A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
The upgraded site became available in the U.S. last month but is now available worldwide. Google wanted to improve how YouTube functions through a mobile browser since the site is being accessed about 100 million times a day that way. Traffic to YouTube through mobile devices was up 160 percent in 2009 over 2008.
Read full article.
emilyNonprofits are moving into the mobile realm like never before, ramping up efforts to leverage the medium for its immediacy and direct response attributes.
DMnews is reporting that nonprofit group The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) recently launched a 10-day mobile giving campaign, for example, partnering with soccer star Landon Donovan to raise money for blood cancer research and patient services. Citing mobile’s immediate nature and ease of use, the organization has placed heavy emphasis on mobile in recent months to boost donations.
Another huge benefit to using mobile for donations is the advantage in utilizing data collection for future efforts. “We’ll be following up with those who opt in through mobile to collect their e-mail addresses to retarget to them later on,” said Todd Whitley, VP of eMarketing at LLS.
A prime example of the boost that can be achieved using mobile is the “Mobile Giving Foundation,” who has seen growth go from zero to more than $50 million in donations since it launched in 2008, spurred by catastrophic events like the January earthquake in Haiti. Combined with the Gulf oil spill, the Mobile Giving Foundation played a pivotal role in getting resources donated via mobile devices to those who needed it most.
Office supply giant Staples is another organization who’s recently jumped on the mobile giving bandwagon. The company unveiled a unique text-to-donate program in mid-July, which is now in its third year of partnering with “Do Something 101,” a nonprofit that urges young consumers to support causes they are interested in. When consumers text the word “notebook” to a designated code, a $5 donation will be made instantly to Do Something 101.
As efforts continue to increase, it’s no wonder why nonprofits are banning together to petition the FCC for open standards in using SMS. We reported recently on numerous nonprofits such as American Public Media, Center for Community Change, The Humane Society of the United States, Reform Immigration for America and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops coming together to file a letter with the FCC demanding fair practices and an open ecosystem to utilize SMS to advance their respective missions.
The Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS device based on a cheap cell phone to help Mexican immigrants safely cross the border by pinpointing safe houses, food, water and shelter, was frowned upon by the US government and brought controversy over illegal immigration.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Ricardo Dominguez, the activist/hacker and performance artist at the University of California in San Diego who speared the project and was accused of inappropriate use of grant funding for this project, has recently been cleared.
Previously: - An app for crossing the border
emilyTawanda Karombo reports on Econet’s plans to significantly upgrade its mobile network in the capital. The company just received a multimillion line of credit from a Swedish creditor.
Harare, Zimbabwe— Buoyed by rising demand for services in the country’s major urban centers, Zimbabwe’s biggest telecommunications company, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, has secured a US$25.6 million loan facility and plans to plow the money into upgrading the mobile operators’ network in Harare.
The majority of Econet’s subscribers are in the capital Harare. The company has more than 4 million subscribers on its network and is eyeing further expansion into the country’s outlying areas. Chief executive officer, Douglas Mboweni, has already revealed plans to surpass 5 million subscribers by year end. However, rivals Telecel and NetOne are not too far behind, reporting in previous weeks that they will also be revamping their services.
The US$25.6 million loan facility is from EKN, a Swedish export credit agency. Econet’s Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Mboweni, told the media in Harare this week that the entire loan would be channeled toward buying equipment for Harare. “Our customers in Harare are increasingly buying phones, which require more capacity and capability on the network,” he said.
Mboweni added that engineers who will undertake the upgrading of the Harare network had already arrived in the country and will soon be getting down to work on the project.
Subscribers have recently reported problems with the mobile firm’s network in Harare. Subscribers have complained over dropped calls, non-refunding for undelivered text messages and an unreliable mobile internet service. “Econet must know that it is the quality of service that counts, not just big numbers. We want refunds for failed messages,” complained one subscriber in a letter to the editor in the Newsday publication.
“Econet’s systems are pathetic: The customer service center doesn’t work, text refunds are hardly ever effected and when they are, they will have expired,” said one subscriber.
Mboweni explained that the company would be addressing such problems. “Econet is currently expanding its network capacity around the country, including its 3-G service,” said Mboweni.
Econet has also introduced a solar-charged cell phone that uses solar energy as power.
Last month, Econet made entry into the United Kingdoms’ Mobile Virtual Network market after agreeing to a deal with mobile firm Orange. The arrangement agreed by the two firms will allow Econet to offer services to its own customers in the UK using the Orange network.
"Orange had to fight off another major operator, Vodafone, to clinch the deal with Econet. The reason for the intense interest in Econet comes from the fact that market research shows that Econet is now one of the most admired businesses amongst Africans. There is strong brand recognition of Econet because many people across Africa, see the company, as an 'African success story, in a world of Western and now Eastern multinationals," said Orange in a statement.
Tawanda Karombo
Tawanda Karombo is a freelance journalist living in Zimbabwe.
