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Voices in Your Hand News
Paul Rankin, '03, creater of the Philips' Voices in Your Hand project will be visiting RDVP this week. Renee Chin, '05 passed on this blog post.
For those of you not familiar with Voices in your Hand, this project
was begun by Paul Rankin, a former Reuters Fellow.
From: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003636.html#more
Betting On The Next Billion: "Voices In Your Hand" | Jeremy Faludi
Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World see
all posts in this category
Regular readers here know all about how corporations reaching out to
the "next billion" customers has a huge future, whether you're a
humanitarian trying to help the developing world, or a company whose
first-world technology markets are already saturated. Why do some
investors get it, and others don't?
A Yahoo News article describes how easy it is for financiers to
underestimate: "The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on
GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume
that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed."
As it turns out, the low demand for land-lines was because
quality/service was so awful, not because they weren't wanted.
Cellular companies that did take the plunge have been richly rewarded:
"Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in
2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western
Europe." The article also describes how cell phones have improve the
lives and businesses of Africans, with one of the examples I've seen:
"Wilson Kuria Macharia, head of the traders' association at the
Nairobi market, says he no longer has to spend two to four weeks at a
time roaming across Kenya and Tanzania in search of fresh produce. 'A
few mobile phone calls take care of what used to be the most grueling
part of the business.' "
Some companies get it, like Philips. Their Voices In Your Hand project
was started three years ago, a humanitarian-and-capitalist effort to
not just make existing technology cheaper or more accessible, but to
start from the ground up and invent a cheap handheld internet/phone
designed to fit the needs of some of the poorest people in the world.
The project is now in a field-testing phase in the favela of Recife,
Brazil, and they have been smart enough to let the testing results
take them in a direction they did not initially anticipate. It appears
that real-time connectivity is not the biggest issue, so devices which
are essentially modified mp3 players you occasionally connect to the
web in telecenters to send and receive voice and text messages are
good enough (and much cheaper than cell phones).
This allows a leapfrogging many people haven't thought about before:
it's not just the leap over landlines to handsets, it's the leap over
paper mail, which doesn't work for you if you're illiterate or don't
have an address because you live in a shantytown; many in Brazil's
favelas are both. It also allows low-cost local
broadcasting/narrowcasting of health & community information or local
musicians. With this, and some of Africa's repurposing of cell phones,
it will be interesting to see what products developed specifically for
the "bottom of the pyramid" will be like.
(thanks, Lorenzo Rademakers, for the Yahoo spotting.)
--
Renée J. Chin, Ph.D.
Mountain View, CA
Mobile: 650.504.9049
Reuters Fellow, Digital Vision Program 2005
Global Telemedicine Network
Stanford University
URL: http://reuters.stanford.edu
was begun by Paul Rankin, a former Reuters Fellow.
From: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003636.html#more
Betting On The Next Billion: "Voices In Your Hand" | Jeremy Faludi
Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World see
all posts in this category
Regular readers here know all about how corporations reaching out to
the "next billion" customers has a huge future, whether you're a
humanitarian trying to help the developing world, or a company whose
first-world technology markets are already saturated. Why do some
investors get it, and others don't?
A Yahoo News article describes how easy it is for financiers to
underestimate: "The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on
GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume
that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed."
As it turns out, the low demand for land-lines was because
quality/service was so awful, not because they weren't wanted.
Cellular companies that did take the plunge have been richly rewarded:
"Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in
2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western
Europe." The article also describes how cell phones have improve the
lives and businesses of Africans, with one of the examples I've seen:
"Wilson Kuria Macharia, head of the traders' association at the
Nairobi market, says he no longer has to spend two to four weeks at a
time roaming across Kenya and Tanzania in search of fresh produce. 'A
few mobile phone calls take care of what used to be the most grueling
part of the business.' "
Some companies get it, like Philips. Their Voices In Your Hand project
was started three years ago, a humanitarian-and-capitalist effort to
not just make existing technology cheaper or more accessible, but to
start from the ground up and invent a cheap handheld internet/phone
designed to fit the needs of some of the poorest people in the world.
The project is now in a field-testing phase in the favela of Recife,
Brazil, and they have been smart enough to let the testing results
take them in a direction they did not initially anticipate. It appears
that real-time connectivity is not the biggest issue, so devices which
are essentially modified mp3 players you occasionally connect to the
web in telecenters to send and receive voice and text messages are
good enough (and much cheaper than cell phones).
This allows a leapfrogging many people haven't thought about before:
it's not just the leap over landlines to handsets, it's the leap over
paper mail, which doesn't work for you if you're illiterate or don't
have an address because you live in a shantytown; many in Brazil's
favelas are both. It also allows low-cost local
broadcasting/narrowcasting of health & community information or local
musicians. With this, and some of Africa's repurposing of cell phones,
it will be interesting to see what products developed specifically for
the "bottom of the pyramid" will be like.
(thanks, Lorenzo Rademakers, for the Yahoo spotting.)
--
Renée J. Chin, Ph.D.
Mountain View, CA
Mobile: 650.504.9049
Reuters Fellow, Digital Vision Program 2005
Global Telemedicine Network
Stanford University
URL: http://reuters.stanford.edu
