Category — Musings

Back in the early 90′s, when I started to take a serious interest in international development, I spent many weekends flicking through mail order booklets and “Working Abroad” publications that I had to order by post. Back then there was nothing relevant on the World Wide Web to speak of – actually, there wasn’t really much of a World Wide Web to speak of.

One thing that struck me back then were the number of overseas placements being offered by church- and faith-based groups, and how in most cases you had to be a practising ‘this’ or a practising ‘that’ before you’d be considered. To put it mildly, this bugged me a little.

Almost twenty years later and I’ve been fortunate enough to fulfil my ambition to work abroad – helping out with hospital and school building, and numerous conservation projects – although in the end I found a home in the ICT4D field. Having made that journey, one thing strikes me. While religious-based placements are still commonplace in “generic” development, they seem glaringly absent in ICT4D. In fact, religion or faith full-stop seem almost entirely absent from our discipline.

Is there a reason for this? Are technologists generally less religious or spiritual than those who work in health, or agriculture, or human rights? Or is it that technology-based work attracts an entirely ‘different’ crowd?

Speaking personally, my work represents something of a mirror image of how I think life should be led. Values I strongly believe in – unconditional help, kindness, the need to be respectful, humble, polite, responsive and so on – are also characteristics I try to embed in much of what I work on. The problem is that many of these characteristics are largely intangible, and although I feel spiritually driven by what I do I struggle to explain exactly what that means or what it is.

When I think of all the different career paths I could have taken, and the many others working in ICT4D could have taken, I can’t help but wonder what drives us all. What common values do we share, why do we do what we do, and does spirituality play a part in many – or any – of our stories?

Last week at the Rutberg Summit in London – an event dominated by senior mobile industry executives – one of the more interesting topics for me was differentiation. How will the new Microsoft/Nokia relationship impact the mobile OS ecosystem? What does the proliferation of Android mean to the many handset manufacturers bundling it with their phones? In a world being increasingly dominated by just a small number of mobile operating systems, how does one smartphone manufacturer differentiate themselves from the next?

Of course, the operating system on a phone is just one part of it. Not only is our choice of OS becoming increasingly limited, so is our choice of “look”.

Take this image – a small cross-section of the handsets on the market today. We’re almost at the stage where you can have any smartphone you like, as long as it looks like one of these. Spot the difference? Not much.

This week, Apple took out another law suit – this time against Samsung – accusing it of stealing/borrowing/using its iPhone design for it’s latest range of phones. (Apple also claim the Galaxy is a little too close to looking like an iPad). The Register has a good article on all of this.

If being a consumer really is all about choice, then there’s certainly less of that today than there used to be. It will be interesting to see where all this goes – court battles included – and where the growing tension between innovation and differentiation ultimately takes us.

A year may have passed since this particular edition of the Economist hit the shelves, but I bet you could replace “April 2010″ with “April 2011″ and few people would notice. I kept this edition back because of it’s special report on business and innovation in the developing world. It goes a long way to explaining and describing what’s happening not only in the commercial world, but also the informal sector. I’d say that makes it a must read for members of the ICT4D community.

There are dozens of takeaways from the report. Here are a few of the highlights which resonated most with me:

“Most striking is the emerging world’s growing ability to make established products for dramatically lower costs – no frills $3,000 cars, $300 laptops and $30 mobile phones may not seem as exciting as a new iPad, but they promise to change far more people’s lives”

“Emerging countries are no longer content to be cheap sources of cheap hands and low-cost brains. Instead, they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to car making to health care”

“Innovation in the emerging world will encourage, rather than undermine, innovation in the rich world”

“Emerging economies are not merely challenging [our lead] in innovation. They are unleashing a wave of low-cost, disruptive innovations that will, as they spread to the rich world, shake many industries to their foundations”

“Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets”

“Old assumptions about innovation are being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. This is proving less true by the day”

“Because so many consumers are poor, companies [in emerging markets] have to go for volume. But because piracy is so commonplace, they also have to keep upgrading their products”

“General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services are doing something more exciting than fiddling with existing products – they are taking the needs of poor consumers as a starting point and working backwards. This approach has been dubbed ‘reverse innovation’, or ‘frugal’ or ‘constraint-based’ innovation”

“Emerging markets are far more varied and volatile than mature ones. Cultural complexities are confounding and tastes are extraordinary fluid”

“Indians often see frugal innovation as their distinctive contribution to management thinking. They point to a national tradition of ‘jugaad’ – meaning, roughly, making do with what you have and never giving up – and cite many examples of ordinary Indians solving seemingly insoluble problems”

