Nathan Eagle's Forum Nokia Blog

Mobile World Celebrates Four Billion Connections!

2009-02-13T20:39:50+02:00

This is a big day for mobile phones everywhere: The GSMA today announced that the mobile world has celebrated its four billionth connection, according to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA’s market intelligence unit. This milestone underscores the continued strong growth of the mobile industry and puts the global market on the path to reach a staggering six billion connections by 2013 (the global population is projected to be 7 billion in 2013)!

Much of this growth is credited to emerging markets... Greetings from Nairobi!

Nokia Life Tools: SMS-driven Agriculture and Education Services

2008-11-10T19:17:03+02:00

While today's low-end phones in the developing world can offer extremely important services beyond voice / text communication, these additional services rarely scale beyond small, local markets. With Nokia's annoucement of Life Tools, it looks as if a major corporation is finally getting serious about services for mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world - a market that now has surpassed 2 billion users and represents the majority of mobile phone subscribers today.

Nokia Life Tools is a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.

More information is available here and here.

Reality Mining at Forum Nokia Developer Day

2008-10-20T21:43:17+03:00

I'll be giving a brief talk about our recent Reality Mining work at at Forum Nokia's Developer day in Budapest on November 19th. I'll overview how we've used mobile phones to continuously gather information including proximity, location, and communication from thousands of people around the world. Systematic measurements from these people over many months has generated some of the largest datasets of continuous human behavior ever collected, representing over one million hours of daily activity. Additionally, in collaboration with several European and African telecommunication companies, I am currently analyzing the call logs of entire countries - dynamic social networks consisting of up to 250 million nodes (phone numbers) and 12 billion temporal edges (phone calls).

In this talk I describe how this type of data can be used to uncover the structure in behavior of both individuals and organizations, infer relationships, and study social network dynamics. By combining theoretical models with rich and systematic measurements, I hope to demonstrate the possibility of gaining insight into the underlying behavior of complex social systems.

While results such as uncovering scaling laws from the communication patterns of hundreds of millions of people will certainly be one emphasis in this talk, of equal importance is how this data can enable applications that improve people's lives. I will demonstrate a variety ways these insights into our own behaviors can be used to develop applications that better support both the individual, organization and society.

The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World... and what we can do about it.

2007-11-19T07:21:48+02:00

I attend an increasing number of keynotes where CEOs and EVPs of both major mobile handset manufacturers and mobile operators trumpet their role in bringing the internet to the bottom of the pyramid in the developing world. It's a total fallacy.

The phones that are designed and marketed for the 'developing world' today aren't data enabled, they have no browser or any ability to function as a traditional data device. We're dumping hundreds of millions of devices into these regions that are essentially crippled - and their legacy (the average life span of a phone in Africa is many times that of it's Western counterpart) will affect mobile internet usage in these regions throughout the next decade. Furthermore, in the small Kenyan village where I live it's significantly less than 1 in 10 phones that can support the traditional 'mobile Web' experience, and it's probably closer to 1 in 1000 phones that have ever successfully connected to the web. Most of the phones I see in the village were originally manufactured well before 2003. (The most popular selling phone in my village is an old Ericsson that stopped being made back in 2001.) The local mobile operators should take some blame as well - many simply don't have the equipment or expertise to role out a data network on top of their rapidly expanding GSM net. It took me over 10 days of phone calls with my local Kenyan operator to get my phone activated for their new EDGE network. Most people I know give up after the first couple of hours of configuration. And that's assuming they actually have the right phone...

This is not to say that these billions of mobile phones do not have the potential to access content from the web - rather, the traditional browser-based paradigm of internet usage does not cater to them. The idea that the mobile web consists exclusively of mobile devices running web-browsers identical to the web experience we are used to with IE/Firefox is simply wrong. Throwing more and more resources towards creating devices for the developing world that can emulate the PC browsing experience is misguided. The 2 billion phones being used in the developing world are really great at making and receiving voice calls and text messages: Why not shape the internet experience to meet the specs of every phone's inherent functionality (voice!) rather than requiring devices to have specs that quite frankly aren't going to be realistic for many years to come?

This is why we're building the mobile web experience using SMS and Asterisk (voice) based applications across East Africa. Taking content from the internet (via rss feeds, text crawling, etc) and piping it to users via SMS isn't a new idea - but it's one that is exponentially growing in the developing world. In Kenya there are countless SMS-based applications that provide subscribers with a different mobile web experience: helping people find jobs, keep up to date with sports scores, get weather information, find a date, get information about commodity prices, etc... All content we expect from a mobile web-experience, but now it can be accessed on any phone in Kenya.

