Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

The Carnival is in town today, so grab a pitcher of cold lemonade and head out to your virtual porch swing to watch this week's parade of mobilists. A big note of gratitude to Carnival host Debi of MobileJones for selecting my post about the impending era of mobile mash-ups as her favorite. (blush!)

I noticed that Judy Breck at Golden Swamp picked up on the same "cell phones in Africa" Washington Post piece that I commented on a couple days ago. And I really like where she is going with this. She asks:

Do we realize that by putting a cell phone with a keypad into [a Congolese woman's] hands we have given her a tool for practicing and rewarding literacy itself? Perhaps not every Congolese (and/or the other billion+ people in developing countries who now have phones) will become literate by using them. For sure some will.

Suggestion: incorporate language practice applications into the phones. This is a stunning new way to reach remotely located people with literacy lessons! Let's do it.

It's striking (and somewhat amusing) to me that we have Nicholas Negroponte grabbing the spotlight with his grand plans about distributing millions of $100 PCs to children in the developing world while behind his back a more dramatic and broad-based deployment of wirelessly connected computers has taken place without the help of MIT's engineering genius, thank you very much. Cell phones in Africa cost on average about $40, have 152 million subscribers (ten times what Negroponte hopes to deploy), and are more ubiquitous than even that number would suggest--97% of Tanzanians say they have access to one, for example. These devices are used not just for voice and messaging, but for banking, purchasing consumer goods, obtaining critical market price information, getting medical care, and even implementing government policies like weapons buy-back programs. People understand the value of mobile data there as very few consumers in the industrialized world do. Most of these phones have Java MIDP environments in them that are quite capable of delivering useful, even life-changing, mobile content and software of the sort Judy is hinting at. She and I have been sharing a brain wave this week, I can tell, and it's really started me thinking about mobile software in a different way.

Give me a large enough lever...

It's as if I'd been hiking around with a favorite walking stick for years, dislodged a large rock as I walked one day, and... Eureka! That comfortable old stick is not just a helpful thing to lean on any more, it's suddenly a lever that can move objects much bigger than I am. Here in America the power of a mobile phone is a useful convenience that makes navigating a busy modern life easier and more pleasant. We say we couldn't live without one, but it's a figure of speech. In a place like the Congo, on the other hand, it is a tool that bears powerfully on some of the most threatening and difficult to solve problems of the developing world: poverty, malnutrition, economic participation, the fight against infectious disease, access to education, humanitarian relief, even the spread of armed conflict. I'm not being so naive as to suggest that these ageless problems admit to a quick technical solution that oh-by-the-way just happens to be in the area of my technical specialty. But when I see the problems that mobile technology is already helping people solve, it makes me wonder: could we mobile software developers make a difference--a real contribution to the world--if, just for a while, we looked closely at the problems of the developing world instead of focusing on our own comparatively small ones? Is that big lever right in front of our noses?

For the moment I'm going to leave that question hanging in the air. All I want to add is this: Africa has long been a favorite place for the West to implement utopian foreign aid schemes. Most of these have been driven more by the rhetoric of guilt than realism about the kind of aid that actually helps rather than making things worse. (Did I mention that one of the two Ph.D. dissertations I never completed was on development economics?) I'm not saying that 15 million $100 laptops for the developing world is a terrible idea. But if you really want to know what people need, look at what they reach for without your help and consider how you can enhance that first. Right now what people are reaching for in Africa is not a laptop. It's a cell phone.

Go to my follow-up of this post: "A better $100 laptop"