There is much (or perhaps little) that can be said about US Secretary of State Clinton's visit to Congo DRC this week. For starters, I'm guessing that the US government heard about the 9/11 attacks in 2003 since there appears to be a two year delay on fresh information. Either that or reporters are hashing together the same "blah blah blah rape. blah blah blah tool of war" that they've been saying for the last god knows how many years. And this does not shed light on the situation. Anyone who actually cares knows about it. How about someone such as... I don't know, a US Secretary of State actually do something about the problem there, like working to shore up a broken government and stop the cause of the rape problem. Eve Ensler's "rape is an epidemic" line does nothing to solve the core of the problem although it does keep her employed.
Okay, sorry, that was my counter-diatribe. I'm rather tired of the situation and those who constantly "shed light" on it as opposed to letting the Congolese speak for themselves. But what I'm not tired of is the fact that under the Obama administration, the embrace of new technologies is wide open. Case in point, the Embassy in Kinshasa has a Twitter which was apparently spurred by Clinton's visit. I assume that it's legitimate, but it definitely comes as a shock given that I've seen the inside of that extremely fortified building and it really doesn't seem like the kind of group that would hop on Twitter. Of course, with a new president probably came a new way of thinking. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
About two weeks ago, there was a good deal of buzz around Nathan Eagle's talk at the ETech Conference (or more properly: O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference). His talk was about txteagle, a new venture that he has started in Africa that could potentially change a great number of ways that people work in Africa.
While I was very much aware of the talk, I didn't have much of a chance to really sit down, watch it, read some reactions, think about it, and toss together some of my own thoughts on it due to Maneno getting a bit of press (thanks again to everyone) around the same time and taking up my days because of it. Now I've had a chance to finally get back around to all of this. Maybe you didn't see the talk either? It's almost 39 minutes long, but if you're having a slow day, I highly recommend giving it a watch as whatever you may think about txteagle, Nathan brings up some good facts:
All done? Great, because there are a great number of points in there that are worth discussing.
Eagle is creating a very innovative system. I like that. I like that he's found an area where there is a need and a possibility for growth. Obviously, paying people to do small tasks isn't an original idea. Amazon really fired up the idea by starting their Mechanical Turk system. Eagle admitted in the talk that he was told the best way to explain what he was trying to do was a "Mechanical Turk for the mobile phone". It's an apt comparison, although I got the feeling he wasn't too keen on it.
There is a massive amount of growth for a system such as this. Mobile phone usage is exponential in the developing world and as he pointed out, the majority of mobile phone users in the world are indeed in developing nations. txteagle takes advantage of a perceived abundance of time for people in these areas, a lack of work, a need for people to work small, low-paying tasks, and a dearth of extra network capacity (although he obviously didn't want to get in to beeping which takes up some of that perceived "extra" network.) This all seems like it's pretty much a win-win for everyone involved, but there were a couple of things that stuck out a rather nasty thorns which Eagle seems to want to pretend aren't there.
Like I said at the beginning of this article, I was interested in seeing what other people said about this talk. It was surprising to see that all of my regular reads, whom most anyone in to Africa and technology would know, didn't mention a thing about it. Maybe they were busy, or maybe they just didn't want to say some of the harsh things that probably should be said. Luckily for me, Steve Song summarized just about every large-scale issue I had with that talk:
Nathan makes an important point when he says the fact that no one in Kenya can afford not to have a mobile phone. Even if you are digging a ditch by the side of the road, day labour is now organised via SMS. This means that mobile operators have Kenyans by the throat.He gives another example about a water pump manufacturer in Kenya who, by combining a mobile-mPesa-enabled, solar-powered metering system with their water pumps, have completely changed their business model. They are now able to give water pumps away for free (if I understand correctly) and then make a profit by selling access to water via Safaricom’s mPesa service. Send the pump 20 Ksh and it pumps 20 litres of water for you.
...Am I the only one who finds this a little disturbing? When a single mobile operator is a gatekeeper to water supply, something is wrong. For any village in this situation, Safaricom can charge whatever they like.
