Catching the Mobile Wave

Anthropology is an age-old, at times complex discipline, and like many others, it suffers from its fair share of in-fighting and disagreement. It’s also a discipline shrouded in mystery. Few people seem to know what anthropology really is or what anthropologists really do, and a general unwillingness to ask simply fuels the mystery further. Few people ever question, for example, what a discipline better known for poking around with dinosaur bones is doing playing with mobile phones or other high-tech gadgets. In today’s high-tech world, anthropologists are as visible as anyone. In some projects, they’re all that’s visible.  read more »

It may not seem like much to you and me -- indeed, it's unlikely to make a lot of sense -- but for the person who sent it, and more importantly the one who received it, it represents the dawn of a new era in rural health care in the region.  read more »

Late last year, the mobile phone industry passed a remarkable milestone, one that not so many years ago it didn't even expect to reach. Media sites and blogs around the world buzzed as the news was announced with equal measures of excitement, amazement and, in some cases, guarded jealousy. We'll never know who it was, or where it was, but on that day someone, somewhere bought a mobile phone and tipped global sales past the three billion mark. "More than half the world's population now own a phone" was a typical headline.  read more »

Thomas John Watson Sr. was the president of IBM during its years of spectacular growth in the 1920s through the 1950s. It was during this time that he nurtured IBM's innovative management style, which, until recently, kept Big Blue at the top of the global IT league. Fast approaching 400,000 employees worldwide, IBM remains the world's largest IT employer; although, a couple of years ago, Hewlett-Packard overtook it based on total revenue (but not profit).  read more »

It's not often you read a book and find that, 10 years on, it remains central to your thinking. Ideas come and go, paradigms shift and many books -- particularly in the rapidly evolving "ICT for Development" space -- become dated and surpassed by new innovation, new models and new ways of thinking. Many earlier studies gather dust, becoming windows to a history of amazing success, glorious failure or a series of what-might-have-been's. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  read more »

It's been a busy week for organizations like Telecoms Sans Frontiers (TSF). With two natural disasters in quick succession -- Cyclone Nargis in Burma and the Sichuan earthquake in China -- they've once again sprung into action, deploying teams to these hard-hit areas with communications equipment at the ready.  read more »

Anyone with the remotest interest in ICT development will have noticed the battle raging at the "bottom of the pyramid," where competing initiatives have been vying for the hearts, minds and dollars of schoolchildren and education ministries the developing world over. This particular battle is being largely fought by Intel and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), once partners but now sparring in opposite corners after months of wrangling led to an acrimonious split earlier this year.  read more »

Is it just me, or are we seeing increasing numbers of books about Africa, African development, Africa's lack of development, beating poverty in Africa, disease in Africa and what we should be doing to solve all of the "problems" of Africa?  read more »

It's well-known that mobile phones are revolutionizing communications across the globe, particularly in developing countries where landline infrastructure is lacking in many rural and urban areas. They are the only means of communication for hundreds of millions of people, and have opened up economic opportunities for their owners, who can use them to find out about job openings, advertise services, or operate complementary businesses such as charging phone batteries.  read more »

It was August, 1993. I had just returned from a five-week trip to Zambia helping build teaching accommodation, a project which, at the time, was part of a wider Zambian government attempt to stop the academic brain drain across into Tanzania.  read more »