Other Blog posts:
Zimbabwe Licenses Four More Publications; Media Groups Urge Broadcast Openings
Zimbabwe: Mugabe Tries to Retain Grip On Media
SIM Card Registration Continues Apace in Africa
Zimbabwe: Audio News Service Bridges the Information Gap
Zimbabwe: Government to Sell Telecoms Company NetOne
We have created a public collection of research papers and books about mobile phone studies conducted by anthropologists in Mendeley.
http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/collections/3920771/Mobile-Phone-Anthropology-Studies/
If you are interested, you can join the Mendeley shared public collection to have access to the PDFs files in that list (when possible).
I just reread a couple of CGAP (World Bank) blog postings on the supposed lack of innovation in mobile financial services.
I don't understand the point of these articles. Yes, I believe innovation for the sake of innovation is a good thing. But in financial services it's a huge uphill battle to encourage blind innovation because of the complex ecosystem of players (sorry I will use that word whether anyone likes it or not) and because of the incredibly complex regulatory environment surrounding financial services. m-Pesa was unique in that several regulatory hurdles were removed to their benefit.
Putting the onus solely on MNO's and banks to innovate or to solve the problems of the financially underserved is not realistic. They are inherently "me too" organizations by design. Everyone buys from the same radio wave spectrum, all banks play under the same regulations, etc, etc. Carriers all sell the same phones. It's like innovating if you build nascar stock racing cars. Good luck. It takes small nimble groups focused on real validated problems to truly innovate imho. On the other hand, Microsoft and Google spend a fortune on pure research related to product innovation. What are the pure research budgets for Vodafone or Citibank? They are all but non-existent.
The more interesting question to me is who really understands what problems people face when it comes to managing and dealing with money in any market, developing markets or otherwise? Who is trying to tackle these problems? Who is validating that these problems exist? What is the inherent value of these problems to both the consumer and business solving them? I would like to see the people complaining about innovation in mobile money clarify what these consumer problems are, what the opportunity cost of solving them is and insights as to how to solve these problems that can encourage the kind of innovations that they say is lacking.
Everyone I speak with working in the mobile money arena assumes that the unbanked need to be banked. Really? Why? We need more talk about what people's problems are and how we propose to solve those problems and less silly talk about more innovation. If there is a viable opportunity cost associated with real problems then there will be real solutions and hence real innovation. Innovation doesn't have to be profitable but to see it through there has to be some motivation.
My colleagues and I have spent weeks interviewing people in remote villages only to realize that some of our assumptions as to their real problems were completely wrong and some were underestimated or undervalued. We've watched consumers use mobile money services and realized that some problems that we undervalued were big and real and some problems that we overvalued are non-existent in their minds.
As an aside, I see plenty of innovation just reading the comments to the CGAP blog entry I mentioned above. So perhaps from that perspective this blog was a good thing.
(author unknown)Last week I wrote a post on the difficulties of running a “mobile for development” – or m4d – project. I tried to make it challenging, and was hoping to stir up some discussion around the merits of mobile-initiated development projects versus development-initiated mobile projects. You can read that post here.
Unless you’re one of the bigger technology blogs – Mashable, TechCrunch, Scobleizer and so on – it’s hit-and-miss whether or not a post will get the traction you’re looking for. Apart from a couple of dozen tweets and a dozen or so comments, the post didn’t generate as much debate as I’d have liked. But it did get me thinking – if these kinds of discussion weren’t taking place here, then where were they taking place?
I’m regularly asked at conferences for hints on the best sites for people to post questions and stimulate debate around mobile technology, and I always struggle to give an answer. It seems crazy that, for a discipline which began to fully emerge probably about seven or eight years ago, there still isn’t a genuinely active, engaging, open online community for people to join and interact with each other.
In order to get a sense of which communities exist, I recently sent out a message to a number of ICT4D and mobile email lists I subscribe to, and posted the odd message on Twitter. Very few people could suggest anything. A few people mentioned email lists which dealt specifically with sectoral issues, such as health, but not specifically with mobile (although mobile was a regular thread in many discussions). Only MobileActive suggested MobileActive, which was a surprise considering its positioning as a global, mobile community with over 16,000 ‘active’ members.
Finding nothing was only part of it – many people clearly had different ideas of what made up community, too (I’d put this down to a challenge of definition). When I pushed out my call for sites, I specifically asked for those which were “open, active, collaborative and engaging”, things that I thought would be pre-requisites for anything worth being a member of.
According to Maddie Grant, a Strategist at SocialFish, a consulting firm that helps associations build community on the social web:
What makes a community open is when there’s “a lot more outside the login than inside”, so most of a community’s content must be at least viewable and shareable without logging in. To be active, most of a community’s content must be member (user) generated, not owner-generated, and must have some degree of conversation which includes comments, discussions and reviews
Going by these criteria I don’t believe we yet have a truly active, engaging, open mobile community. This seems a little strange when you consider the attention the technology has been getting over the past few years.
On the flip side though, it might not be so strange after all. As Jonathan Donner put it to me in a recent email, “Why should m4d have it’s own groups and community sites? Can’t we – or should we – just mainstream ourselves into ICT4D?”.
This discussion clearly has a long way to go. I just wonder where that discussion will take place.
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