A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
The massive earthquake that hit Haiti in January devastated the country in many ways, with one being the destruction of a third or more of the country’s banks and ATMs. Even before the earthquake, however, fewer than 1 in 10 Haitians had ever used a traditional bank.
The Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Tuesday a plan to change all that with $10 million in funding to spur the use of cell phone banking and mobile payments to bring financing to the poor and help rebuild the financial ecosystem in Haiti.
The fund will offer cash awards to companies that build mobile financial services in Haiti, giving $2.5 million to the first country that launches a mobile banking service in the next six months and hits certain goals. The second company that does so within 12 months will get $1.5 million, while the remaining $6 million will be awarded proportionately to those services that process the first 5 million transactions.
“Out of the ruins of Haiti’s tragic earthquake, there is an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Haitians and unlock the country’s economic potential through mobile money,” said Mark Suzman, acting president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a statement. “Making financial services widely available to the poorest families in the developing world can help break the cycle of poverty by giving them a safe place to save, guard against risks, build assets, and provide opportunities for the next generation.”
Those involved are hopeful of the initiative, citing a similar case in Kenya, where a service known as M-Pesa already reaches 9 million people, or 40 percent of adult Kenyans, just three years after its launch. M-Pesa allows a range of goods and services, from taxi fares to school fees to be paid by phone. The Gates Foundation touts a recent University of Edinburgh study that suggests rural households using M-Pesa saw their income increase by 5 percent to 30 percent.
Not all transactions are created equal: the very last dollar in your wallet has a higher value than when there’s a stack of notes; an online transaction completed at home has different security implications than one completed in an internet cafe. Service designers have long recognized the need for extra checks and balances for ‘risker’ transactions - and these are typically reflected by levels of authentification. From a user’s perspective we’ve found it useful to frame transactions in terms of thresholds of concern and thresholds of alarm.
Some transactions fall below the so-called ‘threshold of concern’ – where it takes the user more effort to acknowledge and mentally process the transaction than the utility and/or satisfaction derived from knowing the transaction has taken place. For many people a small, frequent purchase such buying a newspaper might fit this criteria. At the other end of the spectrum, some transactions rise above the so-called ‘threshold of alarm’ and can significantly threaten the users quality of live and consequently users expect more checks, reassurance and feedback. Examples include large or highly time-dependent purchases. Between these two thresholds lies the so-called ‘zone of comfort’ – a space within which most everyday purchases take place, and within whose boundaries most of today’s service designs cater for.
It’s important to note that these thresholds are highly dependent on context, cultural and personal preferences: a transaction completed in the safety of the home might be well within the zone of comfort but when carried out in the context of a bus station might trigger alarm like behaviors; an everyday purchase that is normally considered trivial might be elevated to alarm status late at night when the user is close to running out of cash and there are no alternative ways to pay. There are cultural differences: a user can have different ingrained assumptions about risk depending on whether they are from a fatalistic or deterministic society; people from societies with a high level of social cohesion are more likely to value a trouble-free transaction rather than risk inconveniencing others.
What range of factors affect people’s perception of these thresholds? How can we help users manager their thresholds of concern and alarm?
Given people’s inability to accurately measure risk, how best to marry the users perception of alarm, with the system’s understanding of the same? And what tensions might occur between the provision of these features and, for example retailers desire for their customer to spend money?
-Jan Chipchase
I had visions of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe being a sleepy little hollow, and perhaps in some ways it is. But last week, after arriving at Radio Dialogue offices in Pioneer House in Bulawayo's central business district, I was very pleasantly surprised. We were in the City of Skies to run a practical two-day workshop with six local organizations on using Freedom Fone. Pioneer House seemed to me to be pioneering the way!
Radio Dialogue is a community radio station that opened nine years ago and resides on the ninth floor of Pioneer House. Like all community radio stations in Zimbabwe, it has yet to gain a government license to broadcast. Despite this challenge, it manages to successfully give communities in and around Bulawayo a voice on local issues.
The Radio Dialogue office was bustling! The reception area felt like grand central station, with inspired communicators heading off in all directions. One young journalist stopped me outside the elevator to ask for an audio vox pop: "Now that winter is coming, what home remedies do you personally use to ward off flu?" After describing my potent garlic ginger juice concoction, my colleague and I continued on to one of the well-equipped computer labs to prepare for the Freedom Fone workshop the following day.
