Posts filed under ‘mobility’
accelerating growth
Transforming lives – CNN reports on the key role of the phone, in the fight against poverty.
Leading the way is the evolution of new mobile banking and payment models, tailored to local needs.
Uplifting.
“The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development,” said Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of the 2005 book “The End of Poverty.”
“Poverty is almost equated with isolation in many places of the world. Poverty results from the lack of access to markets, to emergency health services, access to education, the ability to take advantage of government services and so on,” Sachs said. “What the mobile phone — and more generally IT technology — is ending is that kind of isolation in all its different varieties.”
Moreover, the profusion of payment services via cell phones puts places like Kenya and Uganda in the vanguard of mobile financial services. “You can walk in the middle of rural village in Rwanda and use a mobile phone to pay at a recharging station to recharge LED lights,” says Amanda Gardiner, acting program manager of Business Call to Action, a New York-based non-profit organization that is helping to bring more mobile phones to Africa’s rural poor.
mobile dawn
From banking to education to healthcare, the ongoing economic revolution in Africa, is being boosted in no small measure, by rocketing adoption of mobile phones, and increasingly the mobile Web.
The Guardian reports on a pattern that seems to be ever more evident and replicating, across emerging markets.
A new day beckons, a day of empowerment.
In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world’s electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.
The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office.
According to California-based mobile-banking innovator Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay: “Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here… It’s going to change the world.”
text to send
It looks like the beginning of the end for the humble and lovable stamp.
In a move that could potentially spread panic (and rightly so) among stamp collectors, The Local reports the Swedish postal service is toying with the idea of allowing customers to pay for postage through texts, rather than stamps.
An innovative application of mobile payments, but a setback to collectors everywhere.
The system under consideration in Sweden would allow users to use codes retrieved via text message for sending letters and parcels weighing up to two kilogrammes.
The postal services in both Sweden and Denmark are convinced that people will continue to send letters, despite the rise in other forms of communication, and paying postage by mobile phone is seen as a way of making the process easier.
wired, distracted and dangerous
Bumping into one another has taken on a new literal dimension, with millions of people taking to the streets everyday wired to their iPods, mobile phones and other electronic devices.
The NYT reports that such incidences are becoming a growing hazard, so much as to prompt efforts at legislation.
The consequences of cutting ourselves off completely from the real world could have even more deeper emotional implications. Many of which we would not be able to even contemplate today.
“The big thing has been distracted driving, but now it’s moving into other ways technology can distract you, into everyday things,” said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative developments.
Exercising in Central Park on Tuesday, Marie Wickham, 56, said she understood what all the fuss was about: “They’re zigging, they’re zagging, they don’t know what’s around them. It can definitely be dangerous.”
using sign language on mobile
A research group at the University of Washington has demonstrated a software that enables the hearing impaired to effectively communicate via sign language over mobile phones. Science Daily reports that the Mobile ASL project aims to develop a real time video compression scheme keeping in view existing mobile network bandwidth constraints. By facilitating the display of a person’s face and hands in high resolution, and the background in low resolution, it optimizes data transmission.
For mobile communication, deaf people now communicate by cell phone using text messages. “But the point is you want to be able to communicate in your native language,” Riskin said. “For deaf people that’s Sign Language.”
Video is much better than text-messaging because it’s faster and it’s better at conveying emotion, said Jessica DeWitt, a UW undergraduate in psychology who is deaf and is a collaborator on the MobileASL project. She says a large part of her communication is with facial expressions, which are transmitted over the video phones.
beam us up, Scotty? (well, almost)
Captain Kirk would have approved, it’s the next best thing to being there – CNN reports on the telepresence trend. Besides time and cost savings, it can have a significant environmental impact over time, if people cut down on business travel. However, bandwidth availability and high costs continue to be key hurdles to widespread adoption – though telecommunication firms like BT are beginning to offer telepresence as part of their integrated service packages.
At its best telepresence creates an illusion of sitting across the same table that is surprisingly effective — the positioning of furniture and even the wall color are carefully selected.
Participants forget about the technology — which they generally don’t have to muck with at all — and become immersed in meetings that can go on for hours. Body language is easily read and even eye contact can be maintained, though on some systems better than others.
planet mobile
It’s a world that’s always on-call – where people are ceasing to go offline and where the line between office and home is getting blurred. A special report from The Economist provides deep social insights on how mobile technology is reshaping the world – changing our lives, not always for good.
Steve Love, was travelling on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow once when a girl standing next to him started talking to him. She asked him how he was and how his day had been, and Mr Love, though a bit shy, politely told her how much he was looking forward to watching Scotland play football that evening. As he spoke, the girl looked at him in horror, then turned away. Only then did Mr Love hear her say “OK, I’ll call you later.”
It is becoming commonplace for a café to be full of people with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones or laptops and hacking away at their keyboards, more engaged with their e-mail inbox than with the people touching their elbows. These places are “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated”, says James Katz at Rutgers, which leaves people feeling “more isolated than they would be if the café were merely empty”.
As for the things that can come between people, technology is certainly one of them. So it has been since a spear missed the mammoth and hit a tribesman. Every technology has created new excess and silliness. In time, each silliness has produced its own backlash and subsequent adjustment. At the simplest level, it is reasonable to assume that Homo sapiens, having invented the “on” button, will discover the “off” button as well.
