds that “existing gender structures have been dented and that patriarchy is stressed by adoption of the technologies especially mobile phones leading to transformation of gender relations to an extent.”
Animation without Borders: Mobile Cartoons as a Teaching Tool data sheet 4808 Views
A team of scientists, animators, and educators are working together to create animated videos that can be sent and downloaded to mobile phones around the world. The animations can be done in any language, are targeted toward low-level literate learners, and convey methods to obtain safe water in Haiti or techniques to farm effectively in Africa, and concepts such as value in a marketplace exchange.
This University of Illinois project is called "Scientific Animation Without Borders", or SAWBO, for short. The project started about a year ago. As the team delivers the animations via mobile phone and other mechanisms, they also hope to deliver a more collaborative and bottom-up approach toward effective educational materials.
MobileActive.org spoke with university faculty and graduate students to hear more about animation, education, and mobile technology.
A village in India last year banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they would arrange forbidden marriages. The village council suspected young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange to elope. Meanwhile, unmarried men could use mobile phones under parental supervision.
As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater sense of security and safety.
But, there is a darker side. Targeting women with mobile phones can cause changes in gender dynamics and family expenditures and may relate to increases in domestic violence, invasion of privacy, or control by a male partner.
The collection and analysis of information from the field is a big part of ensuring that programs are working correctly. Recently, journalist Justin Smith interviewed George Mu'ammar of the World Food Programme's Vulnerability Assessment and Mapping Unit on how his department uses mobile technology to collect data. Listen to the podcast below:
In today's Mobile Minute, we look at CGAP's coverage on branchless banking and micro-insurance, report on Nielsen and mobile privacy concerns, look at how the New York Times investigates Google's mobile approach and how smartphones are collecting data about cell towers and Wi-Fi hot spots. Lastly, a meetup for those interested in mHealth and ICT4D.
Interested in how branchless banking and micro-insurance can work together? GCAP has a roundup of three different organizations (from Ghana, the Philippines, and Kenya) that have paired mobile banking and micro-insurance in order to reach the unbanked and uninsured.
Today's news covers a new Android app development contest in Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya's rebel-created cell network, a look at how Android has become the fastest-growing mobile OS, a study on how mobile owners listen to music on mobile devices, and the growth of mobile Internet in South Africa.
Are you an app developer in Sub-Saharan Africa? Google has launched an Android Developer Contest – there are three competition regions (West and Central Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa) and three categories (Entertainment/Media/Games, Social Networking/Communication, and Productivity/Tools/Lifestyle). Check out the competition's page to learn more – submissions open on June 1st and are due by July 1st.
After Libyan government forces disabled mobile and Internet services in March to cut off rebels' communication, a group of expatriates set up a new cell network outside of government control. Read the Wall Street Journal's in-depth coverage of the creation of the system here.
The World Bank announced today the winners of its first-ever Apps for Development competition. The contest launched last October as part of the Open Data Initiative and invited developers and development professionals to create mobile applications to help solve world problems apply their skills toward the Millenium Development Goals. A total of 107 applications were submitted form 36 countries across every continent.
Honorable mention, for example, went to Treepet from Mexico, that teaches people about the realities of worldwide deforestation via a game in which you plant a seed, nourish and water it, and try to restore an ecosystem. One of the winning apps helps the Bank directly: StatPlanet World Bank from Australia uses the 3000-plus indicators available from the World Bank database in interactive maps and graphs.
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on African technology use, an interview with txteagle's Nathen Eagle, the 155 millions tweets that are posted on Twitter each day, a look at why technology isn't a panacea, and the future of near-field communication applications for smartphones.
Movirtu's services provide leading mobile operators with the means to connect base of the pyramid shared mobile users to their own mobile identity without the need to own a handset or a SIM card. Users can now bank, make and receive calls and SMS, and reach/be reached with critical NGO and other information services. Movirtu aims to reach more than 4 million users in more than 10 countries by 2013, primarily in Africa and South Asia.
