The invisible computer revolution is a short, but compelling call to arms to build software services for the fast growing cellphone market in non-Western countries; sms updates for health-care workers as continuing education, for example.
I often come across anecdotal references to farmers getting sms‘ (smsii?) on crop prices in adjoining towns and moving to the best markets, along with stories about sms being used as a organising tool during democratic protests.
All good stuff, but actually a lot more reliant on decent, reliable cell-tower infrastructure than cutting-edge mobile apps.
The author’s main premise is that we in the West are soaked in the luxury of desktop PCs, blinkering us from understanding the opportunities (and current usage patterns) of people whose _primary_ computing device is a mobile phone.
As an example of this Western PC bias, the author points to the One Laptop Per Child project.
I think that argument misunderstands the OLPC project; its a project driven by the goal of educational transformation from equipping kids with tools for self-discovery – larger screened, keyboard-based devices are arguably more appropriate than cellphones to achieve the goals rooted in the contructionism theory of MIT’s Seymour Papert.
However, I _do_ think the sudden emergence of iphone compatible sites gives credence to the argument that there’s a ‘Western PC bias’. The iPhone is a great device of course, but hardly representative of the majority of mobile phones available worldwide.
I agree with the BBC articles author on this; it sometimes feels (particularly when observing the States) as if the ‘mobile web’ was just created, whereas no one seems to be looking at the huge opportunity to build tools for lesser mobiles, that look beyond the PC-lite web browser of the iPhone.
Perhaps there’s hope. I think the lo-fi model of information delivery via text messages finally gained momentum in 2007, particularly in the the States, with Google’s recent acquisition of (Finnish) Jaiku. Mix this with the Stateside popularity of Twitter…maybe smarter, low cost information infrastructures will develop as business and social models develop in places other than the myopic Silicon Valley area.
The mobile web needs to do more than optimising sites for a single device. I hope mobile development becomes more than just relying on Silicon Valley to ‘catch up’.
Related note – I’ve read a couple of articles on the increasingly excellent O’Reilly Radar, which touch on the confluence of PC-centricity and mobile devices.
The first, is a recent polemic about the increasing divide between technologists and the role (and availability) technology plays within low income social groups. It’s an interesting read, and while the article only focuses on the States – it’s not hard to make the global leap to connect the ideas from both the BBC article and this post.
The second is an insightful article full of brilliant ideas for developing a ‘dual head’ model of PC-as-management-interface for mobile devices.
I think the article’s great – I love the ideas O’Reilly develops, like his need for a call list creator for mobile phones…
Of course, while the post outlines exactly the connectivity and applications I’d like to see in my computing devices, O’Reilly’s article is exactly the sort of Western PC-centric viewpoint the BBC article attacks.
Always worth having our preconceptions challenged!