We were greeted by excited youths between 13 and 19 years old. They were working together in groups to write and read poetry about Mother Africa. This is one of the many regular activities organized by the Youth Press Bureau, headed by the youth coordinator, Rosie Chauke. She was one of the participants in our Freedom Fone workshop.
Chauke later told me about an art exhibition and competition organized by Radio Dialogue, which we later visited at The Bulawayo Club. It was titled TRUTH telling: The TRUTH will set you free and is about the importance of speaking out against the violent atrocities in Zimbabwe, particularly around the Matabeleland massacres, locally known as Gukurahundi, which took place during the 1980s.
Bulawayo AgendaIn the same building as Radio Dialogue and the Youth Press Bureau, is Bulawayo Agenda. It provides a platform for community views through a free printed news bulletin called Weekly Agenda. Bulawayo Agenda recently organized a Transitional Justice Interface meeting to find resolutions to ensure national healing in Zimbabwe, such as including information on Gukurahundi in the education syllabus and identifying the causes of political violence.
Workshop participants from other pioneering organizations included Habakkuk, Zimbabwe Development Democracy Trust and KG6: King George VI School for the Disabled, where the Oscar winning documentary Music by Prudence was set.
Overall the workshop was not without its technical frustrations, but I left Bulawayo feeling inspired by the dynamism of the participants. Their thoughtfulness during the brainstorming sessions, their determination and resilience during the technical sessions, and their overall eagerness made me hopeful that Freedom Fone would be taken up as a valuable information tool to assist many of these organizations in reaching their noteworthy communication and community-oriented goals.
Amy Saunderson-MeyerOnce again, mobile is providing a lifeline for concerned citizens to donate to the relief of the Gulf oil spill, one of the largest man-made disasters in U.S. history.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has launched a mobile giving campaign as part of its efforts to raise money to help save animals ravaged by the BP oil spill. The new campaign, organized in part by the Mobile Giving Foundation, allows wireless subscribers to donate $10 to the NWF’s Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund, by texting WILDLIFE to 20222.
Mobile donations soared in popularity after the American Red Cross launched a text-to-give campaign that allowed cell phone users to make $10 donations by sending HAITI to 90999. The campaign raised $32 million dollars within one month of its launch and threw mobile giving into the spotlight.
Others have launched SMS-donation campaigns as well. Mad Mobile, a mobile marketing provider, recently launched its “Oil Spill Relief” campaign that allows users to donate $10 by texting ‘GULF’ to 50555. Once an SMS is received, the consumer will receive a text message confirming their contribution of which 100% of the donation goes directly to the Waterkeeper Alliance and SaveOurGulf.org. The donation appears as a charge on the consumer’s mobile phone bill.
You want proof mobile money can make money? Look to M-PESA, which according to Safaricom’s annual financial statements released just a few days ago accounted for 9 percent of company revenues in the last fiscal year, for a total contribution of USD 94.4 mil (Ksh 7.56 bil). M-PESA revenues grew 158% over last year’s figure of USD 36.6 bil (Ksh 2.93 bil).
M-PESA as percentage of Safaricom's data revenue. ©CGAP analysis
It’s not just the gross revenue amount that is surprising. Two more things caught my eye.
First, Safaricom is lauding 78% growth in data revenue as the main engine behind the overall 37 percent growth in company profits (to USD 261.9 mil). And M-PESA now accounts for 48% of all data revenues, and 70% of the total growth in data revenue last year. In other words, this year M-PESA was the single biggest driver of new profits for Safaricom. Goodbye SMS as the #2 revenue source, at least for this mobile network operator.
Second, M-PESA may be delivering even more to the bottom line. A little guesswork is involved. The service is 3+ years old. Safaricom still incurs variable costs of agent commissions, marketing, HQ staff. But if they’ve paid off the original large, lumpy front-end investments in the M-PESA platform, the huge initial marketing blitz and no doubt a few high-priced lawyers to help sort out regulatory treatment… well, it would not surprise me if a substantial portion of M-PESA revenues now flows directly through to profits. Let’s say it’s half; in other words, USD 47.2 mil in profits from M-PESA. And we know Safaricom’s overall profits for 2010 were USD 261.9 mil. In this scenario M-PESA is generating 18% of all Safaricom profits.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
-Mark Pickens
Don Kellogg, Senior Manager, Research and Insights/Telecom Practice, The Nielsen Company
Whether it‘s checking email on the go, connecting with friends through social networks or using turn-by-turn navigation, the capabilities of smartphones are convincing more and more consumers to make the leap from a simple mobile phone to a more sophisticated device. As of Q1 ‘10, Nielsen data shows that 23% of mobile consumers now have a smartphone, up from just 16% in Q2 ‘09.
Vying for their share of the smartphone market are two of the tech industry’s fiercest competitors: Apple, with its iconic iPhone, and Google, with its fast-growing Android operating system.
Between Q4 ’09 and Q1 ’10, Android and iPhone’s share of the smartphone market grew by 2% each. At the same time, smartphone leader Blackberry lost 2% share to fall to 35% of all smartphones while Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS also lost 2% to fall to 19%.
Although Android and iPhone users both skew male (Android users show a 54/46 gender split compared to iPhone’s 55/45), there are some striking differences. Android users tend to be slightly younger than their iPhone peers- 55% of Android users are under the age of 34 — while just 47% of iPhone users fall within the same demographic. As is usually the case, age is also a prime determinant of income and education, with Android users slightly less wealthy and less educated.
Perhaps what sets iPhone and Android apart from the rest of the field of smartphones is operating system loyalty. 80% of iPhone users want their next device to run iPhone OS while 70% of Android users want another Android device. This is in stark comparison to other major smartphone players: only 47% of Blackberry users want another Blackberry while only 34% of Windows Mobile users want another Windows Mobile device.
Among Android and iPhone users who would like to switch operating systems, the rate at which Android users would like to try iPhone is twice as high as that of iPhone users who would try Android. Given that iPhone penetration is three times that of Android, more iPhone consumers are willing to try Android.
Finally, usage profiles for Android and iPhone are more like each other than the rest of the smartphone market. With a broader selection of titles available to them, predictably iPhone customers are more likely to have downloaded a game or played online, but Android users appear to be using their phones for a wide range of activities as well. Android users were more likely to engage in file-transfer activities like downloading ringtones, pictures, wallpaper and uploads.
Following its report on the fastest growing mobile app and browser content, comScore today published a report detailing U.S. mobile subscriber market share for April, 2010.
The report, which features data pulled from comScore’s MobiLens service, details key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month period ending in April, compared to the preceding three-month period. The report ranked the leading mobile OEMs and operators in the U.S. according to their share of usage by current mobile subscribers age 13 and older, and reviewed the most popular activities and content accessed via the subscriber’s primary device.
In terms of operator share, Verizon still leads the pack with 31.1% share, with AT&T a close second with 25.3% share. Verizon has lost market share during the first three months of 2010, while AT&T has gained slightly.
As for OEM device manufacturers, Samsung, LG and Motorola were neck and neck with 21.1%, 21.8% and 21.6% respectively. RIM came in fourth at just 8.4%. For the 3 month period ending in April, 234 million Americans age 13 and older were mobile subscribers.
In terms of mobile content, during the February through April 2010 time period, 64.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.1 percentage points versus the prior three month period, while browsers were used by 31.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 2.5 percentage points).
Subscribers who used downloaded applications comprised 29.8 percent of the mobile audience, representing a substantial increase of 3.1 percentage points over the prior three month period. Accessing of social networking sites and blogs also continued to grow, increasing 2.8 percentage points to 19.9 percent of mobile subscribers.
The Chinese government has blocked access to Foursquare for users located in mainland China following an influx in users “checking in” to Tiananmen Square as a show of solidarity with Chinese dissidents, and to commemorate those who died in the massacre 21 years ago.
Though the true reason for the blockage is still unknown, the issued with Tiananmen Square makes the most sense, as the Chinese government is notorious for stifling discussion about the event, and already blocks internet searches that contain those key terms.
According to this blog post from a news site covering tech news in China, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of people using Foursquare to ‘visit’ Tiananmen Square. The blog published a screenshot (posted above) of a user’s Foursquare app on the iPhone, which shows hundreds of people checking in at the site of the massacre.
This seems to fall in line with China’s “Great Firewall,” which already blocks Google, Facebook, websites about Tibet, the religious group Falun Gong and now the Tiananmen Square massacre, though no word on whether the Foursquare ban is temporary or permanent. It looks as though “Mayors” in China can rest assured their titles won’t be taken any time soon.
Following on from last week’s post on the concept of ‘mediated use’ - asking someone to complete all or part of a task that the user is unable, or unwilling to do - how motivated are agents in helping customers complete all or some of the task?
