Texting over voice

An article in the Guardian today talks about the Phillipines having the unique distinction of being "the first country in the world where mobile users spend more on data services than on voice."

Why, you may ask?

The main reason for the Philippines figures is that texting is very cheap compared to voice calls, so subscribers use texts as their main means of communication and their spending on voice calls is very low.

So the article makes a good case about why this is resulting in more revenue: more texts than calls.

What do you think this tells up about adoption rates (not specifically mentioned in the article). It seems to me that there might be more people texting more often. So making the technology economical, accessible, and giving users the control to choose when to use and how much to spend on each act of communication may yield a higher rate of technology adoption.

Read the full article here: A country with text appeal.

Bringing the Internet to the village

From AsiaMedia comes an article about an initiative by Grameen Phone to create community information centers in Bangladesh.

Several themes from this article seem relevant to our recent discussions:

• Microfinance
  
• Reaching out to rural areas
  
• The promise of the Internet to make economic change
  

What do you think about this story? I thought it was interesting that their ideas for growth was mobile broadband instead of considering the phone as a platform in and of itself.

Hands free mobile phone

From the Street Use blog:

Rubber Band Hands Free Cell Phone

The social networking backlash

There is an AP article in this morning's Seattle Times calledBreaking up with social-networking sites. It talks about how people, especially young people in the US are eschewing social-networking sites for a variety of reasons.

As the novelty of their wired lives wears off, they're also are getting more sophisticated about the way they use such tools as social networking and text and instant messaging — not just constantly using them because they're there.

Welcome

Thanks to Emma for putting this together for the group, and thanks to you all for participating.

I'dl ike to use this blog as an aggregate for some of the information we find that we think might be useful to an outside audience. We can also in the interim use this in conjunction with the listserv until we get the wiki up and running.

Feel free to post ideas from the readings, from discussion, from the data, from outside readings or news items you find, links to interesting stuff, pics of your own you think are relevant, etc.

test

here's our new blog.