While the SMS protocol is standard on all GSM phones, navigating the web via text message is clumsy at best. It requires users not only to have to type english text using an unintuitive numeric keypad, but perhaps more importantly it assumes literacy. Jonathan Ledlie and I are starting to build an audio equivalent to the web that can be accessed from any phone in the world. We're enabling people to make audio homepages where they can record interactive content (in any of Kenya's 1000+ languages) to whomever they wish; telling the family history, listing their CV, anything that the traditional homepage can be used for. But perhaps our most promising audio application is moSoko (soko is marketplace in Swahili) - like Craig's List, but for East Africa and through an audio interface. This type of interface has several major advantages: it is completely free for any Kenyan to use (in most developing countries it is free to receive calls as well as to "flash"* phone numbers), it has no literacy requirements, and any mobile phone subscriber in the country can use the system regardless of the type of phone, service plan, or network. It's a great way to get all sorts of information to people (not just Craig's List items, but weather, produce prices, etc) and also a way to advertise to a very captive audience.
*"flashing" someone means calling them but hanging up before the connection is established, in order to get them to call you back.

I don't believe it is wrong for these mobile phone executives (or press) to hype the potential of the mobile web in the developing world; however I am doubtful that forcing inappropriate, expensive, and fragile technology on these billions of mobile phone users is realistic or beneficial. Instead, I believe we need to start thinking about how to leverage the existing infrastructure of phones present throughout these regions to serve as portals to the internet for the masses.

http://eprom.mit.edu

Finally - Skype for Symbian! (kind of)

2007-02-12T10:29:56+02:00

I was enjoying some high-speed connectivity in Geneva on Friday at LIFT07, and stumbled upon an application I've been wanting on my Nokia for years: a Skype client. iSkoot is the name of the company - and their approach is a bit different from the other (pocket pc) mobile Skype clients I've seen. The app makes the phone actually place a local call to their server which then connects the user to the chosen phone number or skype buddy. This makes a lot of sense for users who have a low bandwidth / expensive data plan that can't consistently support duplex voip conversations. However, for someone in a foreign country without a working sim card but access to a high speed wifi connection - it doesn't seem to do the job. And also unfortunately for me, it doesn't seem to work in Kenya either, but they apparently support most other locations. Would be interested in hearing some reviews from the Symbian community...

SIM Apps: A single application that will run on all 2+billion phones??

2006-12-09T13:18:17+02:00

Here’s the problem: I live in a country (Kenya) where millions of people have extremely low-end phones (most phones don’t even have WAP browser, not to mention Java-support). I need another way to develop applications for these millions (1+ billion globally) phones besides building standard SMS-based applications that depend on the user remembering the relevant phone number and keywords to text...

After talking with Ken Banks and others at the W3C Symposium on the Mobile Web for the Developing World in Bangalore, we stumbled upon another option which I know very little about: SIM-based applications.

Now back in Kenya, I’m finally noticing that Safaricom has loaded up each of their SIM cards with applications that provide the user with real-time information about traffic conditions in Nairobi, news, sports information, etc. And the kicker is that my six-year old Nokia 3310 seems to run these SIM apps just as well as my E61.

So my questions to the readers out there:

1. How do these SIM applications work?

When I send a request for traffic information, does that simply send a SMS to the service provider with the relevant keywords? Or is it a service request – like dialing *144# to check your balance? Or can it be either?

2. How do we develop our own SIM applications?

There seem to be a couple of SIM application toolkits out there. Which one should we use to develop our applications? What are the differences? Tips/pointers/advice would be very welcome...

3. What methods can we use to deploy these applications across Kenya?

Service providers seem to pre-load their sim cards with these applications. However, if I had the green light from Kenya’s two service providers, it seems like I should be able to instantly have my SIM application on every phone in Kenya using the over-the-air (OTA) system already in place. This looks like an extremely powerful way to roll-out an application. Has anyone had any experience with OTA installations of new sim apps?

Unfortunately, the most likely case is that I won’t be able to get any cooperation from the service providers to install my application on their sims. In this scenario, what other ways can I get a SIM application deployed in Kenya? Can I implement my own OTA service with my own SMS gateway?

I know phones can read and write data to the SIM card – is it possible to get a mobile phone application that will install a new service directly on the SIM card? That way it could be possible to get the tens of thousands of local entrepreneurs who sell scratch cards to also offer a service involving putting a customer’s sim card into their own phone and writing the desired application directly to the card.

Would love to get some feedback from the developer community about the validity of this rather low-tech concept... Thanks!