From an agents perspective there are a number of drivers for mediation: they can make money by supporting the customer to successfully complete a revenue generating task; increase loyalty; reduce error rates (and avoid dealing with arguments that come from erroneous use of the service e.g. double-checking a phone number prior to dialing puts the onus on the customer that the number is correct (Chipchase, 2006a); and/or reciprocity. If the agent is engaged in another businesses e.g. runs a grocery store or phone kiosk, then simply offering a service that brings in more customers for longer periods of time enables cross-selling and the time spent on mediating the task can be considered an effective loss-leader.
In situations where the transaction is likely to generate repeat business, where there is minimal competition for the agent i.e. the customer does not have practical alternatives to turn to, and where mediation takes ‘too much’ time and effort the agent will be motivated to teach the customer how to complete the task themselves. How realistic a scenario this is depends on the task complexity, the ability of the user interface to shorten the steps required to repeat positively completed tasks, and the skills of the mediator and the mediated. The risk of empowerment is that it becomes more viable for the customer to take their business elsewhere.
In contexts where there is demand for services and a sufficient gulf between the skills required to complete a task and the skills at hand services are services are more likely to spring up to meet a need: from writing letters; filling forms; navigating processes; to signing up pre-paid customers. This is particularly prevalent is contexts with high numbers of illiterate consumers.
One should not assume that the service agent will always act in the best interest of the consumer – if a moderate sum of money can arguably be sent in 1 or 2 tranches, each of which costs the same set commission how many tranches the agent prefer? Logic dictates however that over time consumers compare notes on the agents they use, and as with everything else in the marketplace understand the need to shop around to find the best deal.’
How to best leverage the malleability of the agents in an otherwise fairly rigid system design?
(Chipchase, 2006 ; Ratan, 2008; Morawczynski, 2009)
-Jan Chipchase
Nielsen today published its latest “State of Mobile Apps” report in which a survey of over 4,200 consumers was conducted. Among the findings was the fact that 21% of US wireless subscribers had a smartphone by the end of 2009, up from just 14% a year ago.
Of all phone users, 14% had downloaded a mobile app within the last month, however smartphone users were consuming far more apps- reporting on average 22 apps on their devices compared to just 10 on feature phones.
Though largely unsurprising, users with iPhones reported an average of 37 apps per device, which is as many as the average number of apps on BlackBerry (10), Palm (14), and Windows Mobile (13) users’ phones combined and significantly more than the average Android user (22).
Like most surveys of this nature, which take into account a relatively small sample size, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it does indicate Apple’s continued stronghold on the mobile app market. I foresee, however, Android taking over the reigns in the very near future.
I’ve raised the issue of Android fragmentation quite often when people tell me that Android is ‘here’ and that ‘Symbian is dead’. Symbian has had it’s fair share of fragmentation problems — they’ve been through a heck of a lot of teething troubles and they’ve come out the other end with a very powerful, reliable, proven operating system (that doesn’t really look as sexy as the competing platforms at the moment).
Most of the time people I’m talking to just smile and say I’m too much of a Symbian or Nokia fan to know. I then point out that much of the feedback on the Android market is from, for example, a guy using a Droid complaining that the app doesn’t work on his phone, or someone using a Nexus One warning not to buy the app because ‘it doesn’t work on Nexus One’. That kind of feedback is hugely worrying for consumers. It’s perfectly fine when the platform was being used by geeks who could root their G1 and do what they wanted with it.
It’s not good for end consumers who just want things to work.
How bad is the fragmentation issue? Well, it’s beginning to seriously irk some developers. Here’s a chap contributing to a Slashdot discussion on the subject.
Some examples of his frustration:
Android 1.5 has a Java NIO bug that forces me to copy data to a temporary array on its way to buffers to be rendered via OpenGL. This hurts performance on older phones that often need it the most. It also means I have to do more testing to make sure both code paths are well exercised. I bet many developers don’t even realize the bug is there an just have broken OpenGL apps on Android 1.5. The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there’s no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.
He continues…
Another really frustrating one is how I have to detect specific devices and request certain size depth buffers just to get decent performance. Hardware graphics acceleration is only enabled on the Samsung Galaxy for depth buffer size 16, for example, not for no depth buffer. Depth buffer size 24 works best on the Droid, etc.. The Galaxy has had this bug for a very long time. The Archos tablet has no hardware acceleration and there are promises that cheaper phones will be similar. Do I write all the extra code for adjusting rendering for each of these? Or do again give up large swaths of the market?