The failure of communication regulators in Africa to either license sufficient new market entrants or to curb the excesses of incumbents with significant market power has led to a situation where existing operators collude to maintain high profits.
Steve perfectly nailed the biggest issue in all of this to me. Basically, it is allowing monopoly control of resources. This is nasty. Obviously, there is no way for txteagle to function without working with the major mobile operators, but I have to question as to whether this will ultimately be a good thing, or as Steve says, "have Kenyans by the throat".
I also have to say that I'm a bit perturbed by txteagle's eventual acting as a small fringe bank. One of things that Eagle proposes is to have people be able to collect credits and then roll them over in to an actual bank at some point. At no time during this will txteagle be considered an actual bank as they are actually just classified as a "financial creditor". He says that you don't want to be a bank in Eastern Africa because of all the undue regulation. Sitting here in the crumbling economies of the developed world, I have to ask, how is regulation of a monetary holding company a bad thing? These regulations, while burdensome, exist to aid the citizen, not the institution. Allowing txteagle to work outside this is rather shady in my book.
A question that I've been asked on one or two occasions (and probably more in the future I would hope as it's a good question), is, "What is the incentive for people in Africa to use Maneno?" To this, I usually give the same response, which is, "The same as for anyone in North America, Europe, or Asia." People find their own incentives to blog whether they be response in the form of comments, visibility, informing a greater audience, activism, or any number of other items. Within a community, there will always be individuals who wish to act at the historian, chronicler, crier, or journalist. Those are the people I want to be able to give access to Maneno so they can act on those desires if they wish.
I bring this up because we're approaching Maneno from a very hand's on, functional point of view, not an academic, theoretical point of view. This difference is rather critical in that I think that txteagle is based too strongly on the theory and not enough the practical. Don't get me wrong, I still love the innovation, but it appears to have been created first to try and fill a need (the SMS Bloodbank example he mentioned in the beginning), which it couldn't fill without introduction of a practical element--payment. Eagle then went on to develop the theory out further without taking in to account the fact that there were two needs to the equation which were constantly uknown and changing variables: a source of work/tasks and a source of revenue. He was focused mostly on the primary issue that there is an abundance of waiting labor. He said that in the pilot, they've "run out of tasks". This is an tremendous issue because if people start to rely on these tasks for income and then they suddenly dry up, then this is in some ways worse for people than their current situations.
It is true that txteagle could end up with a good deal of work from companies in need of such small task work. Like Eagle pointed out, medical transcription is a huge market, which I guess someone would listen to, write down, and then text back. Could work. The surveys seem a lot more promising, albeit limited. Same goes for the advertisement calls. But, the one big, big area with the most potential for short task work like this is object identification in videos and images (or any binary, non-textual file.) In a past "sometimes office" I worked for, they had to send the piles of video they had off to the Philippines for matching the products which were shown in the video. There is huge potential in this, but it is simply not possible over SMS. In fact, it's barely possible over modern mobile data connections. So, I have to question as to where this is all going and if it could potentially be much more harmful than beneficial given the collusion with large mobile operators, possible shortage of work, and the technological hurdles that are simple not possible to overcome at the moment. If txteagle can get past all of these issues, then it will indeed be a fantastic service. I suppose only time will tell at this point.
Lately, the words have been hitting the fan with a large flap over the value of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization and the laptop that they make. Cory Doctorow wrote a very nicely thought out article on the whole issue. Walrus started with some shots across the bow. OLPC News answered back. Then of course Africano Blanco, Steve Song, and MobileActive added in to the discussion as well.
I find the discussion to be a worthy one. I really love Jon Evan's points on Walrus as well, with the second one being the most to the point and sadly humorous:
The XO laptop is a piece of crap.
I'm not going to judge the OLPC laptop though. I've never used one and I have nothing to do with the project. I have met a number of people who were involved in the project that have nothing but bad, scornful things to say about it now. I'm not sure if these naysayers are all large personalities who felt they weren't being listened to (and this could easily be the case) or that the OLPC was dead in the water before it even started to rain. Honestly, I think that it could be the best product in the world that all of us wanted and it would still fail. I feel this way because of three things: products such as the relatively cheap CrunchPad, African innovation, and Web 3.0 which I'm officially calling 'Web Free' from this point on.