Whether in the developing world or the business sector, the majority of mobile data collection efforts parallel the processes set down by their largely paper-based predecessors. In traditional data collection systems information is collected from a variety of sources, funnelled to a single point and eventually compiled, sorted and (hopefully) acted upon. In many cases this workflow meets the basic needs of data consumers and in some cases is preferable.
Let's consider some of the challenges posed by traditional one-way data collection systems.
The people performing data collection (usually referred to as "mobile workers") don't have access to the wealth of raw information available to data consumers. This makes mobile workers outsiders to the big picture and lessens their potential contributions to the overall data collection effort.
Solutions pull collected data into a black hole: once it's submitted there's very little the mobile worker can do to access it for review or to make corrections.
Implementations often force knowledgeable team members to work in a void. If data cannot be easily and seamlessly shared between team members collaborative efforts will be impeded and their overall effectiveness reduced.
When team members cannot "see" what others in the group are doing, the chances of double-entry and redundant information are all the more likely.
When aggregated data finally returns to mobile workers it is often severely outdated.
Solutions are not really mobile if they require workers to access desktops or laptops to complete tasks essential to the data collection process. This is also true if the tools make it impossible to take pertinent portions of the data set with them for online & offline use.
Group Complete has coupled the power and open architecture of Open Data Kit and XForms standards with CouchDB to provide a mobile and real-time collaborative data collection platform.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
App resides and runs on a server
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Share collected data between mobile team members and data consumers in real-time
Allow team members to collaborate on data entry and review collected data, regardless of their locations
Reduce double entry, increase team cooperation and still employ more traditional workflows when needed
Perform all of the major functions of data collection on a smartphone (form building, data entry & export)
Use Group Complete Mobile to work offline
Integrate with Open Data Kit and XForms workflows
Main Services:
Voting, Data Collection, Surveys, and Polling
Location-Specific Services and GIS
Mobile Social Network/Peer-to-peer
Information Resources/Information Databases
Display tool in profile:
Yes
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2011-03
Platforms:
Android
Linux/UNIX
Current Version:
0
Program/Code Language:
Java/Android
Javascript
Other
Organizations Using the Tool:
n/a
Number of Current End Users:
100-1,000
Number of current beneficiaries:
100-1,000
Support Forums:
http://www.groupcomplete.com/help
support@groupcomplete.com
Languages supported:
English (multi-lingual capable)
Handsets/devices supported:
All versions of Android 2.2, 2.3 and 3.x supported. Support for Android 2.1 coming soon.
Mobile Africa Report 2011: Regional Hubs of Excellence and Innovation data sheet 2030 Views
Author:
Rao, Madanmohan
Publication Date:
Mar 2011
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
According to industry estimates, there are more than 500 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa now, up from 246 million in 2008. In 2000, the number of mobile phones first exceeded that of fixed telephones. Africans can accelerate development by skipping less efficient technologies and moving directly to more advanced ones.
The telecommunications sector continues to attract a flurry of public and private investment from foreign sources and local banks, but the investment should be in software and services, not just cabling infrastructure.
There is an enormous amount of literature on the use of mobiles in development work - from case studies and project evaluations, to broad policy recommendations and specific technology papers.
One place you can begin your search of relevant publications, reports and evaluations is in our mDirectory. For snapshots of the kind of information you can find there, here are more research slidecasts!
Way back in 2008, we spoke with Yael Schwartzman, who described her work in agricultural data collection. In this presentation, we feature a report published by Schwartzman, now a country manager at Frogtek in Mexico, and Tapan S. Parikh, assistant professor at UC Berekeley's School of Information.
Mobile del Mar: How Mobile App Fisher Friend Helps Fishers in India data sheet 3319 Views
An ongoing project in coastal India is working to improve the livelihoods of “fisher folk.” A mobile app called Fisher Friend provides timely information on local fish markets, the weather, and the sea.
A video about Fisher Friend suggests that, “for fishing communities, the key to livelihood is knowledge... knowledge of the market, the weather, and most importantly, the sea.” The Fisher Friend app, which launched in 2007, provides timely and critical information for fishers, and “also increases their knowledge base by providing information on government schemes and entitlements, health services, directory services, and a marine toll-free helpline.”