Now here’s an interesting question. How committed is Google to Android? I mean really committed. Developers need these issues and niggles fixed properly and reliably.
It is really disappointing that Android team, the carriers, and the device manufacturers don’t do more to prevent it. Doing things like back porting fixes so that older phones can be more trivially updated would help enormous numbers of apps and app developers compared to the very few resources needed on Google’s part to do it.
Here’s a good example of Google not really getting stuck into the discussion:
Meanwhile Google isn’t even interested in solutions to these problems from what I’ve seen. One developer brought up another potential solution during a session at Google IO. He suggested making the highest level of Android a distributable framework, like .NET. This would allow updating it much easier. Not nearly as many phones would be stranded with old, buggy versions of the Java portion of Android at least. The Google staffers just brushed the idea off without even discussing it. They said fragmentation should really be called progress and to deal with it.
Another damning point:
If you look at a recent app produced by Google, the Twitter app, you’ll see that it is unavailable to a huge percentage of the market because they don’t support older versions of Android with it. Independent developers can’t afford to ignore large sections of the marketplace like that. Google isn’t in the app business, so the Googlers just go ahead and ignore the issue.
Not good at all.
As technology has improved, it is now easy for users to stream entire football matches on their mobile phones, using BBC iPlayer’s iPhone-optimised website, for instance, but each user would need about 400mb of data per game.
According to Ed Marsden, telecoms partner in Deloitte’s Information and Technology Risk team, that means “There is a high probability that networks could become oversaturated during midweek day games if individuals do not have television access and, in turn, opt for online viewing.”
Read full article.
emilyThe potential of Oil Reporter, a new mobile application from Crisis Commons, goes far beyond its intended application to monitor the fallout of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf Coast. In a blog post written four years ago (Content without wires), I hinted at the potential for meaningful peacebuilding through similar applications, running on smartphones that are now increasingly the norm,
For peace, this means that grassroots communities will (finally) have the means through which their voices can be promoted, at little or no cost (certainly less than the combined cost of PC ownership and PC based wired internet access) through mobile telephony frameworks or WiMax & PDA combinations to a larger audience. In reality, this means that technologies already in development for news and journalism using mobile video can be used for human rights monitoring, bringing to light local government corruption, capture government officials who take bribes, help in alternative dispute resolution with regards to post-conflict land issues by giving mediators a better idea of the contested territory through video & photos, helping humanitarian aid work and strengthening community participation in peacebuilding frameworks.
However, as I’ve noted earlier,
…the mere introduction of technology will make our lives better is erroneous – 3G is not going to make our lives better. We need to figure out the ways through which 3G can and must feed into democracy that’s founded upon effective communication between peoples – and that’s not something telecoms companies operating under profit imperatives can always successfully envision.
Oil Reporter by Crisis Commons, running on Android as well as the iPhone, is open-source, polished and powerful. Although there are very few reports featured on the site produced by the mobile application, it’s the commendable thought that has gone into the design of this application that is worthy of emulation. There’s a visualisation component through Google Maps, a data aggregation component, an API, a mobile client for incident tracking and the Oil Reporter application itself – for me, the fundamentals of a citizen journalism newsroom.
Opening up the environmental and livelihood costs, over the long-term, to public scrutiny and debate, Oil Reporter’s website notes,
Oil Reporter’s Adopt-A-Beach initiative will provide the opportunity for virtual volunteers to review high resolutions imagery of the Gulf Coast and to map data elements such as perimeters of oil presence and injured wildlife in remote areas where physical assessment access is limited. This also provides an opportunity for Oil Reporter photographs and video to be joined with high resolution imagery to provide greater understanding and provide an ability to share data from these sources back to the public.
It is that greater understanding that applications such as this can provide in other contexts, such as terrains of violence and theatres of conflict. The robust contestation of issues and processes informed by multiple perspectives captured through mobile devices is a new paradigm for accountability and journalism that contests propaganda, mainstream media bias, marketing spin.
Even in Sri Lanka, though a basic camera phone, the callous insensitivity of government stood exposed and condemned post-war. Beyond this, I am interested in how applications like Oil Reporter can be adapted and leveraged to provide citizens with the power to bear witness and a voice to capture the world as they see it. All of the resulting content will (and must) be contested. But let’s not forget or underplay that much of it will never be featured in mainstream media.
And that to me, looking to the future, is the true potential of Oil Reporter.
Advirtek
student
Ben Freda Consulting
BizMeds
