From the category archives:

Mobile

The Progress Project

September 2, 2009

The Progress Project is the initiative set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; tackling social, environmental or economic challenges; bringing to life real stories of people through video. The site’s not fully live yet – I was told it will be up and running [...]

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My laptop, my MBA! Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

August 31, 2009

This is the last post in the series on Mobile Innovations based on a learning journey that I was a part of. Here’s the full series:

Mobile Innovations – Introduction
Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – [...]

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The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new

August 31, 2009

I took this picture of Dhanaji Dongre, the farmer we visited during our Nokia Life Tools immersions, on my test N97 (which has a pretty cool camera but a lousy touch-screen esp. when compared to the iPhone). He is taking a picture of the crew on his own little camera phone, who in turn, are [...]

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“The Internet for the Next Million” – Mobile Innovations in Rural India

August 31, 2009

It’s how Natesh, Head of  Nokia Life Tools India describes the program – I like the realism when he uses ‘million’ and not ‘millions’ or ‘billion’! Alan Reiter, who was with us during our rural immersions has a great article on Life Tools – here’s an excerpt:
Farmers view Dhanaji Dongre’s crops in Khandali, India, and [...]

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“Raju, go and get some bakery” – Mobile Innovations

August 30, 2009

Umesh Markat, a 9th grade school boy, shyly rattles off this line, quietly proud that he can actually string together a sentence in English! Another example of a sentence in English he shared with us – “Raja Ravi Verma is the best Indian artist”. In the picture below, taken by fellow-blogger Alan Reiter, Umesh [...]

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Mobile Innovations

July 23, 2009

For a few days over the next two weeks, I’m going to be a “scribe” where I will visit with people who’s lives are being transformed through mobile innovations. This will be in rural Maharashtra and Kolhapur, and the two projects we are covering in India are Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej.  This is [...]

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A day in the life of …

February 5, 2009

…. a mobile phone in Seoul, South Korea. Neat observations and statistics from Rudy de Waele. And more insights on youth and mobile phones in South Korea. I’d love to see more posts like this covering different parts of the world, including India! [links via @grahamdbrown on Twitter]
Here’s a presentation from him on Mobile Digital [...]

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The Future of Social Networking?

September 11, 2008

This morning, I set up an Open Phweet around the Future of Social Computing, triggered by Jan Chipchase’s paper called Future Social, and my subsequent feeling of reinforcement and validation around a study we recently did around the future of Mobile Social Computing.  It’s been an interesting day, talking to a few people who joined [...]

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Mobile Phones, Emerging Markets and Stuart Henshall

May 13, 2008

Stuart’s becoming quite the expert on mobility in urban India!! He was here end-April for a little over a week and we did a lot of learning around the mobile phone space in Mumbai. Next time, small towns too!! Its really cool to see how he can really get to some deep [...]

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Twitter Shortcode for India

January 31, 2008

Aaah finally …. a Twitter shortcode for India which means we don’t pay international SMS charges! Nice. Thanks to Moksh Juneja for pointing this out. The shortcode is 5566511.
“Twitter asks you to verify your phone so we know that you’re you. You’ll never be signed up for mobile updates unless you [...]

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Invasive or Transformative – mobile phones now read you

December 22, 2007

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb shares, with some optimism and a lot of caution, the Reality Mining project, being conducted by the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab. They are processing more than 350,000 hours of data collected from peoples’ cell phones. More than just who calls who, Pentland is also [...]

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Morphing from a qualitative researcher to a mobile phone industry expert?

December 22, 2007

It’s funny – in the last month, I have been interviewed as an ‘expert’ on the mobile phone scene and its future in India by representatives of companies like Nokia and some large telcos (NDA’s prevent me from naming them!). Moni Kivirauma from Finland was here a few weeks ago and she gifted [...]

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