Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• A Social Publishing Strategy by @gkjohn at @kanter covers education/publishing. love the skype reading sessions esp. -

“Our strategy has relied upon being part of a larger mission, providing meaningful and valuable content, curating information and content for the community, using a legal framework that allows for a participatory culture and lastly, in time, providing a space for the community to assist in the mission by creating content themselves. The last part, a community publishing platform, is something we are working on with the Connexions Project and a brief video about it is here. It’s still a journey we are on and we’ve had many success till date  - Skype reading sessions across countries, helping us get books to children across the country, audio books created for the blind, iPad apps being made of our content and so much more.  Here’s some details about some of social tactics:

Skype reading sessions: This project started after a few tweets were exchanged between a librarian from Central Manor, Pennsylvania. We started off by people from our organization having Skype reading sessions with a few children and then moved onto having sessions with entire classes. On 20th March, 2009, we managed to hold a Skype storytelling session between kids from Akshara Foundation’s community library and a class from Central Manor.The purpose is to go beyond being just a publisher. Through these activities we are encouraging reading, learning and connecting children from different communities and backgrounds. Channels used: Twitter, Skype, Blog

Inviting people to remix/repurpose our content: As a publisher, we have a lot of content available which we want people to access as easily as possible. In our attempt to do so, we have managed to license some of our books under Creative Commons licenses. Now, if we can’t publish a book in Assamese, but a teacher in Assam wants to do so, she doesn’t have to worry about copyright infringement. We have also put up some of the illustrations of our books so that people can remix or repurpose them. Channels used : Scribd, Blog, Flickr

Facilitators/connecting organisations and people: @Anorakmagazine found us on Twitter and asked if they could send us some back issues of their magazines to share with kids in India. Once the books arrived, they were sent to the community libraries run by Akshara Foundation. We also helped coordinate a drawing project that Anorak Magazine wanted to involve the children with. Now, some of the kids have their work published in an international children’s magazine.Channels used: Twitter

Audio books for the National Association of Blind : This project started off because of another blog post (on the Helen Keller Talking Library project) that got automatically updated to our Twitter account. @owos then messaged us to tell us about a similar intiative Radio Mirchi had started. Then another tweep (@barkhad) told us that she had registered with Radio Mirchi but they didn’t get back to her. So, we got in touch with Radio Mirchi to talk about a blog post and while we were talking, she asked if we would be interested in having our books recorded by Radio Mirchi for the National Association of the Blind. We also requested if @barkhad could record one of our books and they agreed. So, our Twitter friend went offline and recorded a book in their Delhi studio! Channels used: Blog, Twitter

Passing it on – the book edition: We read about about a bunch of kids in Kolkata who went around with a van full of books to reach kids who didn’t have access to books and even went on to teach the kids how to read. After reading about this initiative, one of our trustees volunteered to sponsor some Bengali books if we could find these kids. We mailed the news bureau which published the article, but were unable to get a response. So, we decided to see if the Twitter community could help us. Within half an hour of sending out a tweet, we had a volunteer who said he would get us the information and by the next day we had an address and contact number. Within a few days, Bengali books were sent by us to these kids.From this story, we decided to start an initiative which would allow our online community to participate…to help these kids as well as other kids. Channels used: Twitter, Blog, Facebook

What we’ve found is that honestly, transparency and accountability are the three most important elements of any social media strategy.   A longer case study that we had written up is available on the IndiaSocial site.

• iSay, you say, we all say, to Nokia – neat post by @rashmibansal who’s got herself an iPhone – Rashmi Bansal shares why she will never go back to a Nokia phone, and gives Nokia some good advice!!

CLIPs: “Nokia is still a market leader in the lower end handsets. But there too companies like Micromax are coming in aggressively with high end features at very competitive rates.” It’s time for Nokia to go back into the laboratory and come up with something that make you want to chuck what you have and buy a new one. Imagine a stunningly good-looking girl with an IQ of 180 – but in the form of a phone.”

