kinda makes you wonder….

Madhur

Likewise, a lot of Academic work has been done on mobile phones and their significance, especially in the US and Europe.

I am more interested, however, in the convergence of web 2.0 social software platforms and mobile phones: emerging trends where the computer would be replaced by a cheaper (and smaller) interface such as the phone in sharing and creating content such as video and images etc. Ubiqutuos mobile computing etc.

So I was sitting in Bombay recently and had a chat with a friend of mine about how people in the city don’t meet that many people socially. Much on the interaction happens through the cell phone - a person is determined by the extent of his mobile phone network. We speculated that perhaps Bombay is, in fact, a giant social software incarnate. People are links to each other but perhaps never meet physically such as with myspace. You see how much people spend their time on the mobile phone to contacts of various hierarchies of importance and status.

This got me interested how the communication topology of the city decided to a large degree today by mobile connections. Don’t know why … a feeling. Maybe partially the fact that a big portion of my PhD deals with how SMS messages during the tsunami became “news” via multiple steps of digital intermediation. And that was two years ago … things have changed shitloads since then …

“The cell phone may not yet seem a very effective window to the world’s information. But as the internet gets more and more customized for the cell phone, we will see an explosion of new uses for this small but immensely powerful device.

One good example of what’s possible is a little company in Bangladesh called CellBazaar. Closely related to GrameenPhone, the largest mobile phone company in the country, CellBazaar enables the users of cell phones to conduct business on an eBay-like market.

Sellers list products or services in a database, and buyers search this database using only SMS text. CellBazaar doesn’t actually conduct transactions, it just makes a connection between the parties, who meet in person to conduct the deal.

This company illustrates several key points about the use of cell phones in developing countries. First, well over 50 percent of cell phone usage there is for business use, mostly very small businesses.

Even in the slums of Mumbai, today a large percentage of residents have a mobile phone, which they use to bring more efficiency to the micro-businesses that occupy almost every home.

Cell phones speed the pace of economic activity and enable far more people to participate actively in the economy. Much of this activity is driven not by voice caling but by SMS - short text messages. ”

The article can be found here:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/20/magazines/fortune/kirkpatrick_UN_speech.fortune/index.htm