The Fisher Friend app provides information on potential fishing zones and market rates per species, helping fishers in all phases of their work. MobileActive.org spoke with S. Senthilkumaran, director of MSSRF in Chennai, to learn more about Fisher Friend.
A comprehensive new study, commissioned by UNICEF, sheds light on trends and challenges in global mobile telephony. The report, Mobiles for Development, focuses on mobile tech as an area of significant future opportunity for advancing social development around the word. The report finds that there is an increasing number of mobile-based projects, with the most common sectors being health, socio-economic development and agriculture. Findings also show that "mobile tools can identify the most deprived...communities, provide cost effective interventions, overcome bottlenecks to services, and enable communities to maximise the impact of available resources."
Additionally, the report takes a look at the mobile operators in this field. It finds that there are significant business opportunities for regional operatators in the field of social development, including:
Mobiles for Development is a research study commissioned by UNICEF to help the organization understand the global mobile telephony landscape as it relates to advancing development, and as an area of significant future opportunities. Evidence for the report comes from UNICEF operational staff and representatives of mobile operators in 14 countries (Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Kosovo, Lao PDR, Malawi, Mongolia, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Uganda, and Zambia). The report suggests that mobile tools can identify the most deprived children and communities, provide cost effective iinterventions, overcome bottlenecks to services, and enable communities to maximize the impact of available resources.
In case you missed it! We have some great new content on the site: Two new case studies on building a local jobs database in Haiti and TulaSalud, a mobile health project; and two new how-tos (that nicely complement each other).
Konbit: Using Mobile Tech (and Your Voice) for Local Jobs in Haiti data sheet 2191 Views
Konbit is a service that aims to help communities rebuild themselves after a crisis by indexing the skill sets of local residents, allowing NGOs to find and employ them. Konbit development started after the earthquake in Haiti, and in response to complaints that NGOs were typically bringing in their own labor, rather than hiring locally. The service allows Haitians to describe their everyday skills and talents, in their own voice and language, over a mobile phone.
This audio content is then transcribed and translated into job skill categories that can be searched by NGOs and employers in the area. In this way, Konbit combines mobile and Internet technology with something more accessible to the Haitian community: their own voice.
This is a guest post by our colleague Michael Benedict who is currently working in Tanzania and Uganda. It was originally posted on his blog and is published here with permission.
While working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guaranteed”. My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corruption of data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I am interested in learning about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission. I found myself in Mwanza, Tanzania last week with two GPRS modems and a local partner who was distinctly unenthusiastic about the work I was there to do, so I decided to try an experiment. I bought SIM cards and airtime for three of the major TZ networks, put two at a time in the models, and wrote a simple python script using Adam Mckaig’s excellent pygsm
2-3 March, Mobile Banking Southern Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa) This conference focuses on the potential of mobile banking for Southern Africa. Panelists will lead discussions on everything from mobile banking security to exploring ways to bring m-payments to the unbanked. If you want to learn more about how mobile banking is affecting Southern Africa, this is the event for you. 7-9 March, AnDevCon (San Francisco, USA) If you're interested in building and monetizing Android apps, check out AnDevCon for workshops, classes and presentations about ways to build for the Android OS.
Regulatory Independence and Wireless Market Development: A Comparative Analysis of Two African Nations data sheet 1176 Views
Author:
van Gorp, Annemijn F. & Carleen F. Maitland
Publication Date:
Jan 2009
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
This study analyzes the nature of regulatory independence and its influence on wireless market development in Tanzania and Botswana. The study finds that the level of regulatory independence is associated with improved market conditions. The research has implications for theories of regulation and market development in low income countries.
In particular the Tanzania case suggests that the independence of regulation can have secondary effects such as diversity of technologies and faster transitions to advanced technologies, while the reversal of independence in Botswana highlights the need for greater insights into the under-theorized dynamic nature of regulatory independence.