“… Just a few crazy ideas. I am sure there are designers and engineers out there can come up with much better. Because product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. If you’re not dreaming ‘what next’, ‘what more’, your brand is one step closer to the grave. Nokia still enjoys tremendous goodwill, and marketshare. But it needs some stardust to sprinkle on consumers. To work its magic spell, to mesmerise us into saying “lena to Nokia hi hai, question is ‘which model’!”

My new Yoga teacher speaks no English. He’s young, and comes from a small town in the North. He’s moved to Mumbai to make a living. And still, he communicates via SMS so well, and has evolved his own form of English. I asked him how come he doesn’t text in Hindi, he says its an image thing – he prefers to send his clients English messages.  And he said he’s learning English this way too. Imagine the potential for so many who can’t speak but are using Texting and SMS to learn and communicate in the language!

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 fully by Sept 3 – still, I thought I’d share this now, as videos of the documentaries that were made by the Lonely Planet and Nokia teams on our immersions into the Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej projects are already up there! And the Nokia Data Gathering and the Mobile Learning Institute projects that my colleague at Mosoci, Stuart visited are also on the site. Should be interesting stories to watch! I do hope there will be follow-ups too as the projects take a life of their own.

Although the site has both Flash and HTML options, you’d either have to view the videos on there, or download them – both of which don’t make it easy to blog. So I decided to post them on youtube so I could embed them in here.

Nokia Life Tools – Full length documentary – 4:42 . In this video, you will see different users than the ones I’ve blogged about. I wasn’t able to meet them all on the trip – so it’s nice to see similar stories but being told by different people!

Nokia Tej – 90 second edit:

Another small hitch at the Progress website – while there are Share options for many social networks, blogging platforms and other social media sites; only the URL is shared, and not the actual videos!

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

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:

1. Mobile Innovations – Introduction
2. Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
3. Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju go get bakery” – mobile innovations in rural India
4. The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new
5. “My laptop, my MBA” -  Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

Nokia Tej is a mobile order and supply chain management solution for companies working in a communication intensive and networked business environment. Check out more details and this video which demonstrates how it actually works on the ground.

We visited with an Agent and a Manufacturer using the service, to understand what changes these mobile innovations are bringing into their lives. One of the persons we met – the Agent, Nikhil K. Gadhia who is using the service calls it his laptop and his “MBA” – Mobile Business Administrator – all rolled in one!

How it works:

Chand Malu, Head of Product Management, New Business Program at Nokia (in the pic below) tells us that Nokia Tej is an attempt to improve efficiency – speed of booking/placing orders, mobility, accuracy of information provided in the orders, ability to track, less paperwork required and a smaller margin of error.

Tej runs only in English, as most written communication was done in ledgers and booking sheets that were printed in English. It’s still in beta – the first prototype was piloted in 2007. Pricing  is yet to be decided, and will be announced with the commercial launch later this year.  Chand also told us another user in the beta program called Tej his “CRM – customer relationship on the mobile”.

The Agent plays a large role in the entire Textile Industry sourcing –> manufacturing –> retailing chain. I’ve tried to capture this in the diagram below, which represents my perhaps simplistic understanding of the flow, based on our chats with manufacturers and agents and dealers during our immersions:

Benefits to Agents:

There are tremendous benefits for the Agent. Nikhil Gadhia, the Agent we met shared some of these with us :

• normally Agents need to make 3 copies of order forms, one for himself, one for his supplier, and one for the dealer.
• the orders are complex because you’re dealing with many grades, shades, varieties of cloth and fabric.
• mobility and automation allows him to take on greater volumes of work.
• it’s a tremendous image boost to be seen to be using hi-tech
• he would normally take an order/place an order on the telephone while on-the-move and then get back to office late evening and send a confirmation fax or email via a cybercafe or send the confirmation by courier. This was exhausting for him and his work was duplicated manifold. With Tej, he said, he could do all this instantly, and from anywhere.

Here are some of his expressions of benefits he is getting:

“I have mental peace now. Now there is no need to work when you get home.  My wife earlier called my cell phone my first wife, now she has reclaimed that position!”

“Now I can do much greater volumes of business as the paperwork takes less than a minute. Also, if an Agent forgets to place an order, the customer alerts us, as he is informed what order is placed on his behalf. Recently, a dealer ordered for a particular piece and I forgot about that and ordered the wrong piece – I got an instant alert from the dealer as he saw what order I had placed via SMS”.

