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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

* Africa goes mobile


Mobile phones charged while you wait (Image courtesy of kiwanja.net from its Mobile GalleryAfrica now has 300 million mobile phone subscribers and "a penetration rate fast approaching 30%," according to an article in the latest Receiver, Vodafone's online magazine. Many more people use them, of course, because they work as pay phones. If you need to make a call, you can hail a boda boda. Ken Banks, the author, writes:Mobile phones are attached to bikes (two and three wheelers), and even boats, and taken to where the business is. In Uganda these bikes, known locally as boda bodas, are hooked up with spare batteries and desktop mobile devices to create what are affectionately known as 'Bodafones'. I met the owner of one on Kampala Road last summer, and got talking to him through the universally accepted language of English Premier League football.Some mobile phone functions can be more useful in Africa than Abingdon, such as the ability to work as a torch. Charging phones is more of a problem, though the arrival of cheap solar panels should help solve that.One service that would be (maybe is) useful in the UK is'Call Me', which allows Vodacom subscribers in South Africa to send up to five messages per day, free of charge, requesting a call back from the receiver. Services such as these have emerged in response to consumer behaviour, users who would have previously 'flashed' the person they wished to speak to by ringing their phone once and hanging up. 'Call Me' formalises the process, helps minimise network traffic through fewer prematurely disconnected calls.Most parents with teenagers are probably familiar with the idea.Banks "graduated from Sussex University in Social Anthropology and currently divides his time between Cambridge (UK) and Stanford University in California on a MacArthur Foundation-funded Fellowship". He says:A lot of the research, often the catalyst for these new devices and services, is increasingly led by fellow anthropologists - notably Jonathan Donner at Microsoft Research and Jan Chipchase at Nokia, both of whom spend considerable amounts of their time studying mobile phone use in the field and, in Jan's case, working his way through a fair number of bicycles in the process

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