Social Ruminations

Mobile Phone Entrepreneurship in the Developing World

This morning, I've been reading about an exciting ongoing project called EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) that is focused on fostering mobile-phone related research and entrepreneurship in the developing world.  The EPROM project is lead by Nathan Eagle, whose seminal Ph.D. research at the MIT Media Laboratory focused on understanding complex human dynamics from social interaction data derived from mobile devices. 

To fully appreciate the motivation for EPROM, it is important to consider the trends within Africa.  The following statistics are from the EPROM site.

2006 Statistics

• Worldwide, there are more than 2.4 billion cellphone users, with more than 1,000 new customers added every minute.
• 59 percent of these 2.4 billion people live in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.
• Mobile phone shipments grew 19 percent to 810 million units in 2005 and are expected to rise by 15 percent to 930 million units in 2006
• Cellphone usage in Africa is growing almost twice as fast as any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to 152 million today.
• Kenya is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. In June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million, despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity.
• It has been shown that adding an additional ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts a typical developing country’s GDP growth by 0.6 percent.
• Access to market information through mobile phones provides rural communities with invaluable information about centers of business; many African fishermen check the local fish market prices on their phones to determine where to bring the day’s catch. The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (Kace), now provides crop growers with up-to-date commodity information via text message (sms). This allows farmers to access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets, and many have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to information about potential buyers and prices before making the often arduous journey into urban centers to sell their produce.

Such statistics clearly indicate the power provided by communications technologies that support efficient information exchange and market formation.  One particular example of this within the EPROM project is txteagle, a mobile crowdsourcing application that allows individuals to make small amounts of money by completing simple text-based tasks via text messaging. 

EPROM has a strong empowerment agenda as well that is educating future African entrepreneurs on mobile phone application development technologies through the Mobile Phone Programming Curriculum and the SMS Boot Camp.  It will be fascinating to watch how these empowerment activities fuel the development of new mobile social software, further supporting economic development. 

Crowdsourcing Cyberwar

On April 27, 2007, the Estonian government moved a controversial bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from its long-time resting place to a military graveyard outside the capital city of Tallinn.  The statue, which serves as a memorial to the fallen Soviet soldiers that battled the Nazis in World War II, has long served as a point of tension between the majority Estonian and minority Russian populations within Estonia.  For the Russians, the statue is a symbol of sacrifice and struggle.  For the Estonians, the statue represents occupation and oppression.  After 15 years of independence from the former Soviet Union, the government finally decided to take action to place this troubling symbol in a more remote location.  The reaction from the Russian minority was swift, with rioting and looting of downtown Tallinn that lasted for days.  Along with chaos in the streets came the beginning of a protracted cyberriot known now as the first Internet war.

For Estonia, the cyber-campaign brought negative consequences on a national scale.  Having rapidly accelerated into the online age, Estonians leverage the Internet in every aspect of life.  Therefore widespread denial-of-service attacks had significant implications.  The nature of the attacks at first appeared familiar but quickly morphed into a new phenomenon.  In contrast to cyberattacks of old, consisting of waves of botnets, this conflict exploited the anger of the Russian minority to exact revenge online at scale. 

At the start of the conflict, posts appeared in Russian-language websites, discussion groups and blogs about the recent events and ways to respond.  With a combination of hate speech and instructions on how to launch a denial-of-service attack, average citizens were called to the battle and provided cyberweapons to participate.  As the campaign continued, fresh posts in the blogosphere provided updates allowing the masses to adapt as the defenses attempted to respond to the attacks. 

The Estonian Internet war provides the first example of a new type of warfare that leverages social media to exploit societal tensions and dramatically reduce the barriers to participation in conflict online.  With the assistance and guidance of likely a small number of skilled information technology specialists, cyberweapons were crafted and distributed online to anyone that wanted to participate.  They were crafted such that no special skills or resources were required to operate them.  With access to the Internet, anyone could join in the fight and express their outrage in a significant way with limited risk.  It is a masterful use of knowledge of the human terrain and the technological landscape in concert to exert significant effect.

Without a doubt, this will certainly not be the last time we witness this type of conflict.  With Russia's recent incursion into Georgia, a cyber-campaign was launched in concert with ground operations.  Although the Russian government once again denies involvement in the cyber-campaign, similar activities are being witnessed online.  Online forums are once again distributing scripts for executing denial-of-service attacks that have targeting lists embedded within.  Once again, a few with the necessary technical literacy are significantly lowering the barrier to participation so that the masses can express themselves through their actions online.