I think a problem with the OLPC and the reason that people are wanting to say it will fail, because mobiles are the device of choice in developing nations is because a laptop is too complicated for these regions. No, I'm not saying that people can't figure one out. That is ludicrous as they're quite simple when you get down to it. I'm more thinking along the Apple lines that simpler is better. Something along the lines of a CrunchPad is a simple, all-in-one device that is overbuilt as far as durability is concerned. This is what you need. A laptop has too many moving parts and too many points of failure. Sure, you can build to ward off issues that spring up from having a hinged screen and a keyboard, but really, laptops are doomed for failure in demanding elements.
This is one of the reasons everyone turns to the mobile as the "obvious" alternative to the OLPC. We know they're rugged. They stand up to most anything. When I was in DRC last year, my friend, Cédric could whip out his Nokia N95 and check his email anywhere in Kinshasa, whereas I was offline because the humidity had blown out the LCD on Thinkpad X40; not to mention wifi networks aren't just floating around Boulevard du 30 Juin like they are in San Francisco's Mission District.
Needless to say, a mobile is not a laptop. Even my Blackberry Curve 8320 with a full keyboard pales in comparison to even the most basic of laptops. But, with the Nokia N97 or the Apple iPhone, the convergence gets more and more blurry. This is why it will not be strictly a mobile or strictly a laptop that makes information the most available in developing nations, but something in between, which brings me to my next point.
The wealth of information about regions like Sub-Saharan African is biased, based upon "l'atrocité du jour". To say it's unfair is an understatement. Unjust and disgusting would be more fitting words for how I feel about the general coverage of events in Sub-Saharan African by media in developed nations. This is part of the reason why a project like Ushahidi gets so much attention. They're Africans (Kenyans for the most part) who are creating an innovation sourced from Africa. It's also part of the reason I was so happy to see the bus article I wrote about previously.
Africans are incredibly resourceful and when given the opportunity, they create products and tools that work great for where they live. And this is what I see as the main problem of the OLPC in that, from what I gather, while they conduct their needs studies and probably write up those "blessed" white papers, there appear to be no Africans working with them. There are some folks who, based upon name are from South East Asia, but it would have done them well to have real Africans working on the project.
Maybe this was too hard to accomplish or just didn't cross their minds. Whatever the case, they really short-sheeted themselves on this move. Without having people on the staff who really know what works on the ground, they're just working in a vacuum. It harks back to my first point and this is just the observations of some dude who doesn't even live in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it's quite easy to see what works and what doesn't. Again, mobiles work. Laptops are hit and miss. When it comes to the internet, mobiles are king, even if that access costs something and is subject to government censorship. It will be a melding of these two that I inevitably predict some Africa man or woman will pop along with someday. And won't seem like any big thing with a PR campaign around. It will just make sense.
By 'free', I don't mean that the internet is going to be free of charge, but more that it's going to be free to roam. All our flirts with wifi and "cutting the cord" are going to come in to full fruition over the next 1-2 years. This will ultimately give birth to the next iteration of the web, a Version 3 if you will. I don't really like the term 3.0 as I never liked the term 2.0 because 2.0 was a gimmick and was really Web 1.5. 2.0 was a maturing of all the initial technologies we created in the late 1990's, but were impossible to really envision due to bandwidth sucking on very narrow pipes.
Web Free will take everything from the first two generations of the web and make it not only wireless, but mobile, and create a new approach. It's not my web developing ilk who have brought this about though. It's the likes of Apple and Nokia creating true mini-computers which, while not able to run Photoshop (yet) allow easy, mobile interaction and the exchange of knowledge, which is cornerstone of the internet.
