The World Wide Web Foundation is running a new program called Mobile Entrepreneurs in Africa. Yesterday I attended a Webinar that talked about the opportunities and risks in developing, voice, sms and mobile applications in developing countries and particularly Africa.
If you are interested in high-level overview of the market and technologies used to develop mobile applications for developing markets you can view the stored Webinar or access a short version via pdf at http://public.webfoundation.org/2010/11/introducing_mwg.pdf (for statistics related to Ghana)
Some interesting things I learned from the webinar presentation.
- While 37% of SMS users send/receive SMS with other users, 25% of users used their mobile phone (SMS) to access information services from their phone operators or other information sources.
- It appears that SMS text services are preferred to voice activated services even by people that can't read. They prefer to use the keypad to enter numbers from memory for accessing text based services. (Presumably, they save the text to phone and then find someone that can read help them.)
In the question and answer sections Max Froumentin felt that premium SMS services were a good way for developers to get paid for developing/operating mobile services in developing countries.
Here is some additional information
Mobile Web Technologies for the Developing World, Max Froumentin, World Wide Web Foundation.
Although more than half of the world population has a mobile phone, only a tiny fraction use browser-based mobile internet services. The rest, most of whom are in developing countries, aren't able to benefit from the huge potential of the Web. This presentation explains why and how the problem could be solved with current technology.
http://ieee-elearning.org/outreach/course/view.php?id=84#next Requires free registration to view the saved Webinar (quicktime)
The World Wide Web Foundation, Mobile Entrepreneurs in Africa
Train entrepreneurs to leverage mobile and Web technologies that are particularly relevant to the developing countries context, and that will enable them to launch new services to provide locally relevant content and applications and give them a stream of revenue
http://www.webfoundation.org/projects/mobile-entrepreneurs/
Mobile Web Ghana
Mobile Web Ghana is a community of mobile-technology entrepreneurs, developed as part of the World Wide Web Foundation's Mobile Entrepreneurship in Africa program.
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