Mobile phone use in Sub-Saharan Africa

My research into Internet use in Cameroon in 2004 led me to predict that, if financial barriers could be overcome, mobile phones might be suited to the entrepreneurial expansion and development of small, local businesses in the area. This is because SMS text messaging could be a more effective alternative to the then prevalent use of small ads on the web. The problem appeared to be a lack of appropriate Internet access for conducting full-scale business online. Mobile phones appeared to present a viable solution if personal ownership could rise. I've just read that a Accra-based company, TradeNet, is pioneering an experimental text messaging-based service for local business development:

Buy, cell, hold
A plan is afoot to create a pan-African market based on mobile phones

THE technology revolution may be coming to poor countries via the mobile phone, not the personal computer, as it did in rich ones. And just as the internet encouraged an entrepreneurial ethos, and with it the creation of a few too many dotcom firms, Africa's surge in mobile-phone use may unleash the same sort of business energy, but tailored to local needs.

One such initiative is about to begin. TradeNet, a software company based in Accra, Ghana, will unveil a simple sort of eBay for agricultural products across a dozen countries in west Africa. It lets buyers and sellers indicate what they are after and their contact information, which is sent to all relevant subscribers as an SMS text message in one of four languages. Interested parties can then reach others directly to do a deal.

Listing offers is free, as is receiving the texts. TradeNet plans to earn revenue by putting advertisements in the messages, though it hopes the service will become so useful that recipients will eventually want to pay. For the moment, though, the company is busy signing up users and swallowing the cost of sending the messages.

Mobile-phone use in sub-Saharan Africa is soaring (see chart). Whereas only 10% of the population had network coverage in 1999, today more than 60% have it, a figure expected to exceed 85% in 2010, according to the GSM Association, an industry trade group. This provides the infrastructure for businesses like TradeNet to function.

TradeNet is the brainchild of Mark Davies, a British dotcom tycoon who gave up the rat race and went to Africa in 2000. In 2005, he started the prototype for TradeNet using around $600,000 of his own money and about $200,000 from aid agencies. An early set of trials last year generated a plethora of trades, such as a sale of organic fertiliser between a person in Yemen and another in Nigeria.

A number of other mobile-phone market-places taking shape also started as aid projects. For example, Trade at Hand, a project funded by the UN's International Trade Centre in Geneva, provides daily price information for fruit and vegetable exports in Burkina Faso and Mali, with plans to add more countries. And Manobi, a telecoms firmbased in Senegal, providing real-time agricultural and fish prices to fee-paying subscribers, is also backed by aid money. But TradeNet's approach is unique so far because it collects valuable economic data—names, locations, business interests and telephone numbers—and then sells them to advertisers. The price of economic development may be junk mail by mobile phone. [source]

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Frantic Arm-Swinging to Increase Exponentially in Public Locations

NTT DoCoMo to launch motion sensing mobile phones
Japanese mobile service provider NTT DoCoMo has announced that they would soon launch mobile phone products with motion sensing technology. These 904i-series of phones would work like the Nintendo Wii’s Wiimote and users would be able to interact with games by moving the phones. Takeshi Natsuno, senior vice president of NTT DoCoMo and managing director of its multimedia services department spoke on these new generation of mobile phones: “Traditionally in trains youngsters would be staring down at their phones playing games but that is going to change dramatically.”

All of these upcoming phones would be based on the WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) 3G technology. And these are going to be available in stores by May and June in Japan. These phones are being manufactured for NTT DoCoMo by Mitsubishi Electric Co. Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) and Sharp Corp. Natsuno added on their plans for their domestic market: “DoCoMo is going to take the offensive. We are going to offer various things that cannot be mimicked by the other operators.” NTT DoCoMo also announced their plans to launch a music subscription service in partnership with Napster. Users would be able to download and listen to music available on the Napster Japanese service. [source]

Consider this a public service announcement.

UPDATE: Another article on this topic.


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On blogs and de-blogging...

Why are so many people blogging off?

While it's doubtful that the world will be a poorer place without them, those blogs about what people had for dinner may be dying out. New research by Gartner, the US technology analyst, suggests the number of new blogs peaked in October and that an estimated 200m have been abandoned and left to rot in cyberspace. ...

"You have to be opinionated and passionate about what you write, or your enthusiasm will wane," says Drew Benvie, social media adviser for Lewis PR and a blogging expert. Benvie thinks now is the time to dig out your old password and get back to blogging. "Companies are starting to see them as a way of promoting their products. Write about films and you might get tickets to screenings; write about gadgets and you might be sent gadgets to test." [more from source]

Things slowly fading into unremarkable oblivion tends to be a hallmark of the Internet in general. If you were to challenge most people to click on the seldom-visited links in their bookmarks, how many of those sites would still be active? How many people still regularly read the same news or post on the same newsgroups and bulletin boards that they did 5 years ago? It is a human universality that "the novelty wears off". In other words, this recent finding does not surprise me. A better comparative example would probably be to find out how many times people began writing a diary or keeping a weekly planner only to forget to update it more and more often until they have forgotten entirely where they have even put it. I am sure that many of the sites left to rot in cyberspace were experimental or motivated by some inspirational event or another. But human lives go on, and not all people see fit to continue commenting. Perhaps a virtual anthropologist should analyze the subject matter and posting trend of blogs which eventually become extinct.

I suppose I find this whole thing interesting because I have only just officially started this blog. At the moment, I am quite enthusiastic and hope to continue it. Of course, at busy times, I expect my posts to wane. Having said that, according to Drew Benvie, I clearly need to start blogging about gadgets. So, if anyone out there has the means to donate to my anthropological fieldwork, I would like to test out an Internet-capable handheld computer running Windows Mobile (HP iPAQ, any reviews?), a 3GSM mobile phone, digital voice recording equipment (possibly with voice transcription capability), a digital camcorder, a laptop with at least 160GB harddrive and 3.0GHz processor, solar-powered batteries, and a digital camera beyond the 3.2 Megapixels that I am currently equipped with (yes, yes, I know). Oh, and throw in one of those new, tiny iPod shuffles (for a friend). Let's see if Benvie was right.

In other news, did you know that the term "dooced" has been adopted for being fired from your job for writing a blog? Maybe that's why people are abandoning their blogs.

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