But, these companies and the marketing people who will glom on to Web Free aren't the ones who have really brought it about. It's established markets like the highly unwired Japan and Korean markets and the soon to be developed markets such as Sub-Saharan Africa. I know it seems like a sellout to look at Africa as a "market", but money (and to a lesser degree, physics) unfortunately makes the world go round and when it comes to creating new wealth through expansion, that means creating a new market base. The web markets of Europe, the Americas, and Asia are mature. There is little way to create new growth in these. You can add to it, but to stand out from the crowd with a product that improves upon what is there is about the only way you can make it. Africa provides something entirely new. This is the reason Google is quite excited about expanding there. There are literally a billion people who have had extremely little exposure to the web. Only 5.3% of the population has been on the web. This is massive. This a place where businesses can expand. This is a place that calls for Web Free.
There is no possible way to open markets based upon current America/European IT ideology though Computers, let alone electricity, and internet, are hard to come on the continent at large. The mobile rules there for information delivery and communication exchange. But, what does a company do? They're so used to the Web 1.0 and 2.0 models to develop a site. Simple. They go mobile. They deploy for handheld devices which are mobile phones for now and some kind of CrunchPad entity later. They free their sites from the constraints that we've all learned to know, love, and hate. It will truly be something new, not just a rehash of ideas.
Most importantly in all of this though is that they will involve Africans. There are so many qualified people there, who know how to solve the obstacles that they run in to with the kind of fresh thinking that Web Free will need. Don't just grab a fleet of hipsters from the US, send them to Lagos for a week and have them come back ready to "innovate for Africa". No. The solution will rise from people that are there and for the first time in the history of the internet, this Web Free iteration will be all-inclusive, connecting all the world in a fashion that will approach near equality, or better yet, will have Africa as the leading continent in internet usage due to an explosion of new users.
This is what I hope for. How it will materialize remains to be seen. Whatever the case, Web Free will be a mobile web and to some unknown degree, Sub-Saharan Africa will be part of this. 2009 will be a telling year in all of this.
As I was traveling a bit last weekend, taking the metro, train, and a bus connection in California, I watched a number of kids riding along with me and using their mobiles in a way that I usually don't in that they were texting heavily. Instead of blathering on the phone like so many people I know usually do (including myself at times), they just kept pinging text messages back and forth during their whole ride. Now, these kids had some of the latest mobiles with touchscreens and ridiculous ringtones that would play a full song when they had an incoming message, but what I was amazed at was how able they were with texting. One was using T9 and the other was using multi-tap to put in their messages. Both were just as fast as each other and were able to do this with one hand, whereas I need both my thumbs in there for any amount of speed.
But what really got me was that despite all the fancy junk that keeps getting slapped on to mobiles, it keeps coming back to the basics that I've seen in Africa in that everyone really wants a two-way text pager. In Western countries, we keep buying new mobiles that are basically worthless gadgets. I know there have been cries by a lot of folks to offer a mobile that is a simple B&W screen, rugged, and has endless battery life. While I think we all regret tossing out older mobiles (I miss my S40), people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are a lot smarter, hanging on to, fixing and continuing to use these older mobiles. Sure, there is the issue that it's done out of a cost issue, but really, when it comes down to it, a Nokia 1200 or a Nokia 3410 have to be some of the best phones suited for these areas, especially Central Africa.
It's not just the Africans using these types of phones I might add. People working for the UN and other NGO's fall back on them as well. They stand up to the environment, perform well, and hang on to battery life for a long time in an area where power can be scarce. Good luck keeping an iPhone running anywhere except in a capital like Kinshasa, Kampala, or Kigali. Of course, this isn't lost on foreign-based companies like CCT (Congo China Telecom) who offer a very simple phone for $20 USD that meets all the criteria of these older mobiles that keep circulation the region. What I regret even more than selling my S40 was not picking up one of these phones. While they are locked in to CCT, they're a very interesting example of the innovation that takes place in Sub-Saharan Africa due to environmental needs rather than by consumerist want. The big GSM Association conferences may take place in Barcelona, but the place where the most useful implementation of mobile technology is happening, is in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'll bet that whatever Web 3.0 application start popping up in the next couple of years will be based on something that happened in there first.