Nikhil still retained one physical copy however, as he says, “it’s our Indian mentality not to completely trust technology”!

“People appreciate us when they see us using hi-tech. I’m called the hi-tech Agent, and my status goes up. The customer too feels he is getting better service and is updated with the latest information on his order. There is a change in mindset – younger suppliers and businessmen are getting more professional and want to be competitive. This helps them”

What was missing in the service he felt was completion of the chain. He really wanted Tej to deliver on payments too so the cycle would be complete. Possibly an opportunity for micro payments for Nokia?

Benefits to Suppliers/Manufacturers:

The benefits don’t end with the Agent. The Supplier or Manufacturer uses the service on the internet to track movement of orders, production and stock flows and payment cycles. Each manufacturer/supplier can customize the software they use to suit their needs – eg. order forms, and the service is hosted on the Nokia servers. Benefits according to Mr. Marda, the manufacturer we met:

• they can anticipate their inventory, manage their stock flows and balance sheets much more efficiently and get warnings of orders early
• often there would be a time lag of 8-10 days before the Agent placed the order he had procured because he was busy on the field. with this system orders were instant.
• with this system, he would not need one person dedicated to communicating on the telephone with Agents (as he currently had), as the process would be automated.
• often there were discrepancies as these transactions were manual or made over the telephone – now there is little margin for error on the part of the Agents.
• this took up a lot of time, and with Tej he felt communication could now focus on business building and marketing rather than on logistics and admin functions.
• finally, repetitions came in really quickly, as there were templates for Agent’s orders that they could develop!

Marda said that his sales have increased roughly 20 percent to 25 percent because of  the faster ordering process that Tej encourages. Marda’s views on loopholes and problems in Tej:

• Tej needs to tie up with the transporters, as they still required manual printed copies of inventory and invoicing, as they did not accept the details from the Tej system.
• while it would work on simple fabrics (60% of his business), buyers, dealers, retailers needed to touch and feel complex fabrics which were difficult to ‘templatize’.
• there’s a learning curve for the Agent who had to work on the mobile interface and feed all data into it
• GPRS connections that Agents used were often expensive and unreliable
• doesn’t work on CDMA phones, which are used a lot by Agents

Benefits to Dealers/Retailers:

At the other end of the chain is the Dealer or Retailer – they are alerted via SMS on confirmation of order, and on despatch of the consignment.  They can also check up on accuracy of order placed through these updates.

My thoughts:

The Suppliers are getting more professional and using technology in their processes already, so adoption among them may not be such a large issue. Large ERP systems may be unwarranted or out of their reach. Dealers and retailers at the other end, are getting simple SMS alerts. It’s the Agents that are crucial for the success of this program – however compliance can be driven by the manufacturers and suppliers. I feel a lot will hinge upon how simple it is for the Agents to use the mobile input system, and how it will be charged to them!

While we looked at the textile industry on this learning journey, the same principles can apply to many many businesses, and not necessarily only in the emerging markets. Here’s a neat checklist from Anurag at FutureChat on how she’d like to see mobile innovations work for craftsmen and artisans!!

One of the things I like about how Nokia is going about running this program is they are really involving actual customers/users in the innovation process. Nikhil and the Marda’s of Arvind Mills almost felt like they were a part of the Nokia team. It’s also a smart move running the pilot in such a complex industry – lots of lessons for future iterations of Tej!!

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

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 taking pictures and videos of him using really hi-tech cameras!! We had professional “filming” on by the Lonely Planet crew during our visits – to the right are Jere Hietala an immensely talented young Finnish photographer, and Brad from Australia, who was directing the film being made. Still, it must be remembered that photography is really a relatively new behaviour in India, encouraged by easy access to cameras on mobile phones!

An interesting juxtaposition of low tech (note the manual plough worked by bullocks too) and hi-tech in several ways – almost as if several eras coexist side-by-side.

Alan gets this super shot:

And it happens again during our Nokia Tej visit to Kolhapur  which I will be writing up shortly – we’re meeting the sales Agent at a small tea shop in the crowded market, and other customers decide we’re interesting enough to capture on their phone cameras!

