[liberationtech] Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge

Tue Apr 13 05:26:11 PDT 2010

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April 9, 2010
Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge By ANAND
GIRIDHARADAS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/anand_giridharadas/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

What if, globally speaking, the
iPad<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/ipad/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
is
not the next big thing? What if the next big thing is small, cheap and not
American?

America went into a frenzy last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as
hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may
be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.

Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the
simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan,
people are seeking work via text message; borrowing, lending, and receiving
salaries on cellphones; employing their phones as flashlights, televisions
and radios.

And many do all this for peanuts. In India, Reliance Communications sells
handsets for less than $25, with one-cent-a-minute phone calls across India
and one-cent text
messages<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/text_messaging/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
and
no monthly charge — while earning fat profits. Compare that to iPad buyers
in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also
have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smart cellphone, and who could
pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in
different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding
bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier, costlier, more
network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in
developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic
cellphones.

America does not share the world’s romance with the cellphone. Since
returning last year from India, I have been struck by how often calls drop
here and surprised that text-messaging, so vital to Indians, has yet to
entrench itself in America, where so much messaging travels on the Internet.

A recent report by the World Economic
Forum<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_economic_forum/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and
Insead, the French business school, concluded that Americans rank below 71
other nations in their level of cellphone penetration, even though they lead
in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all.
Millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: though they own one
and use it, they also own other devices, and the phone is not
be-all-end-all.

But it is from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa — the kind of places that
have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of
building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such
places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology. The number
of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this
year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, an
intergovernmental organization. That would mean more human beings today have
access to a cellphone than the United
Nations<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
says
have access to a clean toilet.

And because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you,
because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has
opened a new frontier of global innovation.

Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the
Palestinian<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
territories,
offer job-hunting services via text message. Souktel allows users without
Internet or fancy phones to register by texting information about
themselves. A user who then texts in “match me” will receive a listing of
jobs suitable to her, including phone numbers to dial.

In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic
cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West, but
projects like PesaPal and M-Pesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone
the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone
money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone
with a phone.

These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa. But they
create the possibility of peer-to-peer finance that could be useful even in
wealthy countries — for example, allowing small businesses in rural areas to
collect money without credit-card systems.

I called Western
Union<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/western_union_company/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
the Colorado-based money-transfer service, to ask if I could send money to a
mobile phone. “Basically, we do not have that kind of option right now,” the
agent told me. An American company, Obopay, does offer phone-to-phone
payments. Its founder, Carol Realini, got the idea when volunteering in
Africa.

The phone has also moved to the center of community life in many places. In
Africa, urban churches record sermons with cellphones, then transmit them to
villages to be replayed. In Iran and Moldova, phones helped to organize
popular uprisings against authoritarian governments. In India, the cellphone
is used in citizen election monitoring, and in equipping voters, via text
message, with information on candidates’ incomes and criminal backgrounds.

Recognizing the role of cellphones in developing nations, the White House
last year made a point of releasing President
Obama<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s
speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo, in 13 languages over text message. It
has made no similarly publicized gesture in the United States, even though
not everyone has Internet access. (The administration proposes to remedy
that by widening broadband access.)

All of which suggests the presence of an innovation gap between the world’s
richest societies and the poorest — not in device design so much as in
usage. And there is a question about whether the United States, which gained
so much from the Internet revolution, will similarly profit from the entry
of billions more people from the developing world into a massive worldwide
middle class — consumers now but not yet rich, with a simple cellphone and a
less-is-more sensibility.

Certainly, America’s innovative new devices may find important roles at home
— perhaps in distributing news and books and entertainment, which have
struggled to adapt to the digital age. That alone could make their invention
revolutionary.

But is desire replacing need as the mother of American inventions? Will
domestic demand for ever sleeker, faster, fancier devices make it harder for
Americans to innovate for the vaster, less opulent world outside, still
dominated by frugal wants? Perhaps.

Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed
FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way:
“There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way
round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things
just because we can.”

Well, yes. Then again, the mobile phone itself began that way. In 1987,
when Michael Douglas<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/michael_douglas/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
famously
carried one in “Wall Street,” it was an exorbitant gadget for high rollers.
Now it’s more common than a toilet.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the International
Telecommunication Union as a trade group. The ITU is an intergovernmental
organization within the United Nations system of organizations.

Anand Giridharadas, who writes the “Currents” column for the International
Herald Tribune and NYTimes.com, invites you to join an online conversation
on his Web site <http://anand.ly/>.

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