Mobile For Development (m4dev) Roundup

This week I discovered a couple of very interesting articles on mobile for development (m4dev). This roundup includes is on a wide variety of players in this field - from Harvard and the Economist to Nextbillion.net and MobileActive.

• Bottom of the Pyramid using Social Networks (Nextbillion.net)
  

The internet is coming to the BoP and we must think ahead of radical innovations in new media that will better serve the BoP and maximize opportunities for economic upliftment, public-private partnerships, and overall development of local BoP communities.

• How Microsoft and Marico Harness Billions of Innovators (Harvard Business)
  

... you don't need to invent a solution for the socio-economic problems affecting BOP communities. The solution is already invented by social entrepreneurs in these communities. Rather than reinventing the wheel, firms should broker and finance the transformation (replication) of these grassroots inventions into large-scale applications for use across multiple communities worldwide.

• The Meek Shall Inherit the Web (Economist.com)
  

The developing world missed out on much of the excitement of the initial web revolution, the dotcom boom and Web 2.0, largely because it did not have an internet infrastructure. But developing countries may now be poised to leapfrog the industrialised world in the era of the mobile web.

• The Mobile Web is NOT helping the developing world (Mobileactive.org)
  

Furthermore, in the small Kenyan village where I live it's significantly less than 1 in 10 phones that can support the traditional 'mobile Web' experience, and it's probably closer to 1 in 1000 phones that have ever successfully connected to the web.

I believe we need to start thinking about how to leverage the existing infrastructure of phones present throughout these regions to serve as portals to the internet for the masses.

Image is by whiteafrican.

Week 4. IdeaLab

My annoying "learning of the week" was clearly my 2 hours wait at the Chinese embassy for a visa and to be told in the end that I needed a proof of residence or a university certificate to be able to get the document (I'm German). Well ... Tuesday I'll be there again.

Other than that it was a fabulous week. For the weekend I was in Vallendar, Germany, where I stayed at the 2008 edition of IdeaLab, a conference on entrepreneurship (with a focus on the web and technology companies) which gathers about 150 students, entrepreneurs and investors for talks, workshops and networking.

In spite the larger economic climate the atmosphere was excellent, everyone was buzzing with new ideas and energy. So was I and tried to use the opportunity to pitch my start-up (Tagcrumbs) and although I didn't get the slides to work it sparked some interest - and some good questions. The slides can be found soon on our blog.

Another highlight was the speed networking event which I was lucky enough to get into. 20 students/young entrepreneurs and 20 corporates/investors talking to each other for 2 minutes. I was trying to pitch Tagcrumbs and the social placemarking concept to (almost) all of them. It was an interesting experience indeed - it's amazing to see the different approaches and styles people use in such a conversation. This is of course true for both sides. A very agreeable conversational partner was Suhas Gopinath ("world's joungest CEO" of Globals Inc) - calm, relaxed and still very focused although I could also learn a lot by analyzing the razor-sharp questions by some of the VCs and investors as well.

Les Acquis: Semaine 3

Looking back on the last seven days I have to sum up that there definitely weren't enough hours in this week. Apart from Friday evening with Antoine, where we kicked back with some glasses of wine but still discussing Tagcrumbs, it was constant running around, organising group meetings, dedicating every free minute to the company and burning off all the extra energy from staring on screens too much during basketball training.

Therefore, just a quick round-up from an excellent lecture on information and knowledge visualization with Amaury de Buchet (information visualization blogger, innovation consultant and visiting professor) this week. The slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

A good slide showing the effects of the medium with which one acquires knowledge (feet, hands, eyes or ears) on the efficiency of being able to estimate the distance:



This slides tries to explain the importance of design in any innovation process. Instant visualizations of changes to a product and increasingly rapid protoyping (for real world objects) are used to support decision making: