Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
By Jet Hermida on May 13, 2008 in ICT and Small Farmers
TechTuesday again! here’s an interesting article from the NYT asking a rather intriguing question; can the cellphone be the savior of third world countries? This article shows how the mobile phone has benefited people from the developing countries by enabling them faster access to information, increasing income and becoming an important business tool. More interestingly, this article also relates how mobile phone makers are actively engaging and seeking inputs from local people to better design future cellphones. A good read.
NYT | By SARA CORBETT
Published: April 13, 2008
If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you’ll get an “out of office” reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone – “GMT +9″ or “GMT -8″ – so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.
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