Another example of this co-existence that struck me on my trip. In the picture below, on the right, you will see traditional accountants sitting on the floor, doing their manual accounting under the blessings of the Gods. It’s a huge open room, and to the left are desks with computers and the manager’s cabin which is equipped with the latest gadgets. This is an old tradition of accounting, and the owner of Arvind Textiles in Icchalkaranji, Kolhapur told Frances Linzee Gordon and me that although most of his systems are now computerized, he would never let go of these employees who have been a part of the family business for many decades, and are like family members. The practice of manual accounting, according to him, will perish only when these people are no more!

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 ask why they are looking so much better. Dongre says it’s because he is using agricultural information transmitted to his cellular phone, and he shares that information with others. This is how mobile data empowers people in rural India.

Dongre farms some eight acres with such crops as corn, tomatoes, eggplant, and wheat. He lives in a modest home with simple furnishings, and he typically uses animals for farming rather than tractors or other motorized equipment.

Dhanaji Dongre is a farmer from the Mohar Taluka in Sholapur District, Maharashtra; one of the crops he grows is ber or bor. By no means poor, despite his simple living and manual field operations, Dhanaji tells us how he was helpless at the hands of middlemen, transporters and wholesale markets prior to using the Agriculture Life Tools.

How it Works:

While there are many programs, including those run by the government, that hold a lot of useful information on market price, dissemination of this information is usually poor. Here’s where the Life Tools program delivers – it allows access to this information, and disseminates it in the simplest manner – through SMS. Internet kiosks are doing some of this, however they are plagued by infrastructural problems (erratic electricity, high outages etc.).

What’s interesting is that Nokia as an Agri Desk at the backend which works with State Agricultural boards and NGO’s; and collects/mines/analyzes/validates/disseminates this information – most of this backend work is done via the Internet. However, for the end-user, the farmer, it is his mobile phone that is the touch-point, the delivery mechanism, and he is totally unaware that the Internet is actually being used. It’s often been said that India will leapfrog the PC stage, and it is the mobile that will be the device that delivers the internet to people – this is a real example!

For Rs. 60 (US$ 1.3) a month, he gets three types of information daily:

• market prices within a 100 km radius for three crops registered by the farmer – price alerts are sent late evening every day, and are factored upon minimum-maximum price traded that day, and supply levels.
• daily weather updates at 7 am – based on location of the subscriber (the more rudimentary method of using pincodes rather than GPS for now) and advisories based on the three crops registered by the farmer (eg. if you’re growing this crop, take this precaution)
• advisories – alerts, precautions, tips on best practices, pesticides and fertilizer information; and neighbourhood news within the 100 km radius and dependent upon the crop. (eg. there’s a growing incidence of red colour stains on sugarcane crop – take XXX precaution). These are sent early evening.

Benefits and Motivators:

We interviewed Dhanaji for a while, between shooting breaks, to try and understand how all this has impacted his life, changed it and made it better.

[Picture credit]

Dhanaji told us that he had wanted to purchase the Nokia 3110 seven months ago, but when he went to the dealer, he was shown the Nokia 2330 with the Agriculture Tools service. He was primarily attracted by the fact that he would get daily market prices for the crops he grew. As a farmer, he was otherwise almost held to ransom by the middle-men and transporters who would take his produce to the marketplace. These middle-men worked on a commission basis with the wholesalers and retailers at the markets, and did not really look after the farmer’s best interests, holding him hostage to their greed. So more often than not, he never did get the best price for his crop. Moreover, approximately 25% of his revenue was “eaten up” by these intermediaries he felt.

With the power that comes with access to information, Dhanaji now insists upon a fixed price with the middle-men, and also asks them to take the produce to the market of his choice. Also, he feels better equipped to buy and more in control of the pesticides and fertilizers he needs.

How does he make is assessment whether the Agriculture Tools service on his mobile phone is working?

