Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on mobile learning in South Africa, Egypt's pre-election SMS restrictions, Motorola's launch of dual SIM card handsets in India, a new mobile sensing tool, and India's extension of its deadline for banning RIM's BlackBerry services.
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In New York City's East Village neighborhood last Friday, anyone with a mobile phone could have their words heard across Tompkins Square Park. An art exhibit called "Urban Speaker" allowed participants to call a mobile phone hooked up to an amplifier and loudspeaker, and the resulting messages were immediately broadcast.
Designed by artist Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena, Urban Speaker is a mix of technology and performance art – participants could either call the number printed on a sign, or use a QR code to get more information about the project. Anyone could call the number and had 60 seconds to speak into a voicemail service, and then the message was sent out over the loudspeaker. Watch Gomez de Llarena explain the project below:
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The Mobile Minute is back with the latest mobile news. Apps4Africa announces its winner, Microsoft prepares to launch its mobile operating system, the United Arab Emirates doesn't go through with its proposed BlackBerry ban, political campaigns try to grow mobile campaign lists, and although Skype is now available on a greater number of Android phones, its not without its downsides.
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October is here, and so are plenty of events to keep your M4D calender full! Let us know in the comments or via email if you have an event you'd like to have included here.
7 October, Tech@State: mWomen (Washington, D.C., U.S.) Tech@State's latest event focuses on women and mobiles. Topics at the conference will cover the digital gender divide, mobile opportunities and benefits for women, and how to increase mobile access for women around the world.
9-10 October, The Media Consortium: Independent Media Hackathon (Chicago, U.S.) This event brings together programmers and journalists for a two-day coding marathon. The event is designed "to develop apps within the frame of “News + Fun + Community," that creatively integrate delivery of news/commentary with game mechanics (including gaming, fun, interaction, calls to action)."
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Today's Mobile Minute is focused on mobile money. We've got news about Bharti's financial services in India, Rwanda's new mobile banking guidelines, Digicel's plan for mobile financial services in Haiti, ICT growth from 1998 to 2009, and the popularity of native apps on smartphones.
- Digicel, a Caribbean telecom, announced they will launch a mobile banking pilot project in Haiti, starting this October. The pilot will allow users to transfer funds and give and receive cash via mobiles.
- ICT4Dblog charted how ICTs have grown around the world, ranking mobile, Internet, and broadband growth over an 11-year period. The site then looked at how these numbers show the digital gap between rich and poor countries, and then reported on: "digital lag: the time gap between a given average ICT penetration level in the poorest countries, and the year that was achieved in the richest countries. Current digital lag is just under 10 years for mobile, and something like 14-15 years for Internet. For broadband, it’s just over 10 years but the figures are so low that this may not be meaningful."
[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]
Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei
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MobileActive.org turns five this fall. We think that this is a perfect time to highlight the creative and amazing practitioners in the m-4-change field. Our community of developers, organizers, advocates, field staff, researchers, donors, and many more is what makes this peer network so strong and vibrant.
We wanted to hear from you on where the field of 'mobiles for change' has been, where it's going, and how a community like MobileActive.org can help along the way. So we called people around the world who have been in the field for a while to hear their thoughts.
Marty Kearns (Green Media Toolshed), Brenda Burrell (Kubatana), Bukeni Waruzi (Witness.org), Chris Spence (National Democratic Institute), Karen Doyle Grossman (Mercy Corps), and Ben Rigby (The Extraordinaries) shared their thoughts on three questions:
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Last week's tech salon, "Mobiles for Women and Women in Mobiles," brought together practitioners, researchers, and mobile developers. The event highlighted both the amazing women working in the field of mobiles, and also showcased the promise that mobiles offer to improve the lives of women and girls around the world.
Designed to encourage discussion, the tech salon featured both presentations and an open marketplace, where attendees mingled and shared their work and experiences.
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The Mobile Minute is back with the latest mobile news. McKesson Foundation's president is interviewed about its $1.5 million grant for m-health research, Zimbabwe begins to roll out per-second mobile billing, NTEN shows non-profits in the United States seven ways to incorporate mobile donations, Apple publishes its guidelines for submissions to the app store, and Twitter releases new figures about their mobile access numbers.
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The Mobile Minute is here to bring you coverage on Sierra Leone's crackdown on unregistered SIM cards, Wall Street firms' move away from BlackBerry, Tim Berners-Lee's concerns about the mobile web's privacy, accountability, neutrality of networks, and accessibility, and a how-to guide for taking the best photos with your Android phone.
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Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on Australia's record mobile web usage during the recent elections there, how telecom's price wars in Kenya have pushed down prices, why carriers may have raised the price of Google's Nexus One, a project Ugandan refugees using mobiles to find missing family, and competition for data-enabled handsets in Africa.
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