Very few in U.S. willing to pay for online news
By: siliconindia.com
Bangalore: Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group.
Internet to have non-English domain names
By: siliconindia.com
Seoul: In its four-decade history, the Internet is set to undergo a biggest change with the expected approval this week that the international domain names or addresses can be written in languages other than English.
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Mobile Market Floods Africa
Africa uses mobile devices for businesses
By N. Clark Judd
Thanks to an emerging class of social applications, farmers in Uganda have something in common with Madison Avenue advertisers: They both use their mobile phones to do business.
Non-profits like the Grameen Foundation and Kiwanja.net are pumping grant money into projects to bring SMS applications to the developing world. But the ultimate goal, says the Grameen Foundation’s David Edelstein, is to prove that there’s a market for mobile services in places like Southeast Asia and rural Africa.
With the number of mobile phone subscribers expected to reach 4.5 billion globally by 2012, and roughly two-thirds of those in developing countries by Edelstein’s count, there’s no shortage of subscribers. The challenge is showing that there is a reliable market, even in poverty-stricken parts of the world.
To that end, the Washington, D.C.-based Grameen Foundation has already worked with Google to launch an SMS application in Uganda, for example, that makes a market for goods via text message — almost like Craigslist or even eBay, Edelstein explains. Farmers who would previously have to accept whatever prices they can get from whomever drove out to do business with them can now expand their markets — meaning they might be able to get a better price.
Eventually Grameen hopes the project will be self-sustaining thanks to revenues from subscribers — an example for businesses who are looking in international markets.
“Our role is to prove that they’re economically viable and the business models exist,” Edelstein says.
Kiwanja.net’s Mobility Project, meanwhile, is working to create a new class of mobile application developers in Africa, and a new set of development tools for them that would allow them to actually write their code on their mobile phones.
In places like rural Africa, where desktop computers might not be readily available, Kiwanja.net explains, there’s no reason why people should not be able to take advantage of their increasingly more powerful, and considerably cheaper, phones to accomplish many of the same things a desktop computer can.
And mobile service providers like South Africa’s MTN are already moving into this market. MTN offers services ranging from banking on your mobile phone to booking tickets to sporting events. There’s even a number users can send a text to if they’re lost on a dark back road and need an operator to call them and talk them back to a major thoroughfare.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for American countries to move into markets like Africa or Indonesia, where Grameen also does work. “For a certain group of companies, there’s a clear benefit,” Edelstein says. Working in the developing world can expand brand recognition and market reach. Edelstein readily admits there aren’t many companies in the United States who have moved into the developing world as a market. But that’s part of the allure.
The New York Times published a story in May explaining how traffic in Jakarta, for example, is so bad that drivers actually pay professional hitchhikers to ride with them so they can use recently opened carpool lanes. Complex problems create a need for complex solutions. “[Indonesia] is an enormous market where the needs are not really being met,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential in areas like education, like financial services, like jobs … like transportation coordination.”
And a solution on one phone can affect more than just one person. Another Grameen project aims to stir entrepreneurship by helping to set up communications businesses in remote areas: “Village Phone,” which allows a villager to sell use of his or her phone to others in a remote village where the nearest landline might be miles away. “The 4.5 billion,” Edelstein says, referring again to the estimated number of phones in a few years, “underestimates the reach of mobile devices.”
Education on the Go: Mobile Technology Mobilizes Learning Opportunities
Mobile literacy
By Moria Byrne
Educational institutes, software innovators and mobile phone companies are taking mobile education from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 with the dawning of the smart phone.
The advantage of using cell phones to communicate information is that the students can spend less time in the classroom and more time actively building their educational skills. As mobile phones become more sophisticated and inexpensive, students can read and email documents, do research on the Internet and manage their school assignments all from their cell phones. Teachers can send podcasts and hyperlinks within a document to encourage students to read further on topics that might interest them.
Smart phones help users communicate through audio, video, Internet, photography, games, texting and calling another user or group of people. The #1 smart phone on the market may be the iPhone, but there are many other less-expensive models that allow customers with a 3G network access to email, voice-activated GPS, WiFi and all the superstar quality accessories such as a touch screen and type pad. Leaders in the smartphone race include: NokiaN97 (60 v5 platform), HTC Hero, LG Incite, Samsung BlackJack and the Blackberry Curve.
A recent United Nations report on global cell phone use revealed more than 50 percent of the world’s population owns a cell phone. In response to the popularity of cell phones, mobile phone companies are fueling smarter, more innovative approaches to education in both first world and developing nations. Nokia, AT&T, Verizon and others are building educational resources and applications in order to attract teachers, students and content builders to read content from their mobile phones.
Pearson Consulting Solutions, an international media company, is working with Nokia, AT&T and other mobile phone carriers to provide software to build educational content. The company is embracing technology to change the way that people learn. Pearson provides multi-media tools, testing programs and other educational information for pre-school to high school, early learning and professional certification.
“Pearson’s comprehensive offerings help inform targeted instruction and intervention so that success is within reach of every student at every level of education,” says a Pearson media representative. Pearson recently won three major educational publisher’s awards (Including “Miller & Levine Biology” and Longman’s NorthStar/MyNorthStarLab Earn Distinguished Achievement awards in 2009).
Nokia, in cooperation with the Pearson Foundation, started a Mobile Learning Institute to incorporate mobile phone technology into public school curriculums. Participating students learn how to use mobile phone technology and then broadcast their work on the web through Nokia Ovi platform. The Mobile Learning Institute provides these services to students, teachers and school administrators in classrooms and community-learning centers across the United States.
“There’s a huge opportunity here to educate many people, ” says Chris Morris, a Nokia spokesperson.
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