“Because of the lack of brand loyalty, companies have to put even more thought into marketing than they do in the West”

(This image, taken on one of my trips to Uganda, shows ‘alternative’ advertising at work)

“To flourish in this atmosphere it helps to have a spirit of a frontier settler, not a corporate bureaucrat. A property company, say, might suddenly move into computers. Rather than worrying about synergies or core competencies, they see opportunities and seize them”

“The corporate go-getters love to explain that if you can make it here – despite the poverty, the dismal infrastructure and the unpredictable politicians – you can make it anywhere”

“Hostility to globalisation in the developed world is likely to grow as emerging giants disrupt one product market after another”

I find the whole topic of innovation, emerging markets and globalisation – and how the three intertwine – fascinating. What would our reaction be if globalisation, for example – which has long been accused of disadvantaging the developing world – turned on us? And what for the international development community? As more and more countries “emerge” less and less remain to be “developed”. A fully emergent African continent would leave a considerable number of international NGOs looking for a new home, and in dire need of a little innovation themselves.

Maybe that’s one measure of success they wouldn’t be so keen to find themselves meeting.

“Lost and found” meets street notices in a mobile world… Spotted on a lamp post in a residential area outside Cambridge in the UK.

For many of the open source “purists” in the ICT4D field, there is only one (relatively rigid) way to run an open source project. For others – usually those who have had to actually work through the many challenges and complexities of open sourcing a piece of software – things are rarely that clear-cut. Being “open”, and “openness” in itself, can mean many different things.

Three bits of news from the past fortnight highlight how difficult and controversial being truly “open” can be.

1. Twitter

In an attempt to “ensure users can interact with Twitter the same way everywhere”, the company announced that they were considering restricting – and even blocking – access to their API for third party applications. Although this may make sense from a business or user-experience perspective, it was arguably the very explosion of these third party Twitter clients which accelerated the growth of the service. Twitter’s decision to be more strategic with their API, rather than let anyone anywhere build applications around it, is a clear attempt to regain control of the micro-blogging service. The full story is available on the BBC Technology pages.

2. Android Marketplace

Right from its inception, Apple have been heavily criticised in some quarters for the way they control every aspect of the running of their App Store. Applications are vetted and quality tightly controlled, meaning that not “any-old-application” makes it into the store. While this may be problematic for application developers, end-users (such as iPhone and iPod Touch owners) get a largely guaranteed experience – apps that work, apps that have a reasonable and familiar UI experience,  and apps that are malware and virus free. The Android Marketplace is everything that the App Store isn’t, and whilst it’s fully open and community-managed approach may make the purists purr, for the end user the experience can be much more of a challenge. You can read more on the BBC here, where the open nature of the Android platform is described as a “boon and a danger”.

3. Android Honeycomb

“In the great mobile-device wars, Google has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary software—Apple, Microsoft, and Research In Motion”. This argument held up strong until a couple of weeks ago when Google – again in the “interests of the user experience” – decided to delay releasing the source code of its latest Android operating system. This has caused something of a shock in the mobile world, but for others it comes as no surprise.

Problematic as they may be, these little nuggets of news confirm one thing – that the mobile industry is in a constant state of flux. Two things we can be sure of, though, are that even seemingly unambiguous terms such as “open” can never be taken for granted, and that open can never be assumed – by default – to be better than closed.

Last month I attended the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and sat on a Panel discussing “Conscious Capitalism” with Sally Osberg from Skoll, Bright Simons from IMANI, Michael Strong from FLOW and Mabel van Oranje from The Elders. It was during preparation for a short ten minute talk that my concept of “reluctant innovators” took shape, something I blogged about in more detail here.

Here’s the video of that introduction (you can also watch on YouTube), in which I briefly touch on our work with FrontlineSMS and why we focus on the “social mobile long tail“. It ends with a summary of some of the challenges entrepreneurs and innovators face working in the mobile-for-development field – nasties such as business models, measuring impact and scale.

It’s quite fitting, really, that I find myself sitting in the most unlikely place – the foyer of a five star hotel in Saudi Arabia – randomly reading a tribute to a man who was instrumental in helping get me where I am today.

You won’t find anything online about Frederick Richard Vivian Howard Cooper, not even news of his passing late last year. Freddie was an intensely private man. His phone number was ex-directory, and he never gave anyone his contact details. For the vast majority of the time I knew him it was his social club down the road from the housing estate where I grew up in Jersey that gave me the point of contact I needed. After the “Learning Centre” shut down in 2000, that point of contact was lost, and we only managed to reconnect on a couple of further occasions before his passing.