• his revenue has increased – he says “if earlier I earned Rupees 100, now I earn Rs. 150″
• he feels he’s better equipped for timely interventions and precautions that ensure his crop is doing well
• he feels more knowledgeable when he goes to the shop to buy pesticides and fertilizers. Often product info on the packs are in English or Hindi and he doesn’t understand either very well. So he would rely on the shopkeeper’s recommendations on type, brand, method, timing – which he feels could be biased by the margins they get on each product. Now he knows better and has been asking for specifics

He says people ask him why his crop looks “visibly better” – which for him is proof! Another consequence is that he is now perceived by other villagers to be the thought-leader – and this gives him immense satisfaction and a sense of power, status and achievement. I asked him why others in the village weren’t buying the service, especially since it had all these benefits, and he said they don’t need to – all they need to do is ask him for his advice on how they can grow a healthier crop, and get better market value!

Equipped with knowledge around farming, access to better prices and the ability to make choices, I do hope these sorts of initiatives will help alleviate some of the strife our farmers face, often leading to suicides, especially among poorer farmer.

It’s also a smart marketing move on Nokia’s part and can be a really profitable venture – 70% of India is still rural, a large proportion of that is in agriculture. Mobile phone penetration urban and rural in India is at 34% and the rural segment is growing quite fast. This means many many many millions who are yet to be connected. Natesh’s estimate of connecting the next million using the cell phone as the device seems reasonable.

It’s also smart in terms of pricing and payment model – for the most basic information, the farmer pays Rs. 30 (less than 1 US$ a month) while for the full suite of services, he pays Rs. 60 a month (US$ 1.3). The interesting bit is that since almost 90% of all subscribers in India use pre-paid services, Nokia is able to deduct Rs. 20 (if it’s the premium service) every 10 days, rather than deducting or adding on Rs. 60 at the beginning or end of the month. As a result, the farmer doesn’t feel the pinch as much. This taps into the  concept of bite-size pieces or small and therefore affordable pack sizes, propagated by C.K. Prahalad in the  Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Given that the service was launched only in July 09, although pilots were on much earlier,  time will tell what attrition rates will be like. I doubt it though, as the potential benefits don’t seem to be driven by economics alone – using a service like this also delivers emotional benefits of not being at the mercy of middle-men, and of a higher stature derived from using a hi-tech approach to agriculture!

Additional Links:

• More of Alan and my pictures from the village visits
• Watch this TEDTalk with Iqbal Quadir of GrameenPhone who says mobiles can help fight poverty.
• My earlier post on Mobile Innovations for rural India – Educational Tools

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

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 shows us how the Learn English program, a part of Nokia Life Tools works:

We arrived at his little home in a village in Sholapur district late evening and in addition to Umesh, had the opportunity to speak to his father, his siblings and his friends who had gathered around us briefly. His dad, Hanumant Markat had recently purchased a Nokia 2330 mobile phone. He told us that he had visited the dealership with the idea of buying another Nokia model (he only used it for making and receiving calls as he was illiterate himself), but came back with the 2330 because it had the Learn English Tools available on it. While at the dealership, he was told about the Learn English Tools and believing that it would be great for his son, he purchased  it for Rs. 30 a month. He saw it more as an expense than a cost, as the money was deducted from his pre-paid account, rather than being added onto a post-paid subscriber bill. (In fact, a large percentage of mobile phone subscribers use pre-paid cards in India).

According to the father, the moment he gets home, the phone is usurped by his son, who is really serious about getting ahead in life. His aspirations for his son are for him to get a good job in the city, as farming is not profitable. Knowing English would give his son access to a better job, he felt.

I often see this desire to learn English among many many villagers (youth, parents aspiring that their kids learn English, kids), when I travel to rural areas for my research work.  As with Umesh, the aspiration is to improve their status, get out of farming which they feel is unprofitable and unpredictable, and shift to larger cities to work in large companies where they perceive they can earn better.  For instance, rural women in Haryana ask to learn English, as they see it as a “global language and passport to their children’s success“.  Or as Binu Varghese who works for Dalit education through the Operation Mercy Charitable Company says, the “power to dream”.

The Education program from Nokia Life Tools has four sub-programs:

Umesh had selected just the one – Learn English. He felt when he moved to the 10th grade, he would subscribe to the Test and Exam Preparation programs as well.

On the long drive to the villages, Natesh, Head of Nokia Life Tools, India spoke to us extensively about how they developed this concept. It started with debunking the myth that people in villages are so poor they cannot afford such tools, and figuring out through research, what would make a real difference. They found that the need “to better my life” is huge, and Nokia Life Tools might find a space in this, by making users “better prepared when the opportunities strike”.  Currently the service is available in 10 official languages of India. I believe this is a little step in that direction and has a lot of potential for distance education too.

The dynamics we observed between Umesh, his friends and his younger siblings were quite interesting – Umesh said most of them had not really seen the Learn English tool he was using – and he did not wish to share it with them. It was almost like his little secret weapon to stay ahead of the pack. Neither had he shown it to his teachers at school, where he was taught English in a very rudimentary manner (alphabets, sentences but he felt most of that was not meaningful). Because this tool actually gave him both the Marathi and English versions of each sentence, learning was easier he felt.

In the picture below, we see first a definition of the term “search”, and its use in a sentence. In English and Marathi, to make it easier for the user to understand the meaning well.

We asked Umesh whether he’d like to have audio content instead of text – he thought about it for a moment and said no! His reason was with text, you can read it again and again, understand the sentence well, and make corrections easily, which he felt would not be possible with audio.

We also checked with him if he was aware of the Internet – he said to us “I’ve heard of it (he said “him”) but never seen it. I’ve heard you can ask him a lot of questions and get all sorts of information”.  Humanizing the internet in his own little way, bringing it alive, a body all of its own – right from the mouth of the “babes – well almost – Priceless!!!

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

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 part of  Progress, a Nokia initiative with Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; bringing to life real stories of people.

As a scribe, I will be reporting on ordinary people progressing through mobile innovation from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, taking parallel content – text photos, podcast and video.

Why I accepted this project is because it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to mobile innovations on-the-ground. One of my pet research themes for the last few years has been to study how technology is making or can make a real difference in the way we live, work and play. Also how it might bring real changes in people’s lives. It also ties well into my experiences and skills of being a researcher, and I’m hoping to view these projects through an ethnographer’s lens.

I, like Stuart who is covering other programs in San Francisco and Manaus Brazil, was asked by Andy Abramson [@andyabramson] and Danielle Ross of Comunicano to participate in an evolution of the Nokia blogger relations program.  Stuart has a good post on what this means for blogger relations and how might a company engage with bloggers in such programs.

Full disclosure – I’m not getting paid to do this, but my travel and accommodation costs will be borne by Nokia.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full series:

1. Mobile Innovations – Introduction
2. Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
3. Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju go get bakery” – mobile innovations in rural India
4. The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new
5. “My laptop, my MBA” -  Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

…. 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 Storytelling which is an intriguing field.

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 my Phweet Cafe on this!  Am going to keep it open for a few days more!

@whitelight007 on Twitter then asked me – what’s my take on the future of social networking.  Had to keep the words to the bare minimum given Twitter’s 140 character limit so here’s what I said in two tweets and edited down here to:

“Networks based on & layered around location, access, presence & context. Those that enhance real-world interactions. Enabling choice, privacy and control”

Do you believe this is in the zone? Makes sense? What’s missing?  Would you like to share your shot at describing your perception of the future of social networking in say 140 characters?

Come and discuss it! All you need is your Twitter ID and password to enter the conversation.

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 immersions despite so obviously being a foreigner – chatting up kids in a slum, hopping into an Andheri local, getting trade to reveal all, sharing his curiosity openly, completely comfortable sitting on the floor in a tiny home where he has to bend over at full stretch, and drinking sweet chai – despite his tall overview on things. I mean that literally as he is 6′5″. It’s really funny for me to see people’s reactions to him – here, where average male height is 5′5″ – they look up in such awe – and then realise he is human when he smiles, when they touch his arm tentatively and he responds by touching their arm back briefly.

