Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on using SMS to access social networks in Nigeria, Organizing for America's new iPhone app that aids political canvassers, HTC's development of a dual GSM and CDMA phone, a pilot project that uses SMS to send information to pregnant women in Peru, and a Pew Research Center report on U.S. adults' mobile phone usage habits.
- A new social networking service from Zain Nigeria allows users to access Yahoo chat services, Twitter, and Facebook over SMSes. Users without data plans (or just outside of data plan service areas) subscribe to each service by SMS, and then all content from the social networking sites comes through as text messages.
- The Personal Democracy Forum's Tech President blog reports that Organizing for America (part of the Democratic National Committee) has a new canvassing iPhone app that "equips Democratic canvassers to quickly pull up data on voters in their turf (including maps to where they live), find literature that can be passed onto interested contacts, and, important, keep track of what field organizers are learning from their time spent going after voters."
- A yet-to-be-released phone from HTC is reported to support a phone that would support GSM and CDMA. This will allow travelers to move between GSM supporting countries and CDMA supporting countries without changing phones or numbers.
- Wawanet, a pilot project in Peru, uses SMS messages to send information about maternal and child health to pregnant women in Peru. The program will cover 5,000 women in the province of Callao, and will test if text messages are a viable means of sharing pregnancy information with mothers.
- The Pew Research Center released data studying the mobile habits of adults. Some of the results:
- "Adults who text typically send and receive a median of 10 texts a day; teens who text send and receive a median of 50 texts per day."
- "The average adult cell phone owner makes and receives around five voice calls a day."
- "Parents (90%) are more likely to have a cell phone than adults without children under 18 at home (78%)."
- "African American and Hispanic texters typically text more on average than white texters, with a median of 10 texts a day for African Americans and Hispanics and 5 texts a day for whites. White adults are a bit more likely than English-speaking Hispanic adults to say they do not send or receive any texts on a typical day (10% vs. 4%)."
[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
Post new comment