The last time we spoke I’d just got news of my fellowship at Stanford, and we shared a coffee in St. Helier and reminisced about his club, and the early computer-aided-learning (CAL) programs I’d written for him on the Commodore PET computer he used in his teaching.

I was about fourteen when he first let me loose on it, and it sparked the beginnings of my IT career. Freddie even wrote my first ever reference, in 1982, when I nearly dipped out of school early to pursue that career. Without his help I would never have learnt to code, and would never have gained the early experience which later helped me secure employment running mainframe computers for a number of banks in the Island. He gave me an amazing opportunity, and I took it.

When I think about everything that’s happened to me since, and think about where I am today, Freddie Cooper was the early catalyst. He was an outstanding individual who gave many children on my housing estate guidance, friendship and advice over many years. He helped me gain experience on computers at a time when it was barely being taught in schools, and at a time when very few people could have afforded one of their own. Had it not been for him I would not have been able to code the first prototype version of FrontlineSMS almost twenty-five years later. All of the users of that software today – and the people benefitting from that use – have Freddie to thank, too.

One regret is that I didn’t get that one final chance to meet him and talk about all the exciting things happening today, and to thank him – and joke – one last time. He’d have been particularly proud of the work we’re doing with National Geographic. But taking credit was never Freddie’s style. If he’d wanted it, and wanted to be constantly reminded of what he’d done for the many people he’d helped, then he wouldn’t have kept himself to himself and wouldn’t have made it so difficult to track him down.

My career has been blessed by having met many wonderful people who’ve given me opportunities I could never have dreamed of. I took them all. Freddie Cooper set the ball rolling – and set the tone – over thirty years ago. And it’s because of this that I believe so strongly that we should help everyone along on their own journey whenever and wherever we can.

As Tim Smit reminded me recently:

Thanks, Freddie. For everything. May you rest in peace.

Tim Smit, Founder of The Eden Project, recently gave an inspiring talk at the Emerge Conference in Oxford (which I blogged about, in Tweets, here). One of the many takeaways from his talk was this:

This applies just as much to topics and subject matter as it does to people. Some of the highlights for me last year were talks I gave to “mobile-for-development-neutral” audiences. Sometimes we’re so cosy in our “m4d” bubble that we forget that many people don’t realise things like M-PESA exist, or that in the developing world patients can get medicine or appointment reminders, or that farmers can access agricultural advice, all through their mobile phones. We’ve worked for some time at FrontlineSMS to correct this, and this year has witnessed the beginnings of an acceleration of our efforts.

Since writing a travel piece for Vodafone receiver back in June 2008, I’ve been trying to figure out how we can get mobile articles into in-flight magazines. It’s the perfect neutral, captive audience, after all. Late last year, it happened.

As well as helping with the article, we also supplied a selection of photographs from our Mobile Gallery for the Brussels Airlines feature (above). Sadly, the article – “Africa’s hotbed of phone innovation” – is not available online.

We’ve also got a number of conference talks lined up this year which continue to take the “mobile message” away from purely technical or “mobile-for-development” or ICT4D audiences. Later this week I’ll be heading off to speak at the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh:

The Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF), the only event of its kind, is an annual meeting of global business leaders, international political leaders, and selected intellectuals and journalists brought together to create a dialogue with respect to the positive impact organisational and national competitiveness can have on local, regional and global economic and social development

Of course, we also have The Social Mobile Group on Facebook, and our new “Mobile Message” series on National Geographic which has gained considerable traction despite only running for a couple of months. With another dozen-or-so articles still scheduled to run, we’re hoping to keep a regular column and build on their readership’s growing interest in the topic.

And finally, back to magazines, late last year I had a long chat with the Editor of National Geographic Traveller magazine, and our ‘interview’ will be featured in the magazine within the next couple of months.

Talking and writing about our work, and mobiles-for-development more broadly, is always exciting. Taking it to new places is even more so.

It’s been exactly three years since I last put together a compilation of Blog posts, so another seemed well overdue. Last month also marked the eighth anniversary of my time in mobile, and next month it’ll be five years since I started blogging. And I joined Twitter exactly three years ago next week, too.

The Christmas/New Year break is always a good time to reflect, and look back (and forward) on what’s been achieved (and what remains to be achieved). It’s also a good time for renewal. Perhaps that’s why the end of the year/the start of the next brings up so many anniversaries for me.

So, “Ten from twenty-ten” is a look back – through the lens of ten of my favourite blog posts from 2010 – at some of what I see as the bigger challenges and issues in social mobile today.

Click here to download the document (PDF, 3.8 Mb). Feel free to distribute, republish, discuss, disagree or share – should you feel inclined.

Happy reading, and happy new year. Thanks for being here.