Check out his prolific posts on his learnings, which I have collated here because it’s a great collection of observations, images, artifacts, insights and foresight:

• India World’s Fastest Growing Mobile Market- recent statistics on the mobile phone market in India and the need for all-in-one phones
• “China Phone”” Beats Nokia N95 in Boombox Test- BOOM. We are really psyched by the volume on these phones and feel sheepish when we try and compete with our N-Series Nokias!
• The Emerging Indian Middle Class- beginning to question what is the middle class really, after visiting with folks at Dharavi – our largest slum
• It All Comes Out in the Wash- one of Mumbai’s showcases for tourists – hmmm. Intriguing nonetheless in how they organize themselves and the truckloads of laundry
• From the Mouths of Kids – Mobile Insight- meeting some really smart kids from Dharavi who educate us about China Phones despite not owning one themselves!
• Manish Market and the New Mobile Ghetto Blasters – discovering and observing Manish Market – an alternative wholesale, retail, repair and service culture all of its own
• Prince A950 — My China Phone – Think Different where he reviews his spanking new China Phone
• Emerging Market – Research to Action- are you learning from countries like India? Stuart makes the case for companies to not just rely on focus groups and interviews, but to get out there on the field. They insights come out of understanding the “friction” between different needs and environmental factors.
• Repairs, Tweaks and Choice – Mobile Phones- aaah check out our friendly neighbourhood computer and mobile guys – we trust them more than the “companies” to solve our problems!
• Modding the 3G iPhone – Cracking the Case – there’s a whole hardware market for the iPhone coming from Asia

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 really want to be. To get mobile updates, add your phone number to your Twitter settings page, and verify your number. Here’s how:

1. Log in to Twitter.
2. Click the Settings link in the top navigation bar.
3. Click Phone&IM.
4. Enter your phone number in the field provided.
5. Wait for the verification code to pop up and text it to Twitter at 5566511 (for India). In the US, use 40404. In Canada, use 21212. Anywhere else, use +44 7624 801423

Bonus Tip:

Also know that you can shut text messages from Twitter off at anytime by replying with “off” (and back on by sending “on”). And you can even specify that it turn off automatically at night.

More ideas on what you can do with Twitter at the Big Juicy Twitter Guide and at Mashable’s Top 12 Twitter Apps on your Phone.

So I tried it out – sent the sms – I see it on my twitter homepage on the web. However, I got this strange sms back from “55665 Reply cntr.defined” which says “This service is not yet enabled” – what gives???

Other thoughts – given recent Twitter outages and timelags, I wonder what’s going to happen when about 240 mn Indian mobile phone users start using this! Also, anyone know how much each SMS will cost?

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 studying proximity, location and activity data using information like interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices. [images in this post from the Reality Mining website]

More details on the project at Nicholas Carr’s blog:

In a paper entitled “Inferring Social Network Structure Using Mobile Phone Data,” Pentland and two coauthors explain that one of the great benefits of the cell phone as a data mining tool is that it provides raw, unfiltered information, which ends up being more reliable than information “self-reported” by people. People’s reports on their own behavior are subject to a great deal of distortion due to memory lapses, cognitive biases, embarrassment, and other factors. Cell-phone reality mining, by contrast, provides “a new method for precise measurements of large-scale human behavior.” Our cell phone know us better than we know ourselves.

To illustrate the power of the technique, the authors conducted a reality mining experiment that involved “ninety-four subjects using mobile phones pre-installed with several pieces of software that record and send the researcher data on call logs, Bluetooth devices in proximity, cell tower IDs, application usage, and phone status. These subjects were observed via mobile phones over the course of nine months, representing over 330,000 person-hours of data (about 35 years worth of observations).” The data provided a remarkably intimate view of the subjects’ lives. The researchers were, for instance, able to “identify characteristic behavioral signatures of relationships that allowed us to accurately predict 95% of the reciprocated friendships in the study. Using these behavioral signatures we can predict, in turn, individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.”

In an interview with Kate Greene of Technology Review, Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, the senior faculty on this project, claims that reality mining can help solve social problems, big and small:

TR: What could be some benefits to all this measurement?

SP: You can really see things in a way that you never could before–a God’s-eye view. One of the examples I’ve been stuck on recently relates to how transformative Google Earth has been. Imagine having something where you can see all the people moving around on a map. Think about SARS in Hong Kong. What if in a particular apartment building, nobody left for work that day? You could identify a major health problem in 12 hours instead of two weeks. Another example is the social health of communities. It’s known that social integration, or how well people mix, correlates with whether or not a community is thriving. With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn’t happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions. Why isn’t the mayor putting more sidewalks and crosswalks in this area? Could more community events make the area more livable?

I’m not so sure how this will work.

As a researcher working in a commercial marketplace, however, my eyes light up at the potential mining and processing this data would have in several areas: segmentation and user-behaviour modelling and prediction studies on all sorts of parameters based on an observation of actual behaviour- demographic, contextual and social interaction, motivational, community, relational, efficiency, mapping – the possibilities are endless when you have such masses of ‘real’ raw data. With many commercial implications and potential – to feed into explorations and fine-tuning of market positioning opportunities, UI and design experiments, social networking and community building (which may or maynot be exploited commercially), mobile marketing and value-added services.

But, as a user of a mobile phone, I am quite worried by it. I want to control my information, and I want to be able to decide who has access to it. I don’t want my mobile phone to reveal more of me, than I want it to. I want less intrusions, interruptions and invasions – they’re one of my biggest cribs already – I fear that there will only be more. I want an opt-in/opt-out option for sure.
Surveillance or research? Invasive or transformative? Benefit to community or commerce?

Lets see what shape this takes!

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 me the Nokia N800 for exploring further, and will be doing a post on my experiences with it soon – the benefits of being an expert! (I’ve always been so envious of so many of the VoIP bloggers in the US, on the Nokia N Series Blogger Relations programme who keep getting these very cool gadgets to play with). [update: andy sent me this via email: " We never sought to “gift” the perceived “A” list of bloggers and instead focused on passionate, critical and more informed types of users who could fairly showcase the new Nokia N series devices, and provide a transparent set of reviews that would help a buyer decide which N series model was right for them." - gift is the wrong word - my bad!]

Today Reshma Anand, a fellow qualitative researcher came over to my place, once again to interview me as an expert for a project she is doing on the mobile phone industry and its future. Was an interesting conversation we had around the emerging roles of mobile phones and their future in different segments of Indian society.

One of her question to me was, what’s the role of a mobile phone today ….. is it an addiction? I found I wasn’t comfortable with the term addiction – although it goes everywhere with me and I rely on it so heavily for all sorts of things, and it fulfills many needs. I can run my business from anywhere in the world because I can be always on with my mobile phone. It makes me feel so safe travelling anywhere and at any time – I have often told my folks not to worry – “I have my cell phone with me”, when driving home late at night. I also realise that I rarely feel the need to supply full details (as I did in my pre-mobile phone days) of hotels I’m staying in and flights etc to my family anymore. When travelling and on the field, my reliance on my laptop has really gone down, I don’t ‘ache’ to get back from the field, as I can check stuff out, almost anytime and anywhere, even in a remote village. And entertainment of course .. music, FM radio. I use it as a backup modem to get connected to the internet. In the future, I am hoping I can make payments and pay more bills through the mobile … and use wifi with more hotspots coming up …. and mobile TV .. mmmmmm. [picture credit]
As we were chatting, I struggled to find a term for all this – not sure whether addiction is the term – addiction somehow implies isolation. For me, it’s quite the reverse with my mobile phone. Neither is it an object-of-desire. The mobile phone is about many things – access, communication, utilities, mobility, information, personality entertainment, youthfulness and staying young – am wondering if there’s one term to describe all these needs. The best way I found to describe this was comparing it with the clothes, the earrings, the shoes I wear daily or the handbag I carry … imagine stepping out without these … I’d be completely bare! Much the same with my mobile phone – while I don’t ‘wear’ it, it is a part of me, I feel completely lost if its not with me. Am wondering if there is a term that embodies all of this! [picture credit]

Ok … these reflections may seem very obvious and basic and me-oriented and certainly don’t maketh me the expert :):). More nuggets soon around future catalysts, drivers, needs and segments and their implications on user-interface and on how the mobile phone will evolve here in India. All from a researcher’s perspective.