Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

Here's a factoid for you:

About 59 percent of [cellphone] users are in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.

This is from an inspiring article in last Sunday's Washington Post. It's mind-blowing stuff and I urge you to read it. You'll see that it's no hyperbole to say that mobile technology is transforming the lives of people in the developing world, serving not as a convenient way to keep in touch between landlines, but a primary life-line for families, workers, businesses--really the whole economy.

Cellphone usage in Africa is growing faster than in any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to about 152 million today, according to David Pringle, a spokesman for the GSM Association....

When one of Congo's first cellphone networks opened in 1999, it had capacity for 4,000 customers, but 30,000 people lined up outside the office demanding a phone, said Gilbert Nkuli, of Vodacom Congo, the largest of the five cellphone companies competing in the country's booming market....

"People would rather be without a shirt and trousers," Nkuli said, "and they'd rather go for days without food, instead of not having a phone."

Just minutes after reading this I was contacted by Joel Selanikio, a long-term client of Pikesoft. Emailing me from Zambia he proposed the idea of a kind of mobile software developer conference somewhere in Africa. I'm not making this up! The immediate goal would be to train some developers to participate in the open source EpiSurveyor project that I started with him two years ago under the auspices of his Washington D.C. startup, the DataDyne Group. Most of the testing and use of the software to date has been done in Kenya and Zambia, where it is being used to collect health data and monitor medical facilities. The data collection software runs on Palm OS PDAs for use in areas that laptops cannot go for lack of power. (With a few tweaks it could run on Nokia S60 phones, too.) I've been hoping for some time to get the chance to go to Africa and meet with the people who are using the software. But the prospect of actually holding a developer conference there, even a tiny one... well, that's just boggles the mind!

I'm not exactly sure what it all means, yet, but I'